01/18/2011
I’m not sure of the reason for the fuss about this, although it does seem an impolitic thing to say to parents who are complaining about a shortage of classroom seats:Schools Chancellor Cathie Black says ’solution' for overcrowded classrooms is 'birth control': videoI would have thought that all the parents in a lower Manhattan audience would be practicing birth control, not a hundred percent, or they wouldn’t be parents at all, but to below replacement level, at the "1.8 children" typical kind of thing, not the 18 child family that the Duggar family of Arkansas has. (Well done on reversing the demographic death spiral, but I worry that people who do that will strain themselves.)By YOAV GONEN
NY Post, January 14, 2011
That didn’t take long.
Just two weeks after she took the job of schools chancellor, Cathie Black has already put her foot in her mouth — reportedly telling parents that her solution to overcrowded schools is "birth control."
"Could we just have some birth control?" Black said during a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s school overcrowding task force on Thursday in lower Manhattan.
"It would really help us out a lot," she added.
The joke drew some laughs from the audience and came after Eric Greenleaf, a PS 234 parent and NYU professor, presented findings that showed lower Manhattan will need another 1,000 elementary seats by 2015, DNAinfo.com reported today.[More]
Anyhow, I suspect that Chancellor Black would be in much more trouble if she'd said, with much greater relevance, "Could we just have some border control?"
You see, what’s causing a shortage of school classroom seats in New York, (all over the country, too, but especially in New York) is immigration, much of which is illegal. Wikipedia’s report on the demographics of public schools in New York says this:
About 40% of students in the city’s public school system live in households where a language other than English is spoken, and one-third of all New Yorkers were born in another country. The city’s Department of Education translates report cards, registration forms, system-wide alerts, and documents on health and policy initiatives for parents into Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Persian, Hindi, Russian, Bengali, Haitian Creole, Korean, and Arabic.So you can see that immigration is the main financial strain on the school system. Fortunately, since much of it is illegal, something can be done about it. Guard the border and enforce the immigration laws, and you'll have a lot more room in the schools for Americans and even legal immigrants!In 2007, Hispanics and Latino students made up 39.4% of the student population. African Americans made up 32.2% of the student population. European American and Asian American students made up 14.2% and 13.7% of the student populace respectively. Native Americans made up the remaining 0.4% of the student body.[14]
The specialized high schools tend to be disproportionately Caucasian and Asian.
If Chancellor Black had suggested that, however, Mayor "Sanctuary City" Bloomberg would already have fired her.
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