New York City public schools are focused on ideology — and failing kids
It’s back-to-school time in New York City, but the Department of Education isn’t ready.
As the DOE faces the new academic year, let’s bring out its latest report card to see where it can keep up the good work and where it must do better.
Unfortunately, what needs improvement far exceeds the positives to maintain.
New York City’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results, “The Nation’s Report Card,” shows 71% of our eighth-graders fail grade-level proficiency in reading, and 77% fail in math — in other words, the vast majority of our kids fell off the minimum literacy and numeracy tracks by eighth grade.
That’s more than a failing report card. It’s a scandal.
But even a failing student can — with hard work — become a (non-grade-inflated) C student. How about our DOE?
The usual quarters always blame insufficient funding, and with Democratic politicians in the teachers union’s pocket, taxpayers will lose again, despite a budget that exceeds $41 billion for maybe 815,000 students, spending more per student than almost anywhere else in the world again, without the results to match — again.
Let’s instead examine what the DOE thinks it should be doing: its Vision and Mission statement.
Of its eight sections, three — “Big Apple Awards,” “Teacher and Principal Evaluation” and “Teacher Appreciation Week” — focus on showering recognition on teachers and staff.
“Big Apple Awards” honors teachers who “inspire students to be their best selves, dream, and advocate for their future,” “model equitable learning with high expectations for the diverse and dynamic needs” and “affirm students’ identities, unique gifts, and genius.”
Quite a fanfare of lofty platitudes, but apparently forgotten are any accountability for results in student learning and academic mastery.
“Teacher and Principal Evaluation” is worse. It applauds that “students learn to think for themselves when teachers are always learning,” gushing “when teachers reflect on both data about student learning and meaningful comments from their leaders, they learn, grow, and thrive.”
How was such word salad ever permitted on the DOE’s website, of all places?
Of the remaining sections, two regard the chancellor’s letter and a listening tour, and the last three tout diversity, safe, restorative-justice schools and identity-driven education.
In the nearly 300 words of Vision and Mission, not once do the words or variants of the words “arithmetic,” “reading,” “writing,” “math” or “science” appear, except when the word “read” appears in “Read the chancellor’s letter.”
Instead, ideology dominates, saturating Vision and Mission and its linked subsidiary pages with well-known code words for critical-race theory — “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusive” (jointly, DEI), “identity,” “restorative justice,” “anti-racist education.”
If that’s what the DOE wants its schools to do — recruit little kids into CRT’s bitter, paranoid battleground to enact oppressor-oppressed conflicts everywhere and beat the kids into learned helplessness — then no wonder it gets failing report cards for academics.
Taking cover behind buzzwords like “reimagining” or “reenvisioning,” such as “reenvisioning the school experience” — variants of the much-mocked “see what can be, unburdened by what has been” — just means throwing facts, logic and reality out the window.
The DOE’s Vision and Mission clearly shows CRT and DEI, and their operationalizations like the deceptively named culturally responsive-sustaining education and social-emotional learning, remain entrenched in DOE schools, defying the federal government’s order that New York institutions remove DEI. Regardless of threats from Washington, though, our schools should ditch CRT and DEI because they corrupt schools’ proper mission.
Once freed from the shackles of CRT and DEI, schools can return to academics, starting with the 3 Rs — reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic — delivered in classrooms that set rigorous, no-excuses, objective standards. With high expectations in schools and agency in students, kids might actually show up more, reducing the abysmal chronic-absenteeism rates reaching 40% in 2022, and do what they are supposed to do in school: learn.
Long term, initiatives and alternatives such as charters schools are key. Success Academy charter schools, for example, trounce DOE district schools with 95% of their black students passing New York state math tests against the DOE’s 43%, showing what’s possible with high expectations and agency.
But immediate action is needed. Start with rewriting Vision and Mission to reflect real educational priorities and meritocratic accountability, not CRT indoctrination.
Another school year is too much to waste.
Wai Wah Chin is the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York founding president and a Manhattan Institute adjunct fellow.
Credit to Nypost AND Peoples
