Senator Schumer is asking the Navy to issue a reprimand to a recruiter who sent a letter to the editor of the Daily News criticizing two Brooklyn high schools. The commander, Edward Gehrke, was responding to a protest by students at Bushwick High School and Bushwick Outreach Center. The students were objecting to the city’s cooperation with military recruiters. The commander wrote: “Few students in either school exceed the minimum qualifying score on our vocational exam, and most have too many drug and/or police issues to even be considered for enlistment.” Mr. Schumer is requesting that the commander “be made to issue a formal apology to the students.” In the view of Mr. Schumer, “It is not the place of a U.S. military recruiter to publicly criticize and tarnish the reputation of two schools …”

In our opinion, Mr. Schumer’s remarks are a classic case of the bigotry of low expectations. Any apology is owed not Commander Gehrke but by the city bureaucrats. The Navy recruiter is providing a valuable service by bringing plain talk to an issue that is of wide concern in this city. He tells the Daily News that only four of the 209 students from the two schools who have tried to enlist in the Navy since January 1999 have qualified. The schools’ poor conditions are confirmed by the city’s statistics, which show that only 27% of the class of 2001 at Bushwick High earned a score of 65 or higher on the English Regents exam, compared with 54.3% of students citywide. On the Math Regents test, only 27.3% of students earned score of 65 or higher, compared with 57.3% citywide.

Only 17.8% of students at Bushwick High took the SAT, compared with 37.2% citywide. Their scores averaged 357 on the verbal section and 360 on the math, compared with 445 and 473 for the citywide public school average. Bushwick High School’s racial composition is unrepresentative of the city as a whole, and hearkens back to the days of segregation: only 0.4% of the students at the school are white. Mr. Schumer criticizes the Navy for “insulting the Bushwick schools.” The real insult is being delivered by our political leadership to those parents whose children they force to attend these schools. Mr. Schumer, according to American Enterprise magazine, once described school voucher programs as “daggers that plunge into the heart of what is the American way.” Blaming the messenger is the wrong tack. Better would be to fix the schools so at least the pupils attending could stand a chance of getting into the Navy.