On Monday, representatives for 19 parents and 21 children will head to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to file a civil-rights suit.
The children are black and Latino. Each had plans to attend an excellent public school, Harlem Central, until they had their school yanked out from under them by Mayor de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña. So 60 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, these children will make an argument that New York City is violating their own civil rights.
We’ll get back to their claim in a moment. But first we’d like to quote from what the Supreme Court said in 1954 when it famously ruled against separate-but-equal:
Education, said the court, “is the very foundation of good citizenship . . . In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
Today, unfortunately, millions of African-American children continue to be condemned to inferior public schools. Here in New York City, 85 percent of these children are failing their proficiency tests.
Think about that — 85 percent. This is far more than a failure: It is an indictment.
In the 1950s, progressives led the fight against a status quo that consigned African-Americans to inferior public facilities. What does it tell us about politics today that the nation’s No. 1 self-defined progressive, Bill de Blasio, now finds himself the target of a civil-rights suit accusing him of violating the due process rights of 17 black and 4 Latino children?
The argument is likely to be that he did so by acting in an arbitrary manner, and failing to provide the parents and students and the school notice so they could be heard. We’d only add that in targeting Harlem Central, the mayor targeted a school where black and Latino children are getting the “sound education” New York’s state constitution guarantees them.
Today politicians of all stripes like to say education is the civil-rights issue of our day. This case puts that to the test. And our mayor is on the wrong side of the answer.