Want to bet the vast majority of people using the term have no idea where it originated?
In a push to improve diversity at District 15 middle schools in Brooklyn, Mayor de Blasio last week approved a plan to remove admission standards at all of them.
In liberal Park Slope and the surrounding areas, the news was received with mixed reactions. Those against the plan were quoted anonymously in various news outlets, lest they somehow appear to oppose diversity. They had seen what happened to Upper West Side parents who were named and shamed in articles when they opposed proposals for their schools.
One Park Slope dad told me he sees the move as a “prelude to breaking up the specialized high schools.” He added that the plan would “put the academically struggling kids in schools where ‘magic dirt’ makes kids smarter.”
Keep this sort of thing in mind whenever people try to tell you that what you’re doing doesn’t matter. It’s the ideas that matter, whether or not The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and NPR ever deign to accord you the fame of a Malcolm Gladwell or a Francis Fukuyama.
Like the core pro-immigration argument, the core pro-integration argument is cargo cultism that is so obviously wrong it can be accurately dismissed with just two words: Magic Dirt.