The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug

City Journal ^ | Sol Stern

[Dawnsblood]

New York City teems with many more of these schools than any other district in the country. A handful have been around for years, including El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, with its wacky hip-hop curriculum (“An F for Hip-Hop 101,” Summer 1998). But Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein’s project to break up many of the system’s dysfunctional large high schools and replace them with new small schools has spawned many more. The Department of Education’s website lists at least 15 of the new small high schools that either are explicitly named as social justice schools or whose mission statements declare that their curricula center on social justice concerns. Curiously, while left-wing community organizations, including ultraradical Acorn, helped create some of these schools, some have also received funding from über-capitalist Bill Gates’s charitable foundation. Lenin quipped that “a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.” Now it seems he just gives it to you.

Chancellor Klein sees no problem with social justice schools. “Giving schools ‘leadership’ or ‘social justice’ themes is fine with me, as long as the teachers and principals do not bring politics and ideologies into our classrooms,” he told me—though of course that’s just what ed schools instruct social justice teachers to do. “Themes don’t drive school programs; state standards do. Our small secondary schools are academically rigorous. We cannot afford to vilify schools that help us accomplish our top goal as a school system: boosting our students’ achievement and academic success.”

[Dawnsblood]

There is too much in this article to list. A long, but very good read!

[Inwoodian]

There’s a Paul Robeson High School. Why don’t they cut out the middle man and name it Joseph Stalin High.