Just to pick one memorable phrase from Bob McManus’ CityJournal indictment of New York City’s new war on academic achievement.
So it’s also no surprise that UFT president Michael Mulgrew has hopped aboard the social-justice bus, taking to a city newspaper last month to attack what he termed New York’s “academically segregated” high schools—with the eight specialized schools the obvious target. Mulgrew says too many schools are “highly segregated by academic achievement.” The assertion, of course, allows him to gloss over how tens of thousands of his union teachers fail to prepare middle-schoolers for such high schools. All this amounts to a deflector shield—the notion that social-justice pieties can do the job that Carranza’s Department of Education and Mulgrew’s UFT leave undone.
The UFT is the United Federation of Teachers. The issue at stake is Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to limit academic merit as the basis for entering some of New York City’s elite public schools. The plan has been sold as desegregation, but what sort of desegregation? These schools have plenty of white and Asian students. And so, in Mulgrew’s memorable phrase, there’s segregation by academic achievement.
It’s strange to hear the head of a teachers’ union utter a phrase like, “highly segregated by academic achievement.”
Isn’t that what education is? We have multiple tracks. We allow students to learn at their own pace. And advance students to the educational level that they are capable of mastering. Or at least that was how it used to be.
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