doubt that there are any public schools in the country more completely under the thumb of the teachers unions and the radical Left than the New York City public schools. With relentless advocacy for more funding and smaller class sizes, the unions and their allies have achieved what may seem like public school utopia: $37.5 billion of funding for 937,000 students in the current school year, which comes to just over $40,000 per student. (By contrast, according to educationdata.org, the average per pupil spending in the U.S. for the 2023-24 year is $13,701, while the state most comparable to New York, Florida, spends just $11,800.).
Yet, for all the spending, our schools somehow achieve sub-par results for the students, and on top of that are consumed with all the standard leftist obsessions, from socialism to “anti-racism” (aka racism) to LGBT and trans rights. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the districts have started to get some push back from parents on at least some of these issues. To me, the push back seems to be remarkably low key.
Today’s New York Times has an entertaining front-page article on this subject. The gist of the article is that the parents pushing back against the most extreme left-wing activism in the schools are not just stupid and small-minded, but also nasty. The headline in the print edition is “Spraying Vitriol, Parents in New York Clash Over What’s Taught.” To emphasize the point that the know-nothing resistors are really bad and unpleasant people, the headline over the continuation of the article on page A16 repeats the “Spraying Vitriol” mantra. (The online headline covering the same article is “Name-Calling and Calling the Police: How N.Y.C. Parent Meetings Got Mean.”)
Although the article claims to cover a city-wide phenomenon, it focuses on events in a particular district within the City, namely District 2. District 2 covers a large part of southern and central Manhattan — in other words, it’s the district where I live. (However, my grandchildren live in a different district in Queens.).
Perhaps nowhere are tensions more evident than in District 2, a sprawling and diverse section of the system weaving through the heart of Manhattan — from the West Village and Hell’s Kitchen to the Upper East Side.
And here is the current flash point:
[L]ast month, parents [in District 2] passed a proposal asking the city’s Department of Education to review its gender guidelines, which currently allow students to participate on sports teams based on their gender identities, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth.
That’s a serious breach of orthodoxy! So who is the nasty know-nothing who instigated this?
The effort was led in part by Maud Maron, one especially vocal parent leader whose rhetoric has come under fire from school officials.
A brief bio of Ms. Maron can be found here at Ballotpedia. Her career has mainly been as a criminal defense attorney at New York’s Legal Aid Society, which does the bulk of the public defender work here. She also has four children in New York City public schools, and has been elected to the District 2 parents’ council. The reason she rates a page at Ballotpedia is that she ran in 2022 in the open Democratic primary for the newly-configured 10th District in the House of Representatives. In other words, Ms. Maron is not even a Republican, but rather a non-radical Democrat. (The 2022 Congressional race was won by Congress’s new biggest moron, Dan Goldman. Ms. Maron won just 0.9% of the vote in the primary, but then, there were 13 candidates, and she actually got more votes than four of them, for example, recently term-limited ex-mayor Bill de Blasio, who also ran.)
So get ready for some of Ms. Maron’s “rhetoric.” Remember, this is what the New York Times has selected to support its repeated use of the word “vitriol” in its headlines; and presumably they have combed through Ms. Maron’s various statements to find the very most vitriolic of the vitriolic. Here are the totality of the Times’s quotes from Ms. Maron:
At a remarkably tense March meeting, held in person and online, she and other parents said that the current policies presented “challenges to youth athletes and coaches,” and that they failed to consider the “well-being of girls.” . . . Ms. Maron said in a statement that she has several concerns with the system’s gender guidelines, including that they “impinge on the rights of female students.” She called it “immoral” to tell children they need “interventions to fix their bodies.”
I guess it would be hard to get any nastier than that. I’m surprised they haven’t arrested Ms. Maron yet for hate speech.
The Times then quotes several elected officials, and also the schools Chancellor, on the subject of the discussion among parents at the March meeting:
During the meeting, parents attending remotely argued over whether their children would be unsafe if transgender girls joined girls’ teams. Several elected officials called the discussion “disgraceful.” [Schools Chancellor] Mr. Banks later asked, “Won’t you just leave the kids alone?” . . . Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president and a progressive Democrat, said “the MAGA movement has come to Manhattan.”
I’ll let you readers decide which side of the debate is engaging in “vitriol.” The strategy of the Times appears to be to expect its readers never to get past the headline in learning about the tenor of the debate.
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