Should entry to the city’s best middle and high schools be determined by race-blind academic standards, or by race-driven quotas? Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza are pushing hard for the quotas — even though both sent their own kids to “screened” high schools.
We don’t blame either man for doing what was best for his own children. But it makes their current campaign look pretty hypocritical.
De Blasio can argue that his family had already made these decisions before he became mayor. But Carranza was actually San Franciso’s school superintendent when he sent his daughter to the highly selective and coveted Lowell School — a public high school described as the “Stuyvesant of San Francisco.”
Yet after coming to New York, he publicly asked why the city needs any screened schools at all.
Of course, racial re-engineering wasn’t on his agenda in ’Frisco — his focus was on reducing suspensions, getting more resources for disadvantaged students and so on. And Lowell, thanks to court orders, had different entrance-test cutoffs for various racial and ethnic groups.
But the fact remains that he’s blasted screening for high-performing students as racially biased — and accused parents who question the quota drive of racism.
Never mind that the greatest resistance is often coming from another minority group: It was Asian-Americans who filed a federal suit last month to stop the de Blasio-Carranza plan to reserve 20 percent of seats at the city’s top high schools for black and Hispanic students.
Ignore, too, the ugly fact that even these quota plans do nothing for the vast majority of black and Hispanic kids — who would still be trapped in low-performing, non-elite schools.
For all their talk of racial justice, de Blasio and Carranza have yet to offer any plan for radically improving educational options for all New York’s children. And that’s the greatest hypocrisy of all.
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