Tag: public schools

Democrats in New York have a real problem with Asians

It’s sure starting to look like New York’s progressives are simply anti-Asian. 

Their latest cause célèbre, the “Good Cause Eviction” bill, aims to effectively bring some 2 million apartments in the city alone under a new statewide rent-control regime.

On top of being a sure housing-killer, it’s gotten the city’s Asian community rightfully up in arms.

Strongly represented among the city’s small-landlord community, they see this as yet another oblique attack on them by arrogant, far-off leftists.

Indeed, an association of Chinese landlords, the New York Small Landlords, has been fighting back against prog policies on eviction since the eviction moratorium — disastrous for smaller landlords — was declared in 2020.

But GCE is only the latest in a string of progressives efforts in the city and Albany that have hurt New York’s Asians. 

Consider the effort to wreck the Big Apple’s merit-based admissions policies to academically rigorous schools. 

The “problem” this aims to correct is precisely that Asian students (many from poorer backgrounds; many the children of immigrants) compete so effectively: 2021 saw them win 54% of freshman seats in selective high schools. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio did major damage to the system on his way out of office, banning competitive tests for most “selective school” admissions, but the new administration left it intact in most of the city.

Which leaves Asian-Americans increasingly looking to charters as a way to find excellence in public education.

But the progs hate charters, too: They’re leading the charge against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bid to allow dozens more charters to open in the city. If the left succeeds, it means no new charters for Asian neighborhoods.  

Which explains the recent Asian American parents’ pro-charter rally.

Above all, there’s public safety. The left’s criminal-justice “reforms” helped power a massive rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. 

Like the 2022 murders of Michelle Go and Christina Yuna Lee. 

When New York’s Asian community raised their voices in response, all they got from the crime lovers in the Legislature and elsewhere was pabulum about “white supremacy” — and a total refusal to budge on the cause of the crimes, i.e. laws that leave murderous thugs free to walk the streets. 

It’s no mystery why the left’s policies are so profoundly anti-Asian. 

This minority group’s economic and educational attainments blow to smithereens the lies about America being incurably racist that serve as the basis for most progressive policies. 

But electoral results — with Asian voters swinging right in the governor’s race and New York’s legislative races — shows that Dems’ policies are driving this key demographic away. 

It’s an opportunity for the GOP — and thus for actual democratic rule in the Empire State — if Republicans can only seize it. 

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NYC DOE staffers sued for unpaid rent for Dominican teachers

A group of city Department of Education administrators is being sued for $24,000 in unpaid rent by the owners of a Bronx house where teachers brought from the Dominican Republic were forced to live.

ADASA, the Association of Dominican-American Supervisors and Administrators, leased a duplex at 1820 Pilgrim Ave., then required five teachers and one woman’s husband to pay $1,350 to $1,450 a month for single rooms while sharing a kitchen and bathroom.

But the DOE administrators running ADASA — now under investigation — have not paid the monthly $8,000 rent since November, landlords Yuping Chen and Yanlai Lin charged in a lawsuit filed in Bronx Housing Court last month.


The ADASA leased required five teachers to pay $1,350 to $1,450 a month for single rooms while sharing a kitchen and bathroom.
J.C.Rice

The DOE administrators running ADASA have not paid the monthly $8,000 rent since November, according to court documents.

As of Jan. 5, ADASA also owed more than $20,000 in rent at 4414 Baychester Ave in The Bronx, where the group made 11 other Dominican teachers live under similar conditions.

A third building where the DOE administrators put Dominican teachers, a co-op on Marion Avenue in The Bronx, was owned by the late mother of Emmanuel Polanco, ADASA’s first vice-president and the principal of MS 80 before he was removed from the school in October. 

In December, city and federal agencies began to investigate complaints that the Dominican teachers were exploited and threatened by ADASA.


