Diversity Uber Alles

Clear, concise and to the point. Bob McManus takes the measure of New York Mayor de Blasio’s approach to public education (via Maggie’sFarm). He does not merely find it lacking. He finds the mayor and his henchmen striving to destroy the last vestiges of educational opportunity in New York City.

Then again, New York parents voted for de Blasio and for other Democrats in very large numbers, so we will not feel too sorry for them.

Obviously, to anyone who is sensate, the goal of de Blasio is diversity. Educational achievement does not concern them. Providing educational opportunity to the brightest children does not worry them at all. As long as the school system is more diverse.

Being imbeciles these educrats do not understand that the drive to integrate the schools has sent nearly all white parents to the suburbs or to the private school world. Apparently, a few holdouts have sent their children to New York’s premier high schools… like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Those schools are majority Asian… and we can’t have that.

McManus opens:

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s school-integration task force just dropped its initial report—a multilayer cake of mostly impenetrable social-justice jargon, interspersed with a dangerous idea or two, and with a dismaying lack of emphasis on the enduring value of teaching children to read, write, and do numbers. In fact, the report represents a significant victory of show over substance, establishing “diversity” as the principal goal of public education in New York City while exiling accountability—teacher accountability, parent accountability, student accountability—to the ash heap.

Strikingly, the task force has no interest in whether or not children are being educated. By all indications-- see yesterday’s post Teaching in New York City High Schools-- no one is being educated in these schools. And yet, the task force is concerned about diversity. They simply do not care about educating children. So they are taking aim at the better high schools, the ones you enter by passing a rigorous examination:

Or, as the report itself puts it at one point, “the use of exclusionary admissions screens . . . which judge . . . kids on behavior, test scores, and other biased metrics, is the biggest contributor to . . . segregation.” Get rid of “biased metrics,” in other words, and— presto—the problem is solved. But good luck educating children in an environment where behavior and other quantifiable performance standards are deemed an objective impediment to progress.

To produce more diversity and to produce more people who think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is smart, the task force wants to dumb down the best schools by eliminating objective performance standards:

With some estimable exceptions, the city’s schools are at best mediocre, many are abject failures, and most of the rest are teetering on the edge. But taking direction from this report would move them in the wrong direction. To adopt as official policy the elimination of objective performance standards, as Gonzales counsels and the report ratifies, would bring an end to formal teacher evaluations. It would eliminate all the other benchmarks that parents, taxpayers, and the general public traditionally use to hold officials accountable for schools that don’t educate.

So, the children lose out. Who wins? The usual suspects:

In this sense, the report represents a significant victory for the United Federation of Teachers, education bureaucrats in New York City and Albany, and the money-now, results-later coalition that has been dictating public-education policy in the Empire State for decades. At the same time, it’s a big win for the racialists and other social-justice disrupters intent on dismantling the city’s internationally famous selective-admissions high schools and the various programs meant to give high-performing pupils a leg up in the lower grades.

If Amazon had built a headquarters in Long Island City, the products of New York City’s public school system would never have been able to compete for the good jobs on offer. As happens with many other cities in America, New York is becoming divided between the rich and the rest.