At Stuyvesant High School, out of 895 slots in the freshman class, only seven were offered to black students. And the number of black students is shrinking: There were 10 black students admitted into Stuyvesant last year, and 13 the year before.
Another highly selective specialized school, the Bronx High School of Science, made 12 offers to black students this year, down from 25 last year.
These numbers come despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vow to diversify the specialized high schools.... Lawmakers considering Mr. de Blasio’s proposal have faced a backlash from the specialized schools’ alumni organizations and from Asian-American groups who believe discarding the test would water down the schools’ rigorous academics and discriminate against the mostly low-income Asian students who make up the majority of the schools’ student bodies. (At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of current students are Asian-American.)....
১৮ মার্চ, ২০১৯
"Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots."
The NYT reports.
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The Left cannot let the idea of merit stand, because it undermines their view that all people are identical except for discrimination. The fact that the school is 74% asian is too delicious to grok.
Any idea as to how many Hispanics or ethnic Catholics got into those schools? I'm guessing it was probably less than their proportion of NYC's population. How do we evolve--or maybe retrofit--to that past era when we didn't care which ethnic groups got into the elite public schools. These schools have a history of producing Nobel Prize winners. Don't louse them up.
Jew privilege, White privilege, light-black privilege, white Hispanic privilege, masculine male privilege, baby privilege, and now Asian privilege. Diversity in progress.
...and from Asian-American groups who believe discarding the test would water down the schools’ rigorous academics and discriminate against the mostly low-income Asian students who make up the majority of the schools’ student bodies
As always, the phrasing is reductive. Why are "Asian students" considered some kind of uniform blok? Are they Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean? Do their parents speak Mandarin, Hmong, Tagalog, Uyghur, Hindi, Urdu, Thai, Malay? At least the reporter admits they're poor.
And if the schools don't have rigorous academics, what is their point?
I wouldn't like it, but if they have to have "diversity," make everyone take the test and pick the top percent of each group according to the diversity prescription in vogue. And also report how many of each group later drop out because the expectations and competition are too rough. Then you'll see who can handle the curriculum.
Bill in Glendale
and?
My Dad went to Stuyvesant way back when. It was mostly Jewish then, not Asian. Very rigorous standards.
The 7/895 rate of admission for blacks might cut close to the bone, so I don't want to dwell on it or embarrass anyone.
But.
Does anyone on Planet Earth believe that the NY liberals running Stuyvesant High are systematically excluding and/or discriminating against blacks who meet the incredibly high standards of admission? Of course not.
Probably, not many blacks even apply to Stuyvesant High due to the high standards.
The hard facts are that if you have a high objective standard for admissions in college or high school or law school, the applicants will likely NOT be equally distributed among the races or the sexes.
That's just life.
Of course, the Left will get all butthurt over this and sue them for "disparate impact" or "discriminatory purpose" and force the school to add fuzzy, subjective elements into the admissions process to allow for a more ethnically diverse student body.
That's how they roll.
It doesn't bother me that Stuyvesant High is 74% Asian now. If those folks meet the high academic, objective standards, well, again, that's life.
Why isn't the inability of the schools feeding students into these high schools the thing that is being scrutinized rather than the standards of the selective schools?
If you don'y have challenging criteria for elite high schools, you don't really have elite high schools.
"Asian-American and white students make up about 15 percent each of the total public school system."
Here's your problem. Once they eliminate all those Asians and white kids, the blacks and Hispanics will do much better. Well, Hispanics, anyway.
I wonder, is there anything amiss about the demographics of the applicants to those schools in New York, or is this an indication of, say, what Harvard should look like if it stopped mashing its thumb on the scales with affirmative action and just tried ... fairness, for a change?
"That's just life."
DNA-based life, anyway.
Better for DeBlasio to keep the focus on this school's supposed discrimination than discuss why so many city schools are incapable of preparing students for any type of further education. That would threaten his office.
