A group of affluent, white residents of New York City’s Upper West Side lost their minds at a recent meeting of their local school district, after the mostly liberal Manhattanites were informed their local schools would be subject to a “diversity initiative” designed to give minority students access to better NYC schools.
The College Fix reports that Raw Story (not exactly a right-leaning news organization) caught the meeting on tape. As the progressive parents find out their schools will soon have to “reflect the demographics of New York as a whole, as the schools in the area now are predominantly white,” you can practically see the horror dawn on their faces in real time.
“You’re talking about telling an 11-year-old, ‘You worked your butt off and you didn’t get that, what you needed and wanted.’ You’re telling them ‘You’re going to go to a school that is not going to educate you in the same way that you’ve been educated. Life sucks!’ Is that what the DOE [Department of Education] wants to say?” one parent can be heard screaming at an administrator.
Most of the attendees were from Manhattan’s tony P.S. 199 district, and are some of the most affluent people in the country — and they don’t want to share the wealth.
“District 3 currently has very segregated middle schools. The principals have expressed concern that under the blind ranking this may become more worse,” said one administrator, attempting to calm the situation. “So they are looking, and parents are looking, at mechanisms we can put into place to actually decrease the segregation and increase diversity across all of our schools.”
Another administrator responded: “There are kids that are tremendously disadvantaged, that I would love to be able to offer — somebody mentioned $5,000-worth of tutoring for to raise their test scores. And to compare these students and say, ‘My already-advantage kid needs more advantage! They need to be kept away from those kids!’ is tremendously offensive to me.”
As CF points out, this sort of opposition is nothing new. The husband of leftist comedienne Samantha Bee led a fight two years ago to prevent something similar from happening in his own district. They may want better education for poorer NYC schoolchildren, but they draw the line at actually providing that education in schools close to home.