A third building in the Bronx where the DOE administrators put Dominican teachers was owned by the late mother of Emmanuel Polanco (pictured) — ADASA’s former vice president.
Richard Harbus

As of Jan. 5, ADASA also owed more than $20,000 in rent at 4414 Baychester Ave in The Bronx, where 11 other Dominican teachers live.
J.C. Rice

Last week, teachers told The Post they have not been informed about the progress of the probe.

All 19 teachers housed by ADASA have since moved out. 

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Albany’s recipe for ever more gun-toting teens

Each day brings more proof that New York’s Raise the Age law has been a disaster not just for the city and state, but for the young people the law supposedly protects.

A 17-year-old boy was shot four times Tuesday near an Upper West Side high school.

The alleged perp, 19-year-old Cheick Coulibaly, was out on bail for a 2021 armed robbery case.

Later that day — in what police say may have been retaliation — an East Harlem shooting saw another kid hit by bullets near another school, Harlem Renaissance HS. 

These blood-stained tragedies are simply the latest fruit of poisonous progressive policies. Gangs seduce ever more teens into lives of violence, knowing full well that their age serves a shield for real consequences. 

That’s why the number of teen shooters and victims has tripled since 2017 when Raise the Age took effect. Gunfire claimed 36 teen victims over the first eight months of 2017; the same period in 2022 saw 111.

Meanwhile, the age at which kids pick up a gun for the first time has plummeted from 16-17 to 12-13. 

Let that sink in.

Because lefty Dems codified their moral posturing on policing into state law, kids are arming themselves as they hit puberty. 

Under Raise the Age, teen shooters routinely get handed cookies and juice by our chronically hapless Family Court (where juvenile cases are almost certain to be tried), then sent on their merry way.

Of course teen violence is soaring: It’s not even a surprise that alleged perp Coulilbaly was walking free when he should’ve been behind bars.

Raise the Age had a noble enough aim: Don’t condemn kids who make stupid mistakes to overly harsh prison terms.

But in practice it’s been an unmitigated disaster, creating deadly situations for the very groups it was supposed to protect. 

Yes, there are other factors. New York’s COVID policies disrupted social life for two years.

The city’s traditional public schools typically fail to deliver for the neediest kids. And family structures and mores have been breaking down for decades. 

But Raise the Age is supercharging all these trends — and fixing it isn’t even on the table in Albany. 

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‘Teacher’ Randi Weingarten’s ignorant, anti-democratic rant

Randi Weingarten — the nation’s top teacher, in a sense — seems ignorant of what any child could learn about government from “Schoolhouse Rock.”

The American Federation of Teachers boss made that painfully clear (and we mean painfully) Tuesday by launching into an unhinged tirade in front of the Supreme Court, as justices were hearing challenges to President Joe Biden’s college-loan-forgiveness plan.

“This is what really pisses me off,” she fumed, literally screaming and jumping. During the pandemic, “small businesses were hurting, and we helped them. . . . Big businesses were hurting, and we helped them. And it didn’t go to the Supreme Court.” Yet, “all of a sudden, when it’s about our students . . . the corporations challenge it, the student-loan lenders challenge it.”

Hello? Yes, federal aid helped businesses during the pandemic but only after Congress passed COVID rescue packages to keep the economy afloat. Neither President Donald Trump nor President Biden unilaterally ordered handouts to anyone.


The Supreme Court was hearing challenges to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
REUTERS

Yet Weingarten (a lawyer as well as an educator!) claims it’s now fine for Biden to forgive hundreds of billions in debt from student loans without lawmakers’ say-so. And that it’s “not fair” for anyone to even challenge that in court.

If only she’d watched those “Schoolhouse Rock” shorts, explaining the separation of powers: Congress passes laws and holds Uncle Sam’s “purse strings.” If student loans are wiped out, that counts as a hit on the US Treasury, even if funds covering those balances (as much as $1 trillion) get rolled into the national debt, as they would.

The president is supposed to execute laws Congress passes; he can’t simply shower mountains of taxpayer dollars on whatever causes he chooses. And if he tries, Americans have every right to ask the courts to stop him.