And also report how many of each group later drop out because the expectations and competition are too rough. Then you'll see who can handle the curriculum.
For race preferences to be effective they have to continue all the way through the process. If we let in unqualified blacks we also have to create a grievance study track because they won't be able to handle the math and science.
Then we have to create jobs. This is why the left focuses on funding positions in academia and government where they can implement race preferences. They've discovered that doesn't create enough positions so their reaction is to create "diversity offices" in the private sector which can mandate race based hiring there also.
There's always another step to take.
From 2011 from Wikipedia:
In the 2010-2011, Hispanic and Latino students made up 49.9% of the student population. African Americans made up 30.3% of the student population, Non-Hispanic Whites made up 14.3% and Asian American students made up 15.0% of the student populace. Native Americans made up the remaining 0.5% of the student body.[38]
Not sure how many students at Stuyvesant.
1.1 million students overall in nyc school district.
Word missing in the discussion is desparate impact to...
Not many blacks are interested in pursuing a career in science but there are some. And there are not many Asians in the NBA.
Which makes me wonder why, in both college and professional basketball, there isn't a requisite white quota.
What is to be done? You run highly selective high schools---and you use a test to determine who gets in, and who doesn't. And these are highly selective schools for lower income student who can't afford to pay tuition for a fancy private school--and whose parents certainly don't have the money to bribe their kid's way into the school.
And black kids (and probably some Hispanic kids as well) can't get past that admissions test in numbers that the "woke" deem acceptable. We could of course do it the European way---but wait! That won't work either.
Most European state run school systems have a "sorting" sort of test that comes at age 11 or twelve or so--roughly the end of sixth grade, or perhaps middle school in our system.
In England, if you do well on that test (at the end of primary school) you go on to grammar school. That's a state run academically oriented high school. If you don't do so well, then you either leave school altogether, or you can go on to a so called "comprehensive school". These days that may be called a modern secondary school or perish the thought a "high school". And I sometimes see references in English newspapers about politicians who went to a comprehensive school. That's code for either he was poor or dumb or both.
Way back in the way back, I was an American Field Service exchange student living with a Swiss family. The father had a PhD and was a research chemist for a pharmaceutical company. The eldest son was a brilliant student and had an engineering degree from the best Swiss technical university. The middle child, a girl, was doing well in school and destined to become a biologist working at the Basel Zoo. Swiss students who pass that sorting test or "abitur" go on to a "gymnasium", which is roughly the equivalent of a combined US high school and two years at a junior college. You graduate at the age of 20 and then either go off to university or the white collar working world.
But woe is me--the third child, little Max, was twelve and had blown the abitur. He was not going to get any further state paid academic education. He could go off to a technical school and learn to be a plumber or some such--or he could try to find a job. Or he could be enrolled in what we would call a "private" school, studying hard and trying to catch up. I gather that there might later be a a second chance after two or three years of private schooling to take a test and get back on the gymnasium track. I felt sorry for the kid--everybody in the family had done well in public schools--except for him. And of course in a status conscious society (the Swiss aren't as bad as the Austrians in that regard) there was some shame in an academically elite family when somebody stumbles over a test.
And now for some snark: Kamala Harris blew the bar exam on her first go round. What did her father and mother (both highly credentialed academics think about that?)
The flip side of Bay’s argument is that failure to get into those special high schools or Ivy League schools doesn’t mean the end of the world or a life of failure for those kids. That being said, if I didn’t pass the 8th grade test for Omaha Creighton Prep my whole life would have been very different. The Prep test was less of an admissions test and more of a slotting test. Two guys from my freshman science class went to Harvard.
"Neither the expansion of free test prep for minority students nor a new plan to offer the specialized high school exam during the school day made a dent in the admissions numbers."
Something tells me that they're using a highly specialized definition of "minority students" here. Some minorities not included. Oh, hey, I'm right:
... despite years of efforts to use free test preparation to bring more black and Hispanic students into the schools.
