Mzgraciev: Secret policy department

One of the most gratuitously bad policies anywhere in the Bloomberg administration was the one relating to students' use of cell phones in public schools, and I'm glad to hear that it is being revised under the Soviet dictatorship of Bill De Blasio and his educational minion Chancellor Fariña. But the message I've just received from Young Harry's school is not very encouraging, nor does it suggest the Most Transparent Administration in History:

Clicking through the secure sign-in to pupilpath.com gets me to the same redacted bullet list. I can't at the moment find out online what the new policy actually is; Harry says that phones will be confiscated if the authorities see them, which sounds like they've made the de facto situation (teachers won't confiscate the devices if they can avoid it) de jure; OK for schools without metal detectors (of which overprivileged Bronx Science is of course one), but not so good for those with heavy security at the door.

I'm pretty sure they didn't mean to hide the policy from us, but the email is comical. I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, the $3.6-million ad campaign from the "Families for Excellent Schools", better known as the Astroturf Wall Street charter investors' club backed by Walmart and the Broad Foundation, has begun to have an effect, sadly, leading De Blasio to make some careful noises of non-hostility to charters. Although to be fair, he never has actually been hostile to the charter movement as a whole, just questioning some of the unfair advantages some of them have grabbed and asking us not to focus on the tiny number of students who benefit to the exclusion of the majority that get left behind, as he still does:

“The answer is not to save a few of our children only,” he said. “The answer is not to find an escape route that some can follow and others can’t. The answer is to fix the entire system.”