This has not been a banner week for public schools in a couple of American cities. To be fair, most weeks are dismal but they’re now reaching new lows.

You’ve probably heard about the Des Moines Debacle, where school superintendent Ian Andre Roberts was found to be an illegal alien, an academic fraud, and a gun-toting felon. The school board in Iowa’s largest district was no doubt beaming when they hired Roberts two years ago. He checked all the boxes, being Black and an immigrant from Guyana with a Ph.D.  In modern educrat-speak, his presence meant that minority children in Des Moines would finally have a leader who ‘looked like them.’

The not-so-good-doctor had in fact lied about his various degrees and had a prior arrest, but no one did much verifying.  As is often said about an irresistible news story, his bio was simply ‘too good to check.’  His fabrications having finally been exposed, Roberts is now, shall we say, on ICE and in prison.  The lefty school board chair, a former aide to Michelle Obama, expressed grief because Roberts had given so many people ‘hope.’  Meanwhile, the Justice Department is investigating whether he was hired because of his race, which doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

But while the Des Moines incident is shameful and embarrassing, what took place in Chicago is downright obscene.  The Teachers Union gave a soaring tribute to Assata Shakur, who died last week at age 79.  The union’s message: ‘Rest in Power, Rest in Peace.’  She was hailed as a ‘revered elder of Black liberation.’

In 1973 Shakur, soon after ditching her more pedestrian name Joanne Chesimard, murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, who left behind a wife and infant son.  Two years into her life sentence, her colleagues in the Black Liberation Army broke Shakur out of prison and she eventually surfaced in Cuba, free to live out the rest of her years in that communist paradise.  Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was being the first woman to earn a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.  This bears repeating:  The Chicago Teachers Union lavished praise on a cop-killer who had escaped from prison and was protected by Cuba for more than four decades.  Naturally, there was no mention of Officer Foerster’s widow or son. 

One final note of disgrace:  public schools in Des Moines are the worst in Iowa, while Chicago has a full-blown educational crisis.  But apparently what really matters is that one district hired a ‘superintendent of color,’ while the other’s teachers sang hosannas to a murderer.  These incompetent ‘educators’ again demonstrated that morality, truth, and decency all matter far less than skin color, a concept that is imparted every day to captive students in our most wretched schools.  In much of America the far left has a monopoly on public education and revels in its decline.  That is the saddest lesson of all.