![]() The next mayor could change the programme yet again. City education officials will hold community meetings in the coming months to discuss the changes with parents and teachers and roll out the full details right before de Blasio's term ends. "He's tossed a grenade in the room and walked away," said Kaushik Das, a leader of the group and now a member of one of the city's education councils. Because of term limits, de Blasio will leave office at the end of the year and much of the work to implement the changes could fall on his successor. The group is planning a rally next week to protest the mayor's move, which it predicts will generate chaos among thousands of families. PLACE NYC, a group advocating the expansion of the gifted and talented programme, said it was outraged that the mayor announced his plans without advanced notice. "It is going to particularly hurt the families that do not have much and who do not have access to private schools or charter schools - or who cannot afford to move out of New York City for better education opportunities for their children," said Donghui Zang, who unsuccessfully campaigned for a seat on the City Council on a platform partly built on educational opportunities for low-income immigrants. Some Asian American activists have resisted dismantling the programme, arguing that it has given their children educational opportunities to get into better schools and lift themselves out of poverty. ![]() "Two-thirds of a century after the Supreme Court said that segregated schools are `inherently unequal' New York is a national epicenter of racial segregation in unequal schools," the project's director, Gary Orfield, wrote in the report's forward. A report released in June by UCLA's Civil Rights Project was especially damning. "After years of fighting, the mayor has finally made a step to end, or start dismantling, this institutionalized racism that we have in our schools," said another parent, Kaliris Salas. The programme has spawned legal challenges over the years, with opponents charging that it imposed a caste system in public schools. Public education should not actually be rooted in competition because it's the right that everyone should have," Smith-Thompson said. "It's really hard in a city that has so much inequality - that has a history of so much inequality - to set up an exclusionary system and then pretend like people are going to equally be able to compete. Toni Smith-Thompson, who has three children in public schools and who has joined other parents in calling for the dismantling of the city's gifted and talented programme, said the mayor's move was long overdue. ![]() About three-fourths of the roughly 16,000 students are white or of Asian descent, while Black and Latino students make up the rest - despite accounting for about two-thirds of the city's 1 million public school children. ![]() Its gifted and talented programme has underscored many of the educational system's inequities. Despite being among the most diverse cities in the United States, New York City's public schools have long been derided as among the most segregated. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |