The day’s favorite American euphemism for deliberate class stratification, “good schools,” is back, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. This one is doubly insidious because liberals are still comfortable saying it aloud. I bitchslapped Kristof’s fellow white-flight New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell when he took this same call up a year ago, and since nothing’s changed, I’ll refer you to my post from that time, Malcolm Gladwell’s Good Teacher/Bad Teacher Delusion.
Snip:
Don’t blame students; don’t blame parents; don’t blame underfunded schools; don’t blame distending class sizes, don’t blame school funding being tied to local property taxes; don’t blame artificial testing requirements devouring classroom time; don’t blame required special education skewing dollar-per-student vs. results numbers wildly below magnet and parochial schools; don’t blame the flight of your upper-middle class into homogenous neighborhoods.