Gosh, maybe it's not all about test prep! Maybe it's about a lifetime of attention to education, and not just one rigged cram session bought by the privileged, as the excuse-makers would love to believe.
Identity politics are embraced by the Left Party whose members embraces quotas.
But a lot of members of the Left Party in NYC who do not like their children losing their earned placements in the specialized high schools dislike placement by quotas instead of merit.
They refuse to be shamed by either white or Asian privilege arguments when their ox is being gored.
This resistance doesn't help with their next quota problem (getting their children into elite universities).
One way of getting around this -- if you have enough money -- has been in the news lately.
I know a fantastically well-qualified Brooklyn Latin high school student who graduates with an international baccalaureate this year. She's now on tenterhooks waiting on how the quota system plays out in the elite universities she has applied to.
Her parents are lifetime members of the Left Party.
Could we see a breakdown, by race, on how much time the parents, or other adult family members, spend on academics/academic-related items (i.e. reading) with the kids by the time they are applying for high school?
No Operation Varsity Blues for these schools. No one tries to fake or buy their way into Caltech, RPI, MIT. No one tries because no one can. Once admitted you must prove over and over that you have the goods to stay matriculated and to graduate. In other words, that you deserve to be there. Fluffing your way through schools like these is simply not possible.
These NYC exam-only schools must maintain their standards. AA and the ridiculous "holistic" approach to admissions have destroyed high academic standards.
Need more data. My first impression this is slanted.........
Missing is the percentage of applicants for each category and whether there is any correlation. The significant number of Asian students, and dearth of black and Hispanic students, may be a reflection that these "elite" NYC public schools have a reputation of being the "Asian" schools, and students of other races and ethnicities don't bother applying or are interested in more diverse schools. What is the percentage of black and Hispanic applicants are admitted? That would be a significant piece of information, as would the percentage of white or Asian students.
There are currently no side doors to those schools.
Hmmmmm.....you know, they sell openings at Ivy League colleges.
Believing that high school spots aren't sold is another manifestation of Gell-Mann amnesia.
Is the question how many got in?
Or is the question "Of the qualified applicants who were black, how many got in?"
Is that question allowed?
Better for DeBlasio to keep the focus on this school's supposed discrimination than discuss why so many city schools are incapable of preparing students for any type of further education.
Or, for that matter, to discuss why so many kids from particular ethnic groups do somehow manage to get prepared despite going to those schools, while others do not. Because that might suggest that it's about effort, home life, and discipline, and somehow those things seem to vary systematically across ethnic groups. And then one might discover the horrifying statistics about how many black kids, for example, live in single-parent households. Wouldn't be prudent.
It doesn't bother me that Stuyvesant High is 74% Asian now.
Killer Badminton, and Chess teams!! Football???....not so much!
It's not about merit. It's about IQ. The races aren't distributed the same way.
You can, with lousy schools, make the problem much worse, however.
Here's an article that explains part of the problems of NYC schools.
Getting into Harvard is hard. That is why there is so much cheating and many of the places are devoted to a variety of spoils systems.
Graduating from Harvard is easy. Once you graduate you have a golden ticket despite no real value added.
The left is always trying to destroy merit and change the dynamics of who wins and loses to a spoils system they control.
When the seven black students get into Harvard, they'll be looked down upon as affirmative action admissions......I don't think ethnic Catholics of working class backgrounds pull beyond their weight in admission to elite schools. What's more important I don't think working class Catholics think that such a statistic mars their lives or their chances of happiness. They, i.e. me, get pretty much what they deserve out if life. That's the ideal we should strive for..........I suppose smart black people feel that others unfairly undervalue their intelligence. Take those seven black kids who got into Stuyvesant on their merits, for example.
@BAG: "The hard facts are that if you have a high objective standard for admissions in college or high school or law school, the applicants will likely NOT be equally distributed among the races or the sexes."
