Today, I have simultaneously been working on a chapter on the fight for school desegregation leading up to Brown and watching my timeline about a very minor plan to make specialized high schools more equal, and it confirms my pragmatic hopelessness about it all.
I've seen arguments about dumbing down the schools, people have shared with me internal conversations about how project kids will drag down the test scores of the most privileged children in the city, about the unworthiness of black and brown children stuck in struggling schools.
People with no qualms whatsoever will acknowledge their children, simply because of their wealth and being born atop of our racial caste system, have gotten every advantage, and then call efforts to fix that injustice a social experiment that takes away their kids' birthright.
Are we really arguing that only 1 percent of the black children in this city are smart and worthy and hardworking enough to get into Stuyvesant?
It has not been a good day.
I ask one more time: Whose children do we sacrifice? And the answer echoes back so clear. The same children we have always sacrificed.
