The DSA plan for NYC schools
As bad as the public school system in New York City already is, there are plans to make it worse. And I’ll reiterate that, although you may not care about NYC, as these ascendant leftists get more power it will be the plan elsewhere.
The article describes a meeting of radical DSA educators in New York City, mostly connected with CUNY (The City University of New York):
“We need to overhaul the curriculum in a class consciousness frame. . . . The curriculum as a whole needs to be relooked at, revisioned and reframed,” the CUNY Kingsborough Community College professor [Maureen Fadem] said.
The meeting, titled “Planning for Socialist School Governance,” was led by NYC DSA Labor Working Group co-chair Nina Bruckenthal, a math teacher at NEST+m, a public science-oriented K-12 school on the Lower East Side, and Amanda Vender, an ESL teacher at the International High School of Sciences in Elmhurst, Queens. …
The DSA educators vowed to use their connections to fellow socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get their agenda through, and also conspired to use upcoming contract negotiations to realize their far-left goals. …
The UFT contract for Gotham teachers is set to expire Nov. 28, 2027 and the DSA has progressively been strengthening its grip on the union.
An especially chilling portion of the article quotes one of the teachers acknowledging that the idea of indoctrinating children in this way isn’t popular with the public. The solution? To further oppose school choice and charter schools and make such schools even more difficult to access. The New York City public school system is already shunned by parents who can afford to do so and to send their children to private or parochial schools. But for those less affluent, there is at least the possibility of securing a place for their children in charter schools. The rest – about 75% of the children in NYC – are in the public school system, and the statistics look like this:
In 2024-25, there were 906,248 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:
16.8 percent of students were English Language Learners
22.4 percent were students with disabilities
75.3 percent were economically disadvantaged
Race or ethnicity:
42.3 percent Hispanic
19.3 percent Black
18.7 percent Asian and Pacific Islander
16.1 percent White
2.0 percent Multi-Racial
1.2 percent Native American
Note the large number of students whose native language is not English and who need extra help with English (“English Language Learners”), the large number who are coded with disabilities, and the absolutely enormous number who are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The latter designation means the child is getting some sort of welfare and/or is in foster care. Note also that white students are among the smallest ethnic groups in the system.
Therefore it’s quite clear that, if these DSA teachers get their way, they’ll be ramming this far-left propaganda down the throats of the children who are very much in need of basic instruction in traditional school subjects, and who have little access to alternatives to the regular public schools. These children will be used as guinea pigs by teachers who could not care less what the children or their families actually need or actually want.
K-12 The Final Reform
Instead of pouring money from a variety of sources into local monopolies and hoping for good results, the ideal system would be funded by a simple Educational Endowment bestowed on each individual student.
Provision of educational services should look like what the demonopolized telecommunications industry has become, large intensively competitive high tech providers. These providers would be competing to offer educational services that worked, and that parents and students wanted
This ideal system would protect its users from poor teaching performance. If a student failed to exhibit minimum educational achievement, payment would not be made. Instead, it would accrue in the student account, providing twice the amount the next year to the provider who could catch the student up.
Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.
The funds would remain in the student account indefinitely, allowing dropouts to get an education as age and experience created the desire. The endowment would also provide funding for prison schooling, attracting providers who would adapt to the requirements.
Home schoolers whose students exhibited the required achievement would be paid.
Special needs students would still receive extra funding but at an individual level.
Opening educational services to the free market would allow for practical job-related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fought for market share.
Competition among educational providers would make full use of technology, would provide useful training for actual jobs, and would deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification would keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can’t touch. The use of AI would allow the tracking of each bit of knowledge and understanding to be monitored at the individual student level and presented in various ways until understood.
The late 1970’s in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.
Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.
K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time.
Banning labor unions from all public sector employment (inclusive, whether local, state or federal) would make a good start to curbing these malefic anti-social, anti-American actors and their interests.
DSA brings more and better learing to NYC.
Progress, comrades!
Darkness is descending.
@Richard Ilyes: the ideal system would be funded by a simple Educational Endowment bestowed on each individual student.
Maybe; Federal student aid already works this way. But the point of the educational system is not really to educate students, it’s a jobs program. Every so often my school district sends me a little glossy magazine detailing all its wonderful accomplishments and it is eye-opening to see how many people who work for the school district have nothing to do with instruction.
It is also eye-opening to see the district calendar and how many fewer days of instruction there are.
Not to mention this chart of inflation-adjusted per student K-12 spending.
For those who don’t click links it more than doubled from 1980 to 2024 after adjusting for inflation. The national average of course won’t tell the whole story, some districts use that money well, some have good reasons for being more expensive.
In my neck of the woods the K-12 schools have been getting automatic increases for years simply because our home prices and consequently our property taxes are going up (even if the rate doesn’t change). They are accustomed to spending that money whether or not they have a real need. That’s a poor funding mechanism.
So much of the dysfunction of unionized public schools is old news, although neo’s headline of the DSA involvement and direct promotion of socialism is a new and awful wrinkle.
The old paradigm always was “We’ve got a new & improved teaching methodology!” Whole English, or new math, etc. Yeah, sure. Politicians say, “We want change!” For the better, or for the worse?? Change, in and of itself, is a stupid slogan, IMO. The history of the teacher’s union on this topic would suggest that their intent is to degrade or damage the educational experience for children. They can’t claim ignorance of these outcomes forever, but then they move on to something else.
75% of kids are economically disadvantaged? This likely comes from the old scam where the schools work vigorously to put as many children on free school lunch programs as possible. There is supposed to be a financial need based checks on that system that are easily skirted.
A big motivation for swelling the free lunch rolls is that it also forms the needs basis for many other money handout programs. These programs don’t check for financial need because they are pulling names from the free lunch rolls. We already checked… maybe. Hey, it’s government money. Who cares?
…indoctrinating children in this way isn’t popular with the public. The solution? To further oppose school choice and charter schools and make such schools even more difficult to access.
I probably posted something about this here 10+ years ago, but there is a fascinating documentary called The Lottery (2010). I’ll try to cover a few highlights from it quickly:
1) The topic is a charter school (Harlem Success Academy maybe?) created by Eva Moskowitz, and the lottery system used to limit the otherwise flood of students out of the unionized schools.
2) Either in an interview with the filmmaker, or at the beginning of the film, she talks about being on the street filming for another purpose when she encounters a large group of union protestors. She interviews a few of the protestors asking them, “What are you protesting?” Answer: “We don’t know. We’re paid to be here and carry these signs.” Astroturfing. (The signs say, “Ban charter schools!” or the like.) Subsequently, she uncovers the whole story.
3) The film follows 4 kids, their experiences with the lottery, and their experiences in the unionized schools and the Moskowitz school.
4) The filmmaker is a Sackler. Yes, the same wealthy Sackler family involved in the opioid pill epidemic. Sins of the father are not the sins of the child?
It’s instructive to think through, what would a minimal instruction budget look like? One teacher, something like 20 students, a room, and books. This is pretty much all that people had for instruction for hundreds of years.
Something like $200K per year should cover that easily, $10K per student. You could spend a lot on books and the teacher’s salary and benefits, even afford 900 square feet of commercial office space in a big city (Seattle’s average is about $40 / sq ft / year, $36,000 for 900 sq ft. Avg K-12 public teacher salary in Washington State is $111 K. Leaves you about $20K for textbooks and utilities after salary, benefits, and rent.)
That’s a little over half of what is spent today per student, for a smaller class size than is typical.
It follows that much of what public schools do is simply not instruction. I think we can all easily think of things public schools do that are not instruction.