Yet Biden didn’t even try for lawmakers’ OK on his debt-relief plan; he simply decided to bypass Congress altogether. That’s a thumb in the eye not just to the system but to lawmakers — and the voters who elected them.

Even Team Biden itself admitted he couldn’t act without Congress — until it suddenly changed its mind last year, claiming the power under a beyond-dubious reading of the post-9/11 HEROES Act, which offered relief to soldiers heading to war.

Look: A one-time erasure of student debt never made sense. It cheats those who never had such loans or had them but paid them off. And it benefits only a small group of Americans who, in many cases, won’t truly need the aid. And average taxpayers foot the bill.

But what’s really scary is that the national teachers-union head is so ignorant (or pretends to be) about how our democracy works. No wonder America’s schools are in such sorry shape.

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Va. history repeating in NY, … and other commentary

Conservative: Va. History Repeating in NY?

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe likely lost the 2021 election with his debate declaration, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Now, argues the Washington Examiner’s Hugo Gurdon, Gov. “Hochul may have just gifted deep blue New York to her challenger” with her debate flub, when Rep. Lee Zeldin noted she “hasn’t talked about locking up anyone committing any crimes” and she replied “I don’t know why that is so important to you.” Like McAuliffe’s gaffe, Gurdon notes, it was a “crystalline statement of Democratic insouciance toward ordinary people’s interests.” So: “It can be no surprise” that the polling “trend is fast against” Hochul. If Zeldin wins, “McAuliffe can take consolation in the thought that he isn’t alone in his Olympian blundering.”

Budget watch: Hochul Hiding Red Ink

“Governor Hochul’s budget office has yet to release the statutorily required mid-year financial plan update,” huffs the Empire Center’s Peter Warren. State law requires its release by Oct. 30. Why the delay? Likely because it holds “grim news” reflecting the “economic and financial market downturn.” The Aug. 1 update “projected a sea of red ink in the coming years, with deficits exceeding $6 billion by FY 2027.” By “signing the Green CHIPS legislation” a few days later, Hochul added “another roughly $500 million per year to the outyear annual deficits.” Voters should be able “to see the full impact on the state’s finances of both broad economic and market conditions, and specific policy decisions made by elected officials.” That’s why the law requires them “by a date certain.”

From the left: Big Brother’s Watching You Vote

TKNews’ Matt Taibbi flags the rise of mailers aiming “to remind people voting records are public, and whether they vote next week will be public record.” Some are handwritten with a signature; one creeped-out recipient says, “It feels threatening, as if a neighbor is keeping track of who has or has not voted.” Indeed, Taibbi reports, “the word ‘Orwellian’ came up more than once in interviews” on “so-called social shaming mailers.” Yet the practice “is likely to increase even more in the future” because it works. “Is Big Brother watching? If the wrong party loses next week, someone in your neighborhood probably will be. Welcome to 21st century electioneering.”

Eye on elex: Dems’ Dead-Parrot Denialism

“It’s never a good idea to tell people that what they see before them isn’t real,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker, recalling the classic Monty Python “dead parrot” sketch. On key issues, “Democratic candidates across the country are performing an uncanny impersonation of the shopkeeper in the sketch who insists that the deceased bird is in fact not deceased, but ‘just resting’ and ‘pinin’ for the fjords.’ ” President Biden, for one, calls the economy “strong as hell,” yet inflation is “rapidly eroding real wages.” And Gov. Hochul’s “I don’t know why” locking up criminals is “so important to you” remark, Baker contends, shows “a detachment from the reality in which so many of her fellow New Yorkers live.”

