Administration finds discrimination worth punishing in some schools, not in the policy keeping kids out of Stuyvesant.

…(cont) That's the list. Now here's what's on each line.

September 3rd — the Daily Caller runs it marked exclusive, right there on the page: the administration is moving to pull tax-exempt status from schools it calls racially discriminatory. That's the phrase. Racially discriminatory.

September 25th — the New York Post runs a piece of its own, an investigation, not an exclusive, I want to get that part right because somebody already corrected me once this month — about a reporter and her husband who fought, back in 2016, against what the neighborhood called a "yuppie invasion" of their daughter's elementary school in Brooklyn, a mostly Black school. And the same reporter, in that same stretch of years, was telling anybody who'd listen that New York's public school system — the whole system, I want to be fair, not just the one school — is segregated.

October 1st — Justice Sotomayor turns down an emergency request. A mother is trying to get her son into Stuyvesant High School. There's a suit behind it, still going, over the school's admissions policy.

I don't know what to make of that. Do you?

I go through the toll plaza most mornings on the way to the parish. Cash lane on the left, E-ZPass on the right, and bolted up over both of them, same sign: VIOLATION. Fifty dollars. The sign doesn't say which lane it's talking to. It just hangs there with the word on it, and somebody downtown decides later which car it meant. I sat there one morning with the engine running, trying to work out which lane I was actually in. Does the sign mean something different depending which side you came in on, or does it mean the same thing the whole time and somebody just decides, after the fact, who it's for?

Here's what sits odd with me, and I promise I'm not trying to start anything, I'm only reading what's in front of me: on September 3rd, it's the government reaching for that word, "discriminatory," aiming it at schools. By October 1st, there's a family reaching for the same word, aiming it at a school's admissions policy, and the court they went to on an emergency basis told them no, not now. Same month. Different desk, same building, far as I can tell.

I don't have a theory about it. I've got a notebook with three dates in it, and a word that shows up twice. The Post calls what it printed an investigation. The Caller calls what it printed an exclusive. I checked both labels myself, so I know I'm not the one who got that wrong.

Oh — hold on, one more thing, before you head out, since we're already standing here — the word in the September 3rd filing, the one aimed at schools. And the word in the October 1st complaint, the one aimed at a school's admissions policy. Either one of you happen to notice if it's the same word?