Replies

Their parents are either MIA or support the choice of school, since there's no way any kid is being enrolled in this school over parents' objections. Ignore it and move on!

Blows my mind that you can say this in the face of this being a "model school" that other communities are supposed to emulate. This is like a flagship for others to follow. You call yourself a "government shrinker" so how can you possibly justify squandering TAXPAYER money on this horror?

The New York City schools spend a colossal amount of money per student throughout the system, and get very poor results. They're not spending any more on the students at the gay school than they would be if they were attending some other city school. I'm no fan of public schools in general, and even less of out-of-control big urban public school systems. But as long as they're squandering my money on poor educations for the kids (I am an NYC taxpayer, BTW), I'm not going to get worked up if one in 10,000 of the kids in this system are attending a special all-gay school.

As for it being a "model school that others are supposed to emulate", that's what the operators of virtually every oddball experimental school say. But this place has been around for 20 years, and as far as I know no other school system has emulated it yet (perhaps there's something like it in San Francisco, but I haven't heard of it). Personally, I think we'd do better to worry about the kind of alternative public schools that Johnny Taliban Walker attended, where kids are encouraged to pursue any line of insanity that strikes their fancy, with little supervision, and to the near total exclusion of any real academics. There are LOTS of those schools, enrolling a huge number of students. And about the ordinary schools in big cities, where kids learn precious little beyond how to do drugs, have sex, and fight.

A couple of years ago in an NYC high school, a girl was raped during math class, with the teacher present. The teacher claimed she hadn't seen it, and police and media interviews with the other students revealed that this was a perfectly plausible claim, given the usual conditions in the classroom. The noise level was deafening so the teacher wouldn't have heard anything (nor would the students have been catching much of the "math lesson"). A couple of boys stood up in front the rape location to block the view, and the teacher knew better than to endanger her life by trying to force these young thugs to sit down if they didn't want to, so she just went on with the "math lesson". Can you understand now why I think far too much angst is being expended on this teensy little gay school?