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| Milady Baez |
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NYC Education official likened Stuyvesant High to Chinatown: lawsuit
Former NYC Education official said Stuyvesant High was like Chinatown: lawsuit - New York Daily News (nydailynews.com)
A visit to lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School was like being in “Chinatown,” a former city Education Department official said, according to a lawsuit by another former official who says he was demoted because he is white.
The remark by former Deputy Chancellor Milady Baez came during a meeting nearly three years ago with staffers and principals, said her former employee Richard Bellis, who claims he was there.
At the April 2018 meeting with several Education Department staff members and principals, “Baez crassly stated to everyone about her recent visit to Stuyvesant High School, ‘I walked into Stuyvesant HS and I thought I was in Chinatown!’,” the lawsuit claims.
At the time, Baez was head of the department’s Division of English Language Learners, which put her in charge of overseeing programs for 150,000 students learning English as a new language.
Stuyvesant, the most selective of the city’s specialized high schools, has a student body that is 72% Asian.
According to Bellis’s lawsuit, the DOE’s Office of Equal Opportunity investigated Baez’s remark in 2018. Baez was removed from her position atop the English Language Learners division later that year, but kept working at a Queens borough office.
Baez, who couldn’t be reached, no longer works for the Department of Education.
Besides saying he was wrongly demoted because of his race, Bellis also says he was punished for reporting Baez’s remark.
Bellis is at least the fifth white former Education Department official who has sued the city on the grounds their race led to them being demoted or passed over for promotions under former Chancellor Richard Carranza.
Some DOE staffers have forcefully pushed back on those claims, arguing that Carranza’s leadership helped root out long-simmering racism in the department, and elevated leaders committed to pursuing educational equity.
Bellis was a former English Language Learner teacher who began working at the central office that oversees students learning English in 2007. Baez took over the division in 2014.
He said he worked well with Baez until the April 2018 meeting when she made the derogatory remark about Stuyvesant students — a comment Bellis said he found particularly offensive because his wife is Chinese.
Bellis said he told the Office of Equal Opportunity about Baez’s remark during an investigative interview.
He said Baez and other DOE officials retaliated against him for cooperating with the Office of Equal Opportunity investigation. He claims he was excluded from presenting at an academic conference and was treated “as though he was a poor performer when he was not,” the suit says.
[More Education] NYC Education Dept. bureaucrats call for an end to ‘discriminatory‘ Gifted and Talented program »
Bellis alleges Baez was terminated in June 2018 in the wake of the investigation but reinstated in another DOE position.
Carranza shook up the entire English Language Learners division in late 2018 and asked all staffers to reapply for their positions. Bellis said he wound up in a lesser position after reapplying and his previous post was “awarded to a less qualified individual, who was a person of color.”
DOE officials didn’t comment directly on Baez’s alleged remark or the ensuing investigation, but Education Department spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon said “we strongly dispute these claims of discrimination and retaliation and are reviewing the lawsuit.”
East Side Community High School Principal Mark Federman reportedly sent a survey
to white parents asking them to identify their level of whiteness. Robert Miller
NYC public school asks parents to‘reflect’ on their ‘whiteness’
By Selim Algar and Kate Sheehy
February 16, 2021 | 6:16pm | Updated
A city public school principal is asking parents to
“reflect” on their “whiteness” — passing out literature that extols “white
traitors’’ who “dismantle institutions,” education officials confirmed to The
Post on Tuesday.
The “woke’’ offensive at the East Side Community School in
Manhattan features a ranking list titled “The 8 White Identities,” which ranges
from “White Supremacist’’ to “White Abolitionist.”
The curriculum, written by Barnor Hesse, an associate
professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, claims,
“There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white
identities.
“People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’
Hesse writes above the eight-point list.
“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since
white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ Hesse
adds.
In between the two extreme “identities” of supremacist and
abolitionist are such categories as “White Voyeurism’’ — defined as “wouldn’t
challenge a white supremacist, desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting’’
— and “White Privilege,’’ or “sympathetic to a set of issues but only
privately; won’t speak/act in solidarity publicly because benefitting through
whiteness in public (some POC are in this category as well).”
“The Eight White Identities” written by Northwestern
University associate professor Barnor Hesse.
The handout was accompanied by a color-coordinated meter
with the red zone on the left titled “White Supremacist’’ and the green zone on
the far right labeled “White Abolitionist.”
A New York City Department of Education official told The
Post that some parents at the school, which caters to sixth- through 12-graders
on the Lower East Side, first shared the material with staff.
The principal then disseminated it to every parent “as part
of a series of materials meant for reflection” and as “food for thought,” the
official said.
A DOE rep said in a statement, “Anti-racism and the
celebration of diversity is at the core of our work on behalf of the young
people of New York City, and the East Side Community School’s students,
parents, and staff partner together to advance equity in their community.
“The document in question was shared with the school by
parents as a part of ongoing anti-racist work in the school community and is
one of many resources the schools utilizes.”
Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse
presents an “ethnography of whiteness” in the ranking list.
The spokesman said school workers are being threatened over
the missive.
“Our staff are now being targeted with vile racist,
anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs and degrading language from people outside of
their school and nothing justifies the abuse directed at our educators,” the
rep said.
Christopher Rufo of the Discovery Institute wrote in a tweet
that included a posting of the curriculum, “This is the new language of public
education.”
The dissemination of Hesse’s literature to parents comes as
the DOE and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have pushed to eliminate what
they call current administrators’ “white-supremacy culture.’’
The administration has embraced “anti-bias training” across
the board, with staffers forced to attend slideshow presentations denouncing
the current culture’s “paternalism” and “power hoarding” — while getting sued over
Carranza’s alleged creation of “an environment which is hostile toward whites.”
Rufo’s Feb. 15 tweet drew mixed reactions on Twitter.
“If you find this hostile, or unnerving, it’s because you
are fearing the loss of power and advantage that your skin color has afforded
you. It’s an agenda to bring true equality,” a Twitter user fired at Rufo over
Hesse’s chart.
But another writer said, “THIS is what a public school
spends time and money on? Anti-racism like this is a poison.”
The racial makeup of the student body at East Side Community
was 55 percent Hispanic, 18 percent white, 15 percent black, 10 percent Asian
and 2 percent other during the last school year.
The school’s principal, Mark Federman, declined comment
through the Education Department.
Federman made headlines in 2007 when he tried to prevent the
arrest of a student accused of punching a school safety agent. The principal was arrested after scuffling
with another agent during the fracas but returned to school later that day.
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