De Blasio’s latest ridiculous NYC schools report
Mayor de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group last week released a report calling for racial engineering as a magic cure for the ills of the city’s schools. It’s one giant red herring — a distraction from the failure of city schools in high-poverty communities.
One giveaway: It calls for making diversity “another measure of school performance.” What a nice way of watering down measures of whether the kids are actually learning.
This initial report (the panel plans to drop another before summer) targets nine racially mixed school districts (of 32 total city districts). To impose “justice” in each, it wants percentage “goals” for racial groups, multilingual learners and students with disabilities, school by school — all to be overseen by a chief integration officer.
It also wages war on admissions screening, claiming that selecting students on the basis of their behavior (e.g., attendance records) and test scores to be “biased” and a means of “segregation.”
Never mind that this would destroy higher-quality schools, prompting white (and Asian) flight — leaving district schools even less “diverse” than ever.
And, as ever with Team de Blasio, there’s not a word about the need for academic rigor, nor a discussion of what teachers, principals, administrators and parents need to do for challenged children.
Hilariously, the panel even worries that DOE could do harm by improving schools, warning against “unintentionally driving gentrification and displacement.”
Exactly what you’d expect from a panel of social-justice warriors co-chaired by NAACP state chair Hazel Dukes. And never mind that these same folks will adamantly defend the racial gerrymandering of Assembly, state Senate, City Council and House districts.
The best way to reflect who we are as a city isn’t to ensure that every school meets rigid quotas. It’s to give every public school student the chance to graduate with a meaningful diploma.
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