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All the sudden noise about “integration” as the fix for New York City’s failing schools may be the most shameful red herring ever — a blatant bid to distract from the system’s real, blindingly obvious problems.
The proximate cause is New York Times fabulist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ quasi-confession last month about the mis-education she chose for her daughter.
NHJ’s account laid bare a lot of ugly truths behind failing schools — low expectations, rampant absenteeism, cafeteria chaos, checked-out teachers and absentee administrators — only to absurdly claim the root causes are inadequate funding and segregation.
Of course the city spends markedly more per student on its worst public schools than on its best, and vastly more than any other system in the world; only a villain or a fool can pretend that’s the issue.
But it’s as absurd to point to a school’s racial or ethnic mix as in any way relevant.
The classic argument for desegregation turned on resources: “Separate but equal” was a lie, because minority schools didn’t remotely get equal funding or other support.
That’s plainly irrelevant here, because the whole system is swimming in cash.
So how does an uneven racial mix make a school fail?
It can’t be that black kids can’t learn unless enough white ones are in the classroom, too, so what is it?.
Not even Nikole Hannah-Jones can seriously argue that racists are secretly manipulating the system to deny black students a proper educational experience: No cabal of “white supremacists” could operate under the noses of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Chancellor Kamar Samuels and all the other lefty and liberal leaders of all races who’ve controlled the Department of Education for decades.
Please also explain why the city’s best-performing public schools, the Success Academy charter schools, manage to excel with overwhelming black and Hispanic student bodies.
Of course, Hannah-Jones & Co. despise the SA network because . . . well, because it defies every other progressive educational nostrum, and keeps on succeeding.
Note, too, that NHJ had the same prescriptions long before she (basically) admitted her prescriptions had failed her daughter: She’s called for scrapping Gifted & Talented programs, ending middle-school screening and axing the test-only entry requirement for the best high schools — all steps that only discourage excellence without helping anyone, which is somehow supposed to promote “equity.”
Progressives have also gutted school discipline in the name of racial equity, a push that began nationally under President Barack Obama and went into high gear in the city under Chancellor Carmen Fariña; the no-sticks “restorative justice” approach has proved a total bust.
More than half the city’s public schools are blatant failures, but progressives keep pushing the same worse-than-failed prescriptions because they refuse to take off their ideological blinkers.
The true villains — the toxic teachers union and the fail-your-way-upward DOE bureaucracy — are happy to nod along, and the progs don’t even realize (or care?) that they’re being conned.