More Drawbacks of Top-Down Governance

It appears not everyone in Queens is supporting Mayor Bloomberg's directive to teach sex. ed. I don't feel strongly about it one way or another, though I can certainly see benefits of well-informed young people. Of course, I'm skeptical that Bloomberg could pull off anything as rudimentary as effective sex. ed., and wondering what his true motivation is. It seems perfectly plausible that this mayor would try to contain long-term school population via birth control, as both Cathie Black and Joel Klein suggested.

Yet by announcing this initiative without consulting with schools or community, the mayor did not inspire a whole lot of buy-in by those who will need to enact the directive. Sex. ed. was what took down Chancellor Joseph Fernandez. He made condoms available for high school students, and pushed a "Rainbow Curriculum" in which one of the first grade books turned out to be Heather Has Two Mommies. You'd think now that Heather's mommies can legally get married we'd be able to get over this sort of thing, but that would assume that the bigotry that took down Fernandez was dead and gone.

At this point I have no idea whether Mayor4Life has incorporated any such things into his program. I doubt it though. Sex ed. is pretty much whatever the mayor says it is. Considering that, if I had a kid bound for a city sex. ed class, I'd very much like to opt out. It wouldn't half surprise me to see a chapter on how union membership detracts from a healthy sex life, or how questioning the PEP could lead to venereal disease.