Communist New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is certainly blazing a path in New York City. Peggy Noonan has a
revealing column in the Saturday edition of the
Wall Street Journal. (highlights are mine)
What a small and politically vicious man New York's new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn't like charter schools. They are too successful to be tolerated. Last week he announced he will drop the ax on three planned Success Academy schools. (You know Success Academy: It was chronicled in the film "Waiting for Superman." It's one of the charter schools the disadvantaged kids are desperate to get into.) Mr. de Blasio has also cut and redirected the entire allotment for charter facility funding from the city's capital budget. An official associated with a small, independent charter school in the South Bronx told me the decision will siphon money from his school's operations. He summed up his feelings with two words: "It's dispiriting."
Some 70,000 of the city's one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.
Communists like de Blasio hate the poor, they kids and they hate minorities. Fortunately for the communists, in their efforts to keep people poor and under-educated, the kids, the poor and the minorities never realize what's going on.
This war on children via a war on education is appalling. But why do this? Well, here's why:
But the people who run the public-school system that doesn't work—the one where you can't fire teachers who sexually prey on students and principals who don't even show up for work, which is to say the public schools run by the city's huge and powerful teachers union—don't like the charter schools. And they are the mayor's supporters, a significant part of his base.
The very existence of charter schools is an implicit rebuke to the public schools. It means they are not succeeding, and something new must be tried. That something new won't be perfect—no charter school is, and some are more imperfect than others—but people still line up to get into them. And there's something to the wisdom of crowds. When a school exists for the students, you can tell. When it exists for the unions, you can tell that too.
It's obvious to observers or participants in the debate over parental choice in education that the unions always care more about their constituency (the teachers) than the students.
In this move more than any so far, Mr. de Blasio shows signs he is what his critics warned he would be—a destructive force in the city of New York. When a man says he will raise taxes to achieve a program like pre-K education, and is quickly informed that that program can be achieved without raising taxes, and his answer is that he wants to raise taxes anyway, that man is an ideologue.
And ideologues will sacrifice anything to their ideology. Even children.
Bingo! Mayor de Blasio is a loyal follower. There is no reasoning with him. Sadly, he was just elected, so unless there is a recall effort at some point, NYC, and the nation, will have to suffer under de Blasio's iron boot for four years until the next election.
In the meantime, my questions for Mayor de Blasion and his fellow Leftist travelers would be these: Why do you hate the poor? What do you hate Hispanic children? Why do you hate black children?
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