The latest scandal affecting the New York City school system involves revising the curriculum to focus on racial privilege (“Forget reading and math – Carranza wants to focus on racial privilege, activism,” New York Post, Jul. 24). Evidently that is more important than teaching students basic reading and math.
Under the “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education” program, students will be taught how to end societal inequities. But if they can’t do math or English, how in the world is that going to benefit them? K-12 is not the place for teaching students to become activists.
I see the move as a way to distract attention away from the failure of schools to properly educate students. I hope the measure will be rejected by the Panel for Educational Policy in New York City. But based on what I’ve seen before, I wouldn’t count on it.
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Probably driven by NYC politics rather than by a desire to distract from the bad test scores or other ed problems. Seems that a controversial idea like this will attract attention to the bad test scores — as critics, like you, correctly respond to the nutty idea with “look at the bad test scores; let’s focus on the bad test scores”.
I generally applaud efforts to teach real-world civics issues in high school — most (probably virtually all) students graduate from high school appallingly ignorant re pretty much all the major economic, social, and foreign policy issues confronting the country. But, this program (“CR-SE” in the NYP, I can see it labelled “CURSE”) seems focused on just a narrow range of real-world civics issues + starts with an inherent bias re how those issues should be addressed.
The capacity for elected and appointed govt officials to come up with really dumb education ideas is truly amazing.
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Sorry — above comment should have been posted as by Labor Lawyer, not L. My computer did something weird.
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L: Mayor De Blasio and Chancellor Carranza are intent on destroying whatever good remains in the city’s public school system by whatever means possible. Instead of focusing on the dismal performance of students in math and reading, they want to teach students that they are victims of white privilege. It’s truly a scandal, but little will change because residents keep on voting for the same type of leaders.
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