Populist: GOP Must Learn From Musk

Elon Musk’s top challenge at Twitter “is changing the culture of this large organization without interrupting its business,” Bruce Abramson explains at RealClearPolitics, and “it’s a task at which President Trump failed. Trump often complained about the politicization and corruption of federal agencies . . . but he had zero perceptible impact on the culture of the federal bureaucracy.” Learn from Musk’s “first moves. He immediately removed key members of Twitter’s leadership, including its CEO, CFO, policy head, and general counsel,” axing “the highest profile senior people most identified with Twitter’s culture.” Then he “denied the rumors that he intended to fire three out of every four employees — without providing details about his actual intentions. The combined message is exactly right: Twitter culture is about to change in a significant way. If you’re competent in your job and on board with the shift, we’d be pleased to have you stay.”

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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State data offer further proof that school lockdowns were a disaster for kids

Lockdowns set New York City’s public-school kids back big-time, state test data just confirmed — fresh proof that the COVID-phobic teachers union put the children’s interests last.

Math scores for kids in Grades 3-8 took a nosedive — with only 38% of kids being proficient. That was a drop of nearly 8 percentage points from 2019.

Reading scores dropped in grades 3-5, but rose in grades 6-8 (though the latter figure may well reflect a dumbed-down exam, since it cuts against the national trend). And overall, less than half the kids tested as proficient in reading.

Plus, the number of city kids taking the tests was down noticeably, even allowing for lower enrollment. Since opt-outs tend to be lower-scoring, that suggests the real picture is even more grim.

Kudos to Schools Chancellor David Banks for getting the basic facts straight: “No matter what the latest test results tell you, I can tell you the system is broken in far too many ways. We are trying to create a new way forward.”

The State Education Department, meanwhile, is trying to hide the bad news. It sent the test scores to school districts statewide in mid-August, but banned public release of the info until now — and still refuses to release easy-to-compare data for the whole state. Historically, the public always got the full picture in August.

This, after SED cancelled the exams in the pandemic’s first year and made them completely optional in the second. Nor does it have any real excuse for keeping so much info under wraps now.

The obvious conclusion: Unlike Banks, the folks in charge of state education policy don’t want parents realizing the bad news, at least until after Election Day.

New Yorkers should be asking why more than half of the city’s public-school kids aren’t proficient in English or Math, despite record funding for education. Banks, to his great credit, knows that the system is a mess and that more money isn’t the answer. He’s intent on holding bureaucrats, principals and teachers accountable.

But SED, controlled by Democrats utterly beholden to teachers unions, has the opposite agenda: It wants ever-more spending and ever-less accountability.

The question is whether the special interests can succeed in stopping Banks from delivering the change the city’s kids so desperately need.

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1,300 NYC school staffers must get COVID vaccine or be fired

Time is running out for some 1,300 city Department of Education employees on unpaid leave for a year since the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Under an agreement they signed a year ago, the staffers must show proof of at least one jab by Sept. 5, before the new school year starts.

If they do so, “they will return to their original school,” officials said.

If not, they will be “deemed to have voluntarily resigned.” 

“I’m very stressed. I’m praying to the last minute that something will change,” said an unvaccinated teacher who worked more than 20 years at a Queens elementary school.

There are around 1,300 NYC DOE employees who have been on unpaid leave for a year.
Getty Images

She took the unpaid leave after her appeal for a religious exemption was denied, but still received city health insurance that covered therapies for a son and daughter with special needs.

To make ends meet, she took out a loan on her pension savings.

“I’m still on the fence,” she said of the decision to vaccinate. “I really don’t want to do it, but if I have to do it for my kids, I will have to.”

The unpaid employees — including hundreds of teachers — have been getting health coverage since skipping the city’s deadline to get vaccinated last Oct. 4.

Another roughly 1,100 unvaccinated DOE employees who rejected the unpaid-leave deal have already been fired, the DOE said.

But if those staffers “provide proof of full vaccination, they will be eligible for rehiring,” with no guarantee of the same position. 

Another 82 teachers accused of submitting fake vaccination cards were taken off the city payroll on April 25 after they were caught up on a Suffolk County criminal investigation, but will be put back on the payroll on Sept. 6 pending the probe.

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