“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.”
The United Federation of Teachers’ response was a feel-good video reminiscent of those old propaganda clips featuring happy, well-fed peasants talking about the blessings of Soviet collectives. In the UFT version, smiling teachers and students are filmed “celebrating the diversity and success of New York City public schools.”
In short, New Yorkers are being presented with two starkly different narratives.
The teachers-union narrative asks the city to celebrate the “success” of a school system in which there is no hint of any challenges. Families for Excellent Schools suggests that “success” is not the word for a school system in which half a million children—478,000 to be precise—languish in failure factories.
These are defined as schools where two-thirds of the students are failing, the city’s most rotten schools. Ninety percent of the kids in these schools are children of color. Families for Excellent Schools calls this system a “pipeline to failure,” noting that a child who starts in a failing elementary school has only a 1.6% chance of ever going on to a top-performing middle school.