‘City’s Schools Most Segregated’

The irritation I felt in running across reports in The New York Sun such as “City’s Schools Are Among America’s Most Segregated” [Deborah Kolben, Page 1, October 26, 2005] and “We know there’s been an historical injustice in the NYC public school system,” from a spokeswoman of the Fernando Ferrer mayoralty campaign, was barely supportable.

Are we destined to have the lies of yesteryear repeated over and over again in each new generation ad infinitum? The claim of segregation this time derives from statistics that New York City’s private high schools are 66% non-Hispanic white while public school students are 15% non-Hispanic whites. Not to be outdone, John Kozol in a promotion of his book “Shame of the Nation” belligerently adds that our public schools are guilty of “apartheid,” a view that is embraced by many other similarly disposed and no less an expert than the race monger Al Sharpton.

Instead of allowing Americans the democratic right to choose the best schools possible for their children, we are treated to such accusations as “Shame on the nation,” “Shame on the system,” “Shame on the mayor,” etc. What we don’t hear is “Shame on the American blacks for having underperformed for years and have had therefore to suffer the consequences.” The current version of the blame game, in explanation for what was so starkly revealed to the entire country by Hurricane Katrina, is mighty thin gruel, indeed, in having accused a slow-reacting government of racism rather than incompetence.

Black author Shelby Steele, in his Wall Street Journal article “Witness,” writes: “Here – 40 years after the great civil rights victories, and 50 years after Rosa Parks’ great refusal – was a poverty that oppression could no longer entirely explain. Here was a poverty with an element of surrender in it that seemed to confirm the worst charges against blacks, that we are inferior, that nothing really helps us, that the modern world is beyond our reach.”

Professor Steele points to the fact that since the 1960s the white community has owned up to its racism but has not dared to admonish American blacks as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once did his followers – “Don’t blame Whitey for all our troubles” – lest such remarks be judged as racist. Nor had blacks ever dared to admit their inferiority/underperformance while white mea culpas allowed them to “change the subject from black weakness to white evil.”

Nor would whites ever have dared to say, as Bill Cosby has, that whites acting out of guilt could not overcome black inferiority/underperformance; only blacks can. Mr. Cosby’s assumption has been that black acceptance of responsibility for their own lives would be “the great transforming power.”

Now to return to the charge of the great white shame that New York public schools are currently the most segregated in the nation: That same charge was first leveled against the New York City public school system in the heyday of the triumphalism that followed the great civil rights victories in the 1950s against Jim Crow laws in the South.

Never mind that there were no such laws with respect to schools in any jurisdiction in New York State. Nonetheless, the charge of white racism to account for the educational gap between white and black students and the employment gap between white and black school personnel became an all-conquering proposition that few dared to oppose. And as a result, as day follows night, a public school system that had given the city its golden age in public education for more than 50 years in the span of a decade had been completely eviscerated; its personnel, its methods of hiring and teaching and of measuring student achievement were all vilified and slandered as racist. Nothing was left standing of a school system that millions of new Americans for 50 years had sworn by but the educational wasteland we have had ever since.

Today, by a most wanton irresponsibility, the modern counterparts of the 1960s militants who brought the New York City public schools to their present rock-bottom state – as has been attested by year after year of unrelieved failing scores in reading and arithmetic – have the gall to blame the current demographics on a reimposition of segregation.

The fact that students of parents of even modest means have fled public schools by the droves because they do not teach and are not safe, is not evidence of a “restoration of apartheid” from South Africa to New York City, but of market forces at work in a democratic society where citizen consumers abandon inferior products for superior ones.

JULIUS GORDON
Douglaston, N.Y.