Is there a single soul in New York City with less moral standing to speak on public-school performance than Michael Mulgrew of the United Federation of Teachers?
A single soul in the five boroughs who has done more to impede the scholastic progress of black and Hispanic public-school students?
No one comes to mind.
But there was UFT chief Mulgrew on Monday, flanked by a clutch of backbench state legislators, calling for an end to exacting admissions standards for the city’s specialized high schools — on the grounds that they don’t fairly measure classroom performance, and that they discriminate against black and Hispanic students.
It is to laugh. Or maybe just to weep.
For Mulgrew is the fellow whose scorched-earth campaign against even minimal performance standards for teachers was so spectacularly successful that he felt comfortable last month bragging about it:
“It was a strategy decision to gum up the works because . . . we knew [that the Bloomberg administration] had a plan to use the new evaluation system to go after people.”
Right. To go after . . . incompetent teachers.
Now those teachers are safe, and the UFT’s crosshairs are on the so-called Specialized High School Admissions Tests — taken annually by some 27,000 students competing for roughly 5,000 seats in the city’s eight specialized high schools.
Mandated by a 1971 state law, these are not easy tests — nor were they ever meant to be. And while just about anyone can apply to take one, there are dramatic differences in outcomes — especially as measured by the one metric that trumps all others in New York City: ethnicity.
At Stuyvesant HS — the best-known of the eight schools — 950 new students will be admitted this fall; 21 will be Hispanic, and only seven black.
Overall, roughly 50 percent of the eight schools’ new students will be of Asian heritage and 28 percent will be white — although, between them, the two groups make up only 29 percent of the city’s public-school students.
But black and Hispanic students — who make up 68 percent of New York’s public-school students — won just 12 percent of this year’s specialized-school placements.
Unfair?
Mulgrew and his legislative henchfolk say so, and they’ve determined that the tests need to go — to be replaced by an amalgam of formless subjectivities aimed at eventual ethnic balance in the selective schools.
Consequences be damned.
And there will be consequences.
New York City has been down this road before, in 1971, when it abandoned academic rigor at the City University in favor of a come-one, come-all open-admissions policy that all but wrecked a world-class academic institution.
The city was a generation repairing the damage — and in many respects a full recovery probably will never be achieved.
Measured against that experience, why would anyone want to place the specialized high schools — world-class in their own right — at similar risk?
Maybe more to the point, why does Mulgrew even care? He got his pile with that great train robbery of a teachers’ contract last month; isn’t it time for Disney World or something?
But he does care:
- He cares because academic excellence is an implied rebuke to the shoddiness imposed on the schools by UFT practices. More than 80 percent of City University community-college students — almost all of them graduates of New York’s public schools — require remedial work, the university reports. If kids count most, shouldn’t that fact be of more concern to Mulgrew than Stuyvesant’s stats?
- He cares because objective tests of any sort are ultimately a benchmark against which teacher performance can be measured — which is why Bloomberg’s evaluation efforts had to be “gummed up,” and why these exams must go.
- He cares because his union reflexively opposes reforms that have truly helped black and Hispanic kids — charter schools in particular — and he needs attention deflected from that ugly fact as the reforms are slowly strangled.
None of this is to suggest that the ethnic disparities underlying the controversy aren’t shocking. They are.
And it isn’t to suggest that the causes of the imbalance aren’t nuanced. Again, they are. (Anyone who wonders why Asian kids do so well must read “Brooklyn’s Chinese Pioneers” by sociologist Kay Hymowitz in the spring issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.)
But Mulgrew’s approach is no answer at all — even if it was immediately endorsed by the de Blasio administration. (It’s good to be the boss, when you own your own mayor.)
Never forget: Teachers unions exist to serve the needs of teachers, not students. Rhetoric to the contrary is just camouflage, that’s all.