Panel Appointed by Bill Di Blasio Concludes That New York City's Gifted and Talented Magnet School System Must Be Eradicated, In Order to Desegregate Schools

This is going to be bad.

For years, New York City has essentially maintained two parallel public school systems.

A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is filled mostly with white and Asian children. The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.

Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.

...

He risks alienating tens of thousands of mostly white and Asian families who rely on the shadow system of gifted programs and selective schools; if a substantial number of those families leave the system, it would be next to impossible to achieve integration.

You should be aware that it is this program that keeps a large number of well-to-do but not super-rich new york city taxpayers in the city. without this program, they'd either have to send their kids to the terrible regular New York schools or pay exorbitantly for private schools.

I have friends who are in this situation. They are liberal and rich. They are proud that they're sending their kids to public, not private, schools.

Partly for political reasons (liberals love government programs), and also for financial reasons.

Private school is very, very expensive in New York City.

If the selective school system is dismantled, the other alternative, which wealthy city-proud New Yorkers don't want to do, is to move to a NYC suburb with good schools. They don't want to do that, but if you give them the choice of moving, or putting their kids into a nightmare world, or making them pay $100,000 per year for private school, they start making peace with the idea of being a suburban family.

A friend comments: the left-wing elite always carve out little exceptions so they don’t have to deal with the socialism and failure they impose on everyone else.

True. They build themselves some "out" so that they can pretend to be part of an egalitarian system while making sure they're in no way part of the egalitarian system.

Another friend hits this hole in one:

You wanna know who this affects and why it’ll be ultimately rejected? JOURNALISTS.

They don’t have fuck-you money for private schools and they can’t move to the burbs. But they'll drag DeBlasio over this.

This is going to get very ugly, and test liberals' commitment to the ideals they pretend to worship.

One other factor in play: If Di Blasio forces a mass exodus to the suburbs, not only will New York City take a big hit in tax revenue, but it might cause a serious deflation in NYC residential real estate.

I don't see what choice Di Blasio has apart from making the case that Equality and Integration Are Overrated. A politically-engineered exodus of the high bourgeoisie -- a White Flight combined with Asian Evasion -- would be a disaster.

I would comment about this impacting Bill Di Blasio's chances of becoming president, but it actually doesn't change those chances at all; they remain zero point zero zero zero zero percent.

He's a loser to the fifth significant digit -- right to the "R."

posted by Ace of Spades at 01:06 PM

| Access Comments