MADNESS IN ACTION - AT 10:07 A.M. ET:  If you doubt that there is real madness in some parts of our educational system, please read on:  There was a time when the New York City school system was revered for its quality.  Teachers, mostly Irish, taught students of all backgrounds.  Those teachers took great pride in their work.  They had prestige.  They had gone through a rigorous selection process.  The description "New York City teacher" meant something. 

I spent my early years in that system.  We had teachers who could diagram an English sentence.  Now, some students are lucky to have a teacher who can write one.

And while there are still many gems in the New York City system, some of the newer schools are positively off the wall.  Consider:

A growing number of city schools aim to foster resentment and rage among the most uneducated students. Under the guise of "social justice," the fomenting of racial and socio-economic grievances has supplanted the teaching of basic skills. The result is an even wider gap in learning between the poorest minorities and other students.

And get this:

The corruption of the curriculum is getting harder to conceal. In the wake of the ACORN scandals, it's more obviously problematic that ACORN is affiliated with three city schools -- including two in Brooklyn bearing the group's name: ACORN Community HS and the ACORN HS for Social Justice.

Can you imagine the football cheer?

But teacher activism goes far beyond ACORN. Social justice is the guiding academic principle of more than a dozen city high schools, particularly in the newer crop of smaller schools started by community groups.

* On the home page of Bushwick Community HS, you'll find a large illustration of Che Guevara wearing a graduation cap.

* Last year, the principal of Vanguard HS in Manhattan hosted a "radical math" conference at his school. The event, according to the program, featured a presentation by a teacher at Performing Arts & Technology HS about "how to use the history of the Black Panther Party to fuel an algebraic curriculum."

* At Banana Kelly HS in The Bronx, the social-justice agenda has extended into its discipline policy. The school is experimenting with "restorative justice" techniques -- in which misbehaving or truant students aren't punished but instead asked to participate in trust-building exercises to help them "acknowledge their feelings."

Wait.  Stop the music.  Banana Kelly High School?  Who the hell is Banana Kelly?  This one I haven't heard.

All right, I looked it up.  It's actually a street.  Colin Powell grew up nearby and talks about it in his autobiography.

And the city's response to the lunacy in some of its schools:

A spokesman for the city Education Department waved off any concern: "We don't submit schools to political tests. We ask them instead to teach our students to be avid learners and critical thinkers, and we hold them accountable for how well they do that."

Translation: It's not our problem.

COMMENT:  This kind of educational corruption is spreading.  We'll write more about it.

December 1, 2009