In fact, considering that "objective standards" measure cognitive skill, the admissions distributions are more likely to reflect the IQ distributions at age 5 or 10. School and attention help a bit at the margins, but even those relate to fairly persistent and unequally distributed conscientiousness.
Which raises the question why the progressive left in the twentieth century stigmatized IQ as much as it did. Sure, the notion that blacks were "naturally" inferior hurt. IQ denial produced an illusion of possible progress. But did it, does it hurt more than the notion that differences in achievement are due mainly to effort and desire and home--that if only blacks cared enough, they would just as well? Isn't that notion of moral failure much more painful?
If we treat inequality as first and foremost a natural fact--not exclusively etc.--then that changes notions of fairness. What do we owe the least of us? "Fair" should not mean admission to a top HS, but other, more rational forms of compensation for cognitive deficits may be in order in a society that, one way or another, arranges rewards according to largely unearned cognitive skill. Rigging the system so as to hand out fake rewards for subpar performance, as in biased college admissions, or destroying it to be "fair" to minorities, as in the possible elimination of elitist NYC schools, are destructive, inefficient, and demoralizing "solutions."
Merit lacks fairness
Maybe NYC should allocate funding to create additional selective high schools if there are qualified applicants that are not getting in due to limited slots. Or they could keep funding what are essentially holding pens for people who don’t want to be there.
> And of course in a status conscious society (the Swiss aren't as bad as the Austrians in that regard) there was some shame in an academically elite family when somebody stumbles over a test.
When I worked one summer at a German farm specializing in roses, one of the workers was retarded and everyone made fun of him, especially because he came from an academic family. One day it made me so mad that I berated everyone, then picked up a rock in frustration and tossed it across the field where we had just finished laying glass panels over the plants. Splash, a little fountain of glass rose at the far edge. Then one of the Spanish workers picked up a rock, away it went, another splash. All the while the old German farmer driving the horse drawn wagon loaded with panels looked on without the slightest change in expression. I like to imagine that he had been through two world wars and had seen everything...
But yes, status is a big thing in Germany, and probably in Switzerland also.
Remember, the system was invented by white people to put Asians on top.
Diversity is a bitch.
These are public schools, run and supported by the City. If they don't offer the prospect of education to the children of voters and taxpayers, why should the voters and taxpayers support them?
Perhaps it is time to ask more generally what are the tradeoffs between increasing the complexity of our society and the supposed material benefits derived therein. Is it possible that not every part of the US need to be as complex, even Byzantine, as life in the top 2-5% of earners in a place like Manhattan, Palo Alto, Arlington, VA or Cambridge, MA?
Can we make space for life paths for those who can't sit all say long? Who lack the intellectual patience for focused, static work with nothing but information? Can we still allow those who say, like Laura Ingalls Wilder's father, were incapable of functioning in a narrowly proscribed way and who took to the land to tame it, spending all their hours working for their own survival?
This isn't the same as making more healthcare workers or CVS cashiers. It doesn't look like being a plumber in a modern city, either, with licensing boards, paperwork filings, state taxes, county taxes, workman's comp insurance to buy. The general social complexity is too high to allow the creation of real dignity and self worth for many.
Credentialing those who cannot thrive in this world so one can parade around showing how egalitarian one is is increasing resentment and alienation.
Maybe they should have a selective school just for black and brown kids who can't get into Stuyvesant. I'm sure there are enough rich white liberals in NYC who will pay for it.
Achilles said that getting into Harvard is hard, but once you are in graduating from Harvard is easy. It was just a couple of years ago that the Dean of Yale Law School supposedly told his 1L law students that, "not to worry. If you were admitted, don't worry about grades in your first year classes".
