There is a good chance the plan will not be implemented if opposition is mobilized.

How to Destory a School System
The plan to desegregate New York City’s schools is a recipe for disaster.
Bob McManus
City Journal
August 28, 2019

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s task force on school desegregation aims to solve a problem that doesn’t exist by eliminating much of what does work in the city’s troubled public-school system, while failing to address its many shortcomings. The scheme would provoke bitter social discord and further reduce the relatively small number of white students in the system. On the upside, it would undoubtedly accelerate the critical engagement of Gotham’s growing but politically reticent Asian-immigrant community.

The School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), appointed by de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, has called for repopulating each of the city’s 1,800 public schools to mirror the ethnic makeup of the city at large within 10 years. The SDAG report recommends the elimination of ability and performance screening for pupils, and condemns “attendance & punctuality” metrics as “exclusionary” against “Black and Latinx applicants.”

The plan reflects the stated goal of both de Blasio and Carranza: a totally “desegregated” school system. But it is breathtakingly unmindful of the social, cultural, and political complexities of New York. Of course, given de Blasio’s penchant for promising grand slams as he plays small-ball, the scheme could just as easily be sitting in a dust-covered City Hall filing cabinet when the mayor leaves office at the end of 2021. It has already drawn opposition from city council speaker Corey Johnson, a potential 2021 mayoral candidate and, most significantly, from United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. Mulgrew’s stance could be enough to kill the proposal—and it deserves to die.

Conceptually, the report reflects official mayoral school policy since Carranza’s arrival. It condemns what it terms racial imbalances in city schools even as it ignores the system’s myriad classroom failures. Those inadequacies were underscored again last week, when state tests revealed that more than half of the system’s third-graders lack proficiency in either math or reading. Operationally, the report is truly radical. It proposes to “desegregate” the system by dismantling the imperfect yet intricately evolved network of enrichment programs and performance screenings that offer pathways for parents and pupils through otherwise forbidding educational landscapes. And though it does not address the contentious matter of the city’s competitive-entry high schools—that’s a matter for Albany to decide—the effect of its recommendations would be to restrict severely the supply of highly qualified freshmen those schools need to continue in their current role.

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