By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the
political left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a
fraud, it would be now -- and the place would be New York City, where far left
Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their
funding, among other things.
These schools have given thousands of low income minority
children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only
shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school
called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics exams, compared to 30
percent of the students in the city as a whole.
Why would anybody who has any concern at all about
minority young people -- or even common decency -- want to destroy what
progress has already been made?
One big reason, of course, is the teachers' union, one of
Mayor de Blasio's biggest supporters. But it may be more than that. For many of
the true believers on the left, their ideology overrides any concern about the
actual fate of flesh-and-blood human beings.
Something similar happened on the west coast last year.
The American Indian Model Schools in Oakland have been ranked among the top
schools in the nation, based on their students' test scores. This is, again, a
special achievement for minority students who need all the help they can get.
But, last spring, the California State Board of Education
announced plans to shut this school down!
Why? The excuse given was that there had been suspicious
financial dealings by the former -- repeat, former -- head of the institution.
If this was the real reason, then all they had to do was indict the former head
and let a court decide if he was guilty or innocent.
There was no reason to make anyone else suffer, much less
the students. But the education establishment's decision was to refuse to let
the school open last fall. Fortunately a court stopped this hasty shut-down.
These are not just isolated local incidents. The Obama
administration has cut spending for charter schools in the District of Columbia
and its Justice Department has intervened to try to stop the state of Louisiana
from expanding its charter schools.
Why such hostility to schools that have succeeded in
educating minority students, where so many others have failed?
Some of the opposition to charter schools has been sheer
crass politics. The teachers' unions see charter schools as a threat to their
members' jobs, and politicians respond to the money and the votes that
teachers' unions can provide.
The net result is that public schools are often run as if
their main function is to provide jobs to teachers. Whether the children get a
decent education is secondary, at best.
In various parts of the country, educators who have
succeeded in raising the educational level of minority children to the national
average -- or above -- have faced hostility, harassment or have even been
driven out of their schools.
Not all charter schools are successful, of course, but
the ones that are completely undermine the excuses for failure in the public
school system as a whole. That is why teachers' unions hate them, as a threat
not only to their members' jobs but a threat to the whole range of frauds and
fetishes in the educational system.
The autonomy of charter schools is also a threat to the
powers that be, who want to impose their own vision on the schools, regardless
of what the parents want. Attorney General Eric Holder wants to impose his own
notion of racial balance in the schools, while many black parents want their
children to learn, regardless of whether they are seated next to a white child
or a black child. There have been all-black schools whose students met or
exceeded national norms in education, whether in Louisiana, California or other
places around the country. But Eric Holder, like Bill de Blasio, put his
ideology above the education -- and the future life -- of minority students.
Charter schools take power from politicians and
bureaucrats, letting parents decide where their children will go to school.
That is obviously offensive to those on the left, who think that our betters
should be making our decisions for us.
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