Teach Your Children Well

LAST WEEK, USING a mysterious alien reasoning that apparently only he could understand, schools superintendent Joel Klein argued that the state's failure to deliver billions of dollars in funding to city schools was fundamentally "racist." The state, he claims, hasn't come through with the cash because they don't like all those minorities among the city's student population. He made this argument while giving a lecture on Brown vs. the Board of Education to an 11th-grade history class at a Queens high school.

As reported in last Wednesday's Post, "Klein told the students the recent state school-funding court decision-which said Albany for decades denied city kids a 'sound, basic' education-is a 'direct descendant' of Brown."

That one had us scratching our heads for a bit.

We're always a little suspicious of those people who whip out the "racist" excuse when things don't quite go the way they're supposed to-especially when the reasoning they use is so foggy. We also have to wonder what those 11th graders took away from Klein's little rant.

Probably not too much. But so what? It won't matter, so long as they can fake it. According to the results of a new survey (reported, interestingly enough, in the same issue of the Post), half the students in American schools cheat anyway. The study focused on teenagers, but you know as well as we do they're cheating from grade school through college and beyond. So what's the point of trying to offering a "sound, basic" education if the little creeps are just going to steal what they need to pass anyway?

Come to think of it, there is one useful thing Klein taught that history class: Ten or 15 years down the line, when these kids can't read or write or do the arithmetic necessary to balance a checkbook because they cheated all through school, they have a readymade excuse. It's