“It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children,” said a liberal New York City parent four years ago regarding a plan to forcibly integrate his kid’s Brooklyn school. Not much has changed since then in the Big Apple, except that now things may get more complicated citywide, with a recommended new scheme to “fully integrate” all schools within 10 years. As the New York Post reports:
Every school in the city should be engineered to match the exact racial mix of the city, and there should be no sorting by academic ability, an education panel handpicked by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said yesterday.
… Every Gifted & Talented program also should be scrapped, as well as nearly all screening processes — which admit students based on factors such as grades, behavior and attendance — to combat racial and socioeconomic inequality, according to a report issued Tuesday by the School Diversity Advisory Group [SDAG].
Within three years, every city school should reflect its community in terms of diversity, the report said. In five years, it should reflect its entire borough.
And in 10 years, “every school should be representative of the city as a whole,” the panel said, emphasizing that the city Department of Education “should redraft district lines to support the long-term goal of having all schools reflect the city population,” the group wrote.
(Note: How will this plan work out for the Staten Island borough, which is 76 percent white, separated from the rest of NYC by water, and is sort of the far reaches of the Big Apple’s realm?)
The only schools exempt from this scheme are the “Elite Eight,” such as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, which are admissions test-based and partially under state government control.
Interestingly, none of this will affect Bolshevik Bill (de Blasio) or Carranza. Bolshevik Bill’s kids are out of college, and his son, Dante, attended quite exclusive Yale University. As for Carranza, whose résumé includes a sexual misconduct accusation, he is paid a whopping $345,000 a year for his social-engineering position. So there’s no ghetto living or schools in his two children’s futures.
As for the school busing presumably necessary to effect this diversity scheme, that it was an unpopular failure in the 1970s could bring to mind philosopher Georg Hegel’s observation, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
Except that NYC’s social engineers apparently know better.
After all, the SDAG “report acknowledged that the controversial moves could spark an exodus of whites and Asians from the system — making the panel’s goal all but impossible,” the Post also tells us. In reality, this is a given, as a Chinese-descent NYC activist points out.
Bolshevik Bill and Carranza view the current system as “racist” and reflective of “white privilege” and even “white supremacy,” but it’s not whites most “over-represented” (a leftist propaganda term) in better schools and classes. Non-Hispanic whites constitute 32 percent of NYC’s population, but, for example, amount to only 21 percent and 18.54 percent of, respectively, Bronx Science’s and Stuyvesant’s student bodies.
In contrast and reflecting the “Elite Eight” in general, Asian-descent students constitute 73 percent and 62 percent of, respectively, Stuyvesant’s and Bronx Science’s student bodies despite their demographic being only 14 percent of NYC’s population.
Similarly, it is true that just 10 percent and eight percent of Gifted & Talented offers went, respectively, to Hispanics and blacks, despite their constituting approximately 70 percent of the city’s population. Yet while 39 percent of these offers went to whites, Asian-descent kids landed 42 percent. Is this Asian privilege?
Then again, leftist social engineers have a very different conception of “white supremacy.” Bolshevik Bill, Carranza, and their fellow travelers don’t define it “as a belief in inherent racial superiority,” Post opinion writer Max Eden informs. “As their recent staff training made clear, they define it as a belief in ‘objectivity,’ an aspiration toward ‘perfectionism,’ a ‘sense of urgency’ and ‘worship of the written word.’”
“If you sincerely believe that habits and traits that lead to success constitute ‘white supremacy,’ and you oppose ‘white supremacy,’” Eden continues, “then you simply must inhibit opportunities for children to develop those qualities by dismantling advanced coursework.”
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Hans Bader wrote in 2007 that Seattle schools had “defined ‘individualism’ as a form of ‘cultural racism,’ said that only whites can be racist, and claimed that planning ahead (‘future time orientation’) is a white characteristic that it is racist to expect minorities to exhibit.”
The above notions, by the way, are the intellectual vomitus of the left-wing Pacific Educational Group, which also defines hard work and punctuality as white-supremacy-spawned “white norms,” while characterizing “collectivism” as a black norm.
Tragically, this is the institutionalized version of the envy-driven “acting white” ridicule that hard-working black students sometimes hear from peers, which stigmatizes and discourages achievement. Educators used to push back against this, but now they’ve turned it into an ideology and educational paradigm.
In reality, what’s needed to improve education is neither mysterious nor newfangled. First, discipline and obedience — which leftists have done everything to undermine — must be re-established in our zoo-like public schools. After all, how can someone learn from you if he’s not first willing to listen to you? Obedience is a prerequisite for learning.
Then, educators must get back to the basics such as the three r’s, remembering that this doesn’t mean racism, relativism, and revisionism. The elements of morality — virtues (not “values”) — must also be rediscovered, applied, and taught. Examples are diligence, charity, honesty, temperance, prudence, and courage. Sadly, many educators are themselves sorely lacking in virtue, if not outright hostile to it. Thus are they vice carriers and a toxic influence.
After all, hobbling minorities by telling them that successful habits are the province of whites is a plan that even the KKK couldn’t dream of pulling off.
Photo: Lisa-Blue / iStock / Getty Images Plus
