In this chapter, firstly, the author briefly studies how Carranza made NYC segregation claims via storytelling and alluding to Brown v. Board of Education. Notwithstanding, Carranza rarely mentioned the UCLA source from which all NYC School segregation claims in the last decade emanate. Carranza highlights his rooting of school segregation by not citing UCLA, which pre-dates the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Next, the author examines the UCLA reports, specifically its New York section, which primarily centers on districts outside NYC. The argument contends how poorly the research extrapolates into the five boroughs. Overall, following this heuristic, the author argues that it is not only Carranza who uses linguistic subterfuge, ignores data, and deploys a simulacra/simulation framework. Sadly, and not fully critically, the segregation claims all start with Orfield and the UCLA reports, and the elite media embraces and then promulgates this unvetted research.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since... – F. Scott Fitzgerald, the opening line of The Great Gatsby (1926/1995), pg. 1
Since its publication nearly a century ago, many authors have started their work with this quote from The Great Gatsby, and who could blame them? So much of F. Scott Fitzgerald's (1995) prose is aesthetically and often chorally poetic. Beyond this, the writing frequently exhibits a thoroughly American yet nearly celestial Homeric element embodied solely in its elegant prose. Each line has a quality that could be a dance lyric or a ballad, both of which could be sung acoustically on street corners. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald's quote is significant to CRT in NYC Schools. Some ideas, for whatever reason, are initially incomprehensible, and the words need to be turned over in one's mind. To tie together CRT, its enactment under Richard Carranza, and school segregation in NYC, I need to reach out to a type of transcendent prose. In this instance, that prose is Fitzgerald, but essentially, I am praying to the Muse. This is not an uncommon practice. The epic poet Virgil (2004) called to his Muse when trying to cobble together the complicated tragedy of the Trojan War so that he honorably unfolds the moral and national lessons embodied in the arcane but visceral stories of destruction.
Something similar is required when writing about CRT related to public education. As Cornel West (2012) points out, there's too little acknowledgment of the catastrophe from the political right, which is the Black experience in America. Often, the political right seems to overlook keen opportunities to speak about the salient educational issues and race in urban centers but issues reports like A Nation at Risk (1983). Conversely, from the political left, there's a hyperbolic theater of the absurd that has no alignment with the actual learning needs of NYC's students. Think of the NYC political left's resistance to Charter Schools even though students at these institutions outperform their public school peers by a wide margin on nearly every academic metric. Isn’t the educational goal students’ academic achievement?
The point about Charter Schools and the NYC left is the underlying mission of public spending related to the education of the young. Tax dollars are allocated for public education to equip the next generation to enact sophisticated tasks in the local and national economies. Furthermore, tax dollars are allotted for training the young to steward the nation-state regardless of race, creed, and national origin. The perpetuation of the nation-state is enshrined in the Constitution, and public education funding is an evolving idea that came later. When surveying issues of NYC's political left related to educating the young, however, the central concerns often devolve into trivialities. For example, under NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, a disproportionate amount of effort was centered on limiting funding for Charter Schools, thus securing a monopoly hold on educational tax dollars (Sahm, 2018). The question becomes, why? The paradox is that NYC Charter School students outperformed public school students in both English and Math, even though de Blasio heralded the public schools’ gains without comparing the two (Domanico, 2020).
Moreover, when examining issues of CRT, the notion of preparing the next generation to enact tasks related to the economy isn't altogether present. In NYC, issues of ideology are complexly integrated with nearly all aspects of students' learning of the Humanities. Additionally, ideology seems to be interwoven with the macro-schemas students need to understand the world and the government's stewardship responsibilities. Often, specifically in the teaching of English and Social Studies, ideologically driven pedagogy can't easily be separated from CRT groupthink (King & Chandler, 2016). To many academics, my argument about CRT will be viewed as primarily polemical, a line of reasoning reserved for the right. However, the commentary presented here exists beyond the scope of ideological infighting and aspires to live outside the pedantic discussions of educational policy solely rooted between the left and the right. In the paragraphs below, I put forward how a combination of Gary Orfield’s (2014, 2019) UCLA Civil Rights Reports and Richard Carranza's agenda centered on school segregation was pure spectacle and that the media had little critique.