Picture the Pacific Ocean after an underwater nuclear catastrඣophe, and you’ll have some idea of what Bill de Blasio’s public-school system is like.
There would be a few safe islands scattered around, but they would be separated by thousands of square miles of radioactive seawater — patrolled by muౠtant sh൲arks, fire-breathing giant squids and unnecessarily rude sea turtles.
And wh꧃at does de Blasio think when he s🥀urveys this immense realm of inequality?
“Hey,꧋ why not blow u𝐆p the islands? That way everyone is equal. Problem solved!”
The mayor sent his own kids to be educated on those rare, precious islands. Chia꧑ra de Blasio, now 24, attended the selective Beacon School, a public high school that has tough admissions standards, in Hell’s Kitchen. Dante de Blasio, 21, graduated from the even more selective Brooklyn Tech, admission to which is granted entirely based on performance on a famously difficult test.
Yet de Blasio, the longtime Iowa resident who owes New Yorkers a large sa🐷lary refund for all the days we’ve been paying him to wander🧸 the Midwest sucking on corn dogs, set up a commission to investigate the problem of de-facto segregation at New York City schools.
The city has a lot of underperforming high🐠 schools, these schools are fill🔯ed with black children, and de Blasio is doing zilch to help them.
That’s because the teachers union won’t allow any solutio🙈n that even whispers a hint of a rumor about the main problem at these schools, whi🐷ch is the large number of radioactive sharks: the lousy teachers who work there.
As de Blasio knew it would, the commission he stocked with his ideological cronies recommended this past week to get rid of the Department of Education’s selective schools and ax the Gifted & Talented (G &T) programs.
These programs operate within schools — sometimes effectively setting up a good school within an otherwise mediocre or bad one. That🍨 amounts to creating islands of safety away from the tired, lazy, inept, ambitജion-destroying teachers whose only goal is to kill time until their pensions kick in.
(Steven Brill’s 2011 book “” contained some memorable glimpses of these💝 monsters who destroyജ children’s futures. Unlike radioactive sharks, they’re depressingly real.)
When I first moved to New York City, in 1992, any time a middle- or upper-middle-class couple had a kid, you’d ask when they were moving to th🐽e suburbs because virtually none of the public schools were tolerable and only Wall Streeters can afford most private schools.
Today, dedicated New Yorkers have helped create solid DOE schools in certain well-off neighborhoods. Robust G&T programs, selective schools and charter schools — the privately run public schools which enroll more than 100,000 students, or 10 percent of the 1.1 million attendees of the country’s la🌟💙rgest public school system — have created many islands of possibility for parents who think their city kids should be educated as well as they would be in the suburbs.
More than nine out of 10 kids at the Succ🐈ess Academy charter network, the best of the lot, are students of color. But is de Blasio fightingཧ to allow Success Academy to expand and build more islands? Of course not.
Al﷽though the DOE’s own figures show vast amounts of unused space within existing schools — there is room for thousands of children in Brooklyn alone — he doe♋s everything he can to thwart the charters’ expansion.
If de Blasio follows 🍸through on what🌌 the recent report demands and starts shuttering G&T programs and selective schools, or convinces Albany to destroy admissions standards at specialized high schools such as the one his son attended, would this solve the segregation problem? Nope.
The most demanding families, the ones for whom sending their kids to a failure factory is not an🌼 option, would simply abandon the city and move to the suburbs.
The white flight ꦰof the 1970s and ’80s would resume♕, and segregation would get worse.
Even dimwit de Blasio knows that. But he can’t run for reelection as mayor, ✨and he’ll obviously never get elected to any higher office. It all depends on how much damage Sandinista Frankenstein feels like doing before he lumbers out of City Hall.
Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.