nypostcheat

John Derbyshire: Corruption In Big City Schools

By John Derbyshire

10/08/2019

Maspeth High School in Queens, New York isn’t Harvard University, and no one’s going to take it to the Supreme Court over anti-Asian quotas, but in its own way, it’s just as corrupt. The New York Post has been running a series of exposés about Maspeth of which you can get the flavor if I just read off some of the headlines.

That one’s a doozy. This Maspeth alumnus admits he spent most of his junior and senior years at the school drunk and stoned out of his mind, often asleep in the school library. He rarely attended classes and completed no homework assignments his senior year. So … The school promoted him to the head of the class and let him graduate six months early.

September 28th, headline: I quit Maspeth HS because I didn’t want to be complicit in corruption: teacher

And so on. GreatSchools.net gives the proportion of Maspeth students from low-income families as 67 percent, which is not actually that bad for the city. This is not a slum school. Racially the student demographics are 43 percent Hispanic, 36 white, 17 Asian, only two percent black.

Indeed, you have to wonder how, if corruption is so bad at an average-ish urban school, what it’s like down in the slums.

Actually, you don’t have to wonder. This series of stories about Maspeth has brought forth a flood of complaints about similar shenanigans all over. Samples, from New York city teachers. Sample 1, quote:

Have I been told in a staff meeting, by a Superintendent who is now an Executive Superintendent, that "You'd better not fail any of those children?" Absolutely. Did she mean pass kids who had terrible attendance and hadn’t mastered the curriculum? Absolutely.

Sample 2, quote:

Can someone name a school not doing this type of so-called cheating? This is what the city wants principals to do.

Sample 3, quote:

We can’t give zeros to students who plagiarize an assignment or who don’t turn it in. They have to be given 55 … Our principal brags about the graduation rate going up to 70 percent … as long as you have the numbers, that’s all that matters to the Department of Education [ Maspeth cheating expose opens floodgates for other examples of academic fraud, NY Post, September 21, 2019].

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51pYirJJrLL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Regular readers will know that I called this one long ago: ten years ago, in fact, in the education chapter of We Are Doomed, quote:

Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist logrolling.

Nothing has changed since 2009; and the fundamental reason for all the follies and corruption in education, from Harvard to Maspeth and on down, is the denial of human nature. Some individuals are, personally, less educable than others. Some races are, statistically, less educable than others.

That’s reality … but we've trained ourselves to hate reality.

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