Norman Thomas High School Must Be Closed

Norman Thomas High School, a left-behind school, must be closed. Slated for closing among 19 schools by the Department of Education, Judge Joan B. Lobis of State Supreme Court in Manhattan has ruled that education officials engaged "in significant violations" of state education law and "failed to follow proper process in closing the schools". I now see why this school with little PTA activity and minimal parental engagement suddenly was able to produce street demonstrations agitating for its right to stay open -- it had a lot of help from socialist organizers -- outside agitators.

I wish the judge had been as attentive to all the violations of children's right to education and to the outrageous abuses by those in charge of this school as she was to notions of political correctness when she made this decision. I wish she had not been cowed by politicized groups agitating with their own agenda and bringing other agitators out of state to put pressure on authorities, waving the "racism" flag. I wish she had called up the District Attorney's office and seen all the orders of protection by Robert Morgenthau's office issued to my son after he was beaten black and blue by gang members in this school. I have friends who knew the real Norman Thomas, a socialist and pacifist who worked for a non-communist socialist movement in this country, who were inspired to years of justice work from his teachings. He would be turning in his grave if he saw the appalling injustices done in his name today. His name can always grace a new school, opened with less children, and less abusive conditions. The socialists rabidly clamouring to keep this school open and cynically playing the race card should stand down and let impartial authorities and the broader community see what is really going on here.

My son was "safety-transfered" to Norman Thomas  -- brought from another violent " left-behind school" (as we parents have taken to calling them) in 2008. While I was aware that Norman Thomas had a bad reputation as itself a "left behind" school with frequent police calls, it was my understanding it was improving and reducing problems and had an X-ray machine set up at the door to screen for weapons. We didn't have a lot of choice in safety-transfers -- there are a limited number of schools and if you want one within some reasonable commute, your choices are extremely limited. We chose Norman Thomas because it was within walking distance from our home and because I thought that would help me keep an eye on my son better -- he had built up a record of truancy, constantly reluctant to go to school because of violence and the unwillingness of other children to learn and teachers to manage, setting himself up in a cycle of failure, too.

Norman Thomas is a big, tall black box, a large office tower looming on the horizon of midtown Manhattan. It is a multistory school placed inside a major office tower in the center of Manhattan, likely because it had the space to accommodate nearly 2,500 kids (!). This building *has no windows* on many of the floors. It has so many floors that it has *escalators* running between the floors -- the presence of so many stair wells is one of the reasons why kids have a place to hide, skipping class and smoking pot.

The escalator proved a fearful hazard for the vice principal in charge of security, a soft-spoken Haitian man -- he was pushed down the stairs several years ago by thugs in the school and  his leg was broken. While this story was covered in the news at the time, it is little known, even to other school principals. This dedicated man returned to service, attempting with his quiet air of authority and experience to maintain law and order. But he has little help or sympathy.

Somewhere in the mix of this plan to put 2,500 mainly minority children in the center of Manhattan is some faded 1960s hope of 'integration". Perhaps by bussing black children for as long as an hour away from their homes in the Bronx and Queens into one of Manhattan's most affluent districts, some of the opportunity and wealth might "rub off".

It doesn't. No integration is actually taking place of course; when my son arrived to speak to the vice principal on his first day of school -- the man whose leg had been broken by thugs in the school -- he delicately told him he would be part of a "small white community" there. How small we had no idea -- in fact, most of the time, my son never saw even one other white or Asian child -- the school is overwhelming black and Hispanic, with only 34 white children and 103 Asian children listed.  Even if these figures are incorrect, any cursory visit to the school tells the story: this is a school with near invisibility of whites -- whites who have fled to the suburbs, to private schools, and to the very few public high schools of excellence in this town.

That's the dirty little secret of our public schools -- they really are not integrated -- they are basically now overbalanced with only token white presence except for a handful of schools. A few top schools have something remotely like balance, with perhaps 40-50 percent white participation, but many schools are simply all-black. Black children with good grades have a hard time getting into those top schools -- by the way, as do white children coming from the Catholic school system as I've discovered -- there just aren't enough good schools to go around.

The reality is that these all "minority" schools, often with black and Hispanic administration as well which was supposed to help root them in the community and make them work better, are failing. And the failing is not a problem of racism; it's a problem of class -- the persistence of an dysfunctional and entrenched underclass of blacks and Hispanics in our city, where one in five get food assistance, that "progressive" policies are not curing and haven't cured in the 25 years they've been experimenting on our children. It's time to stop. The black gang violence is the chief problem facing above all fellow African-American and Hispanics who want to learn -- they are the ones *first* targeted in these schools that no longer have white children in them and have only very small groups of Asians who refuse to mix with others. Until we can squarely look at this problem as a society, without fear or favour, we will continue doing a disservice first and foremost to the *black children* who bear the brunt of the violence daily.

Looking at the demonstrations and agitation around this issue of school closure, I see there are no shortage of local and international politicians and "community organizers" willing to play the race card and back the union and school leaders in covering up what's really happening in this school. I will demand scrutiny from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; from congress people; from other community leaders who will be willing to put education and not identity politics first.

I will tell one story of what it has been like being one of the very few white liberal parents in these schools -- a liberal whose child has been literally mugged by this reality. I am naming the races of the people involved not as a "racist," but so that we can see that racialist analysis based on paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s is not getting at the reality of what is going on today, a reality more complicated than an Ivan Illich book or a marxism.com tract -- of the kind that my son was once surprised to receive as a handout in his history class, not because the teacher was teaching a variety of perspectives, but because she was teaching *one*.