Curriculum warriors brace for round two - controversial New York, New York school board elections

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 17, 1993 | by Brian Robertson

Mary Cummins's New York seems strangely removed from the glass towers, speeding taxis and feverish commercial pace only minutes away in Manhattan. The political and social dichotomy between Manhattan and the outer boroughs is well-known. Young, single professionals with no children and liberal cultural views dominate Manhattan social life and politics where, because of their relatively large numbers, the clout of gays is quite substantial; the outer boroughs generally are more middle-class, ethnic and socially conservative. Despite the proximity, the two cultures are worlds apart. Outer borough residents have complained for years that City Hall is out of touch with their concerns -- dominated as it is by the unique problems of downtown life -- and those complaints found a ready target in Mayor Dinkins, whose priorities in education have served only to heighten that feeling of alienation.

"When I was a kid, the New York City public school system was looked up to all over the world," says Cummins, whose fight against Fernandez has made her something of a New York celebrity "It was the envy of everyone." Today, with a high school dropout rate of almost 20 percent, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores more than 100 points below the national average and a level of violence that requires a security force larger than the Boston Police Department, there is little left to admire. One of the most common phrases seen in the campaign literature this year is "back to basics," by which candidates mean to illustrate their commitment to emphasizing the three R's over agendas of cultural indoctrination and radical versions of sex education. It reflects less of an obsession with issues of sexual orientation than it does concern that the basics are being crowded out by an ideological agenda, contributing to academic decline.

Cummins points out that lack of money can't account for declining student achievement, since huge increases in spending have accompanied the drop in performance. The problem, she says, is largely one of bureaucracy--only 33 cents of every dollar spent on education makes it to the district level. "You have over 5,000 people over at the Board of Ed headquarters at Livington Street in Brooklyn who have to be paid before the local boards see $1," Cummins complains. "I don't even know what they do all day. I'll tell you one thing, no business could survive with that kind of overhead."

One thing the educrats do is produce curricula for the almost 1 million students in the public schools. In the wake of Rainbow, some are asking what role homosexual interest groups have had in influencing those curricula. Parents' groups such as the Family Defense Council and Concerned Parents for Educational Accountability (both in Queens) are claiming that gay rights advocates exercise a good deal of influence, and that their influence has been amplified by City Hall, which has pushed hard for the inclusion of gay representatives in devising curricula. But the fact is that gays are a relatively large voting block in Manhattan, and are a particularly important constituency for Dinkins, who got strong support from them during his campaign against Rudolph Giuliani four years ago. Since his election, Dinkins has advanced the gay agenda with more success than any other prominent politician in the country, from the distribution of condoms in the public schools to the recognition of gay households as "domestic partnerships" entitled to many of the legal and financial benefits that married couples enjoy. The concern that such political considerations may be determining what values children are taught has animated most of the grass roots parents groups that have sprung up around the city.