With his eye on a run for governor, a Biden administration job or some way to start paying back his vast debts, lame-duck Mayor Bill de Blasio apparently didn’t know that his Department of Education minions eliminated zoned high schools in a clear bid to ram through yet another dumb change before a new team takes over.
“No final decision” has been made about it (nor about ending selective screens for admission to some popular middle schools) he lectured The Post’s Julia Marsh at Monday’s briefing. Well, the DOE’s admissions guide says so. (Blas said he’s unfamiliar with “that specific document.”) And the DOE actually announced it (very quietly, during a pandemic) last year, as Chalkbeat noted.
Indeed, the DOE last year made 48 high schools stop giving priority to students residing in their zone. For fall 2022, it said, all other geographical admissions priorities would go.
The city’s borough (235) and local-zone (27) priority high schools are popular with students and families who want some sense of “our school,” as if they lived in the ‘burbs. The mayor likely knows that, hence his lame denials.
The DOE brainless trust clearly wants to end selective middle schools, too: It’s already killed some, and generally sees any such standards as racist or somesuch. It’s at least dragging its feet for the second year in a row on announcing admission rules for incoming ninth-graders.
Middle- and high-school admissions are already a fraught process — one that the mayor’s dithering and his underlings’ conniving have made even more confounding to students and parents.
Advocates insist that killing these schools that work will somehow increase opportunity and bring more racial integration. Bull: DOE-school enrollment is 80 percent black, Hispanic and Asian; there’s not much integration to be had.
And such moves (along with the DOE’s similar war on Gifted & Talented programs) are more likely to simply drive away middle-class families of all races, further turning the entire public-school system into a ghetto.
In short, all the de Blasio DOE is doing now is pushing more idiocy that the Adams DOE will have to overturn. The next mayor, at least, understands that the way forward is to open more good schools, and add more good programs — not to tear down ones that work.
Really, can’t de Blasio set aside his job search long enough to tell his DOE to just stop announcing any new policies for his final weeks in office?
