A mayor’s school negligence
Whoever ends up succeeding Carmen Fariña as schools chancellor, one constant is likely to remain: Mayor de Blasio’s mayor’s patronage progressivism continues to mar his education record. When city jobs and donor interests mesh, de Blasio does the right (meaning left) thing. This can be seen in his championing universal pre-K and community schools — job-creating, union-supported efforts that are also good for children.
But where there’s no electoral advantage, the mayor ignores, belittles and fudges the issues, no longer interested in reform. Primary examples of this practice are his handling of school segregation and yeshiva education, both subjects of City Council scrutiny at a recent hearing.
Extreme racial and income segregation pervade our public schools. Yet it took de Blasio more than three years to announce a proposal addressing the problem, then another six months just to name an advisory committee to review the plan. It will be another year before the committee’s report is issued. At the hearing, the mayor’s representative even refused to use the word “segregation,” insisting on the euphemism “diversity” to increase policy flexibility and blur its target.
This is more than the mayor kicking the can down the road. It essentially postpones any concrete action until he’s out of office.
For an administration that prides itself on hard-headed initiatives on worker rights, affordable housing and policing, de Blasio’s effort to end school segregation — if that’s even what he wants — is notably thin and amateurish, lacking in urgency and imagination. His shallow steps to appease diversity advocates lack political courage and ignore research that segregation is a debilitating educational strategy and that all students stand to benefit by destroying barriers to integration.
His rhetoric even echoes segregationist arguments that social attitudes must change first, before school policies follow. Beyond that, his overall “Equity & Excellence” education brand smacks of Jim Crow separate-but-equal politics. The list of failing Renewal Schools closely tracks concentrations of low-income black and Latino students, many with other educational disadvantages including homelessness, incarcerated parents, language proficiency and special needs.
He plans to deliver these young people additional Advanced Placement courses, algebra, counseling and other specialized programs — which is nice, but does nothing to change insidious enrollment patterns. Even de Blasio’s 2013 campaign promise to scrap the single-test admissions system for competitive high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech to make those schools more diverse is now expendable political road kill.
The second injustice triggering mayoral obfuscation is denial of a diverse curriculum to ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, contrary to state law. The Department of Education, under the mayor’s control, has a duty to assure that educational standards in these yeshivas are “substantially equivalent” to required learning standards in public schools, including English language arts, science, mathematics, technology, social studies and the arts.
Just as Michael Bloomberg did before him, Mayor de Blasio has failed miserably in meeting this duty, surrendering to political pressures that cripple the education of thousands of children. The documented failure to provide adequate secular studies (often completely absent) in these institutions, and the mayor’s apparent sabotage of this requisite assurance raise serious legal, ethical and educational issues.
Derogation arguably borders on a criminal offense: Official misconduct and obstruction of governmental administration. The state’s highest court has held conviction for official misconduct requires proof that “the defendant, acting alone and with others in his official capacity, caused the abdication of the inherent duty to investigate . . . where there was overwhelming evidence.” This definition closely fits the mayor’s actions.
The so-called yeshiva-gate scandal shows de Blasio’s educational expediency in full flower. De Blasio protects the yeshivas from demonstrating compliance under the pretext of a largely illusory investigation, even as the schools benefit from public funds. In this way, he earns Orthodox leaders’ support along with thousands of votes from their followers. Cast aside are yeshiva students who lack mandated secular studies.
Like any mayor, de Blasio chooses his political agenda. If he were perfectly consistent in following through in combating the tale of two cities, he’d be a robot, not a human being. But the hypocrisy of his patronage progressivism is extreme. He self-advertises as the Education Mayor. But without real progress on desegregation and the education of thousands of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, that legacy will forever elude him.