Where Black Lives Don’t Matter

A spot-on WSJ op ed on de Blasio's hypocrisy, saying the black lives matter but then doing his best to undermine even top charter schools, which are doing more than anything else I can think of for the very kids de Blasio claims to care so much about:

Today, however, the mayor is finding that his progressive measures are being turned against him. For nowhere in New York is the divide between haves and have-nots—or between black and white—as stark as it is on equal access to a decent education. It is this divide the pro-charter Families for Excellent Schools will highlight on Wednesday as mothers and fathers march across the Brooklyn Bridge to demand "school equality," i.e., great schools for all children.

In the run up to this march, the group has released a powerful new TV ad designed to drive home the human costs of the existing inequality by showing a white boy and an African-American boy on their way to school. As the camera follows the white child, a narrator says, "Because he lives in a wealthy neighborhood, this 6-year-old will attend a good school." It points out he'll "likely go on to college."

The black child is also walking to school. "Because he lives in a poor neighborhood, this 6-year-old will be forced into a failing school," says the narrator. The narrator adds this child will probably never make it to college.

"Mayor de Blasio," the ad ends, "stop forcing kids into failing schools. Half a million kids need new schools now."

One measure of the ad's power is how vehemently the mayor's black allies have denounced it. "Racist to the core," charged Bertha Lewis, an activist who ran the left-wing community organizing group Acorn until it was disbanded. Likewise the head of the state's NAACP, Hazel Dukes, who calls the ad "an insult to our communities."

"The facts are the facts," responds the executive director for Families for Excellent Schools, Jeremiah Kittredge. "A half million children, almost all of color, are being forced into failing schools with no escape."

Here's the ad de Blasio & his allies are calling racist: https://youtu.be/T3LSrSZXM8Q. What's racist is our current system of education.

Where Black Lives Don't Matter

A TV ad highlights the racial inequality of New York's public school system.

ENLARGE

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Photo: Reuters

By William McGurn

Sept. 28, 2015 8:12 p.m. ET 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-black-lives-dont-matter-1443485540