In my view it is BLACK people who need to start asking: what the HELL have all these people allegedly crusading on our behalf actually DONE for us?
Nobody is looking out for blacks in this country, least of all their supposed leaders, and supposed advocates. That is why failure continues to be widespread, and unchanging.
We don’t need to have ghettos. We don’t need to have areas of concentrated poverty.
Much of this will require fixes in monetary policy–a full solution certainly will–but much can be done even within political policy. Charter schools and vouchers are the most obvious place to start. They WORK, which is why Democrats oppose them. What happens to their constituency, when they no longer need look to the government for assistance? This is why ending schools which were generating MUCH better results, particularly for minorities, was one of the first things De Blasio did.
De Blasio also finds himself in a pretty lonely situation: By going after the charters, he is attacking one of the most promising urban school reform strategies available to Democratic mayors across the country these days, and he’s doing it without offering a clear alternative.
Among the 870 Success Academy seats blocked was a modest 194-student expansion for Success Academy students in Harlem to move into a new middle school. That triggered days of searing presscoverage pointing out that those 194 students, all low-income minorities, were coming from a school, Success Academy 4, that killed it on the new state test scores, with 80 percent of the students passing the math test, and 59 percent the English test. The co-located middle school the mayor is protecting and where many of those 194 charter students would end up: P.S. 149, where 5 percent of students passed the math test, and 11 percent the English test.
Wasn’t de Blasio supposed to be the champion of improving education for have-not children, his critics asked?