And Sebastian wonders why the progressive left stigmatized IQ scores in the 20th century. Well Sebastian while I agree that denigrating IQ scores doesn't make much sense, I have to argue that there are all kinds of intelligence. The street smartest woman I ever met had an 8th grade education from a rural Tennessee school. But she understood people and generally was sharp as a tack. And while our host may deny that law schools produce a certain percentage of highly educated and credentialed fools, I met plenty of such in my legal career. Degrees do not a wise man make.
Or they could keep funding what are essentially holding pens for people who don’t want to be there.
I went to a "selective" high school in a different big city with otherwise mostly terrible and dangerous schools. I put selective in quotes, because in practice you didn't need to be that smart, you just had to want to go there rather than your neighborhood high school. That was enough--the students wanted to be there. Some ended up at top universities.
From Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test, we find out that blacks constitute between 0.7 to 1.5 percent of those who score between 700-800 on the Math or Verbal portion of the SAT.
Let's be more specific about the SAT racial gap among high-scoring applicants. In 2005, 153,132 African Americans took the SAT test. They made up 10.4 percent of all SAT test takers. But only 1,132 African-American college-bound students scored 700 or above on the math SAT and only 1,205 scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. Nationally, more than 100,000 students of all races scored 700 or above on the math SAT and 78,025 students scored 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Thus, in this top-scoring category of all SAT test takers, blacks made up only 1.1 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the math test and only 1.5 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the verbal SAT....
If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT — a level equal to the mean score of students entering the nation's most selective colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech — we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test. Nationwide, 33,841 students scored at least 750 on the math test and 30,479 scored at least 750 on the verbal SAT. Therefore, black students made up 0.7 percent of the test takers who scored 750 or above on the math test and 1.2 percent of all test takers who scored 750 or above on the verbal section.
As such, 7 of 895, a little less than 1%, sounds somewhat in the ballpark. I don't know how students in the New York elite high schools do on the SAT, but the SAT information from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education indicates blacks are about 1% of the top SAT scorers- rather similar to the distribution in NYC elite schools.
More Asians in the NBA!
And little people. Let's help out the little people.
More little people in the NBA!
I like how the slots are “offered”, not “earned”.
We should consider the possibility that The New York Times is racist.
1) They participate in the division of New Yorkers into racial groups. They want the government to do this. They are happy that the government does this. And then the NYT uses this racial data to point out...
2) The people who are defined as "black" are showing results that are sub-par, below the norm, inferior.
3) If this was reported by right-wingers, we would assume racism. But since the NYT claims "liberal" status, we are supposed to acquit them of racism. They are not pointing out the inferiority of black students. They are pointing out the racism of the people running the schools. That's why the numbers are off. Racism!
4) But simultaneously, the NYT reports that another minority group is doing very well. So the people running the schools are not racist after all.
5) The conclusion we should draw? Apparently the idea is to divide New Yorkers into racial groups, it's the balkanization of a city, and they are just measuring how the teams (a.k.a. tribes) are doing. Kinda like the sports pages also found in the NYT. Yellow man up! Black man down!
6) What about the people who don't like this sport? Who aren't divisive or hateful or want to compete in your ugly racial universe? We'll make you play anyway!
Generally speaking, if you care about education and are not super rich, you don't choose to live in NYC. In fact, if you live in NYC and are not super rich, you tend to be relatively poor. Generally speaking, the markers for social advancement tend to be heritable (I'll leave aside whether they are genetic, memetic, or both, but between genes and culture I think we can safely say that well over 90% is explained). In a society like ours, which has had social mobility for centuries, as well as fairly consistent markers for social advancement, those family groups which have the markers for advancement have largely already moved up, and unless they've gotten super rich, have moved out of NYC. That's why you wind up with a situation where most poor people who move up the social class ladder tend to be immigrants. If you look at the composition of the "Asian Block" being admitted to those test schools, you'll find they're mostly either foreign born or first generation Americans who are very driven to seceed, both internally and via family pressure.
Generally speaking, if you care about education and are not super rich, you don't choose to live in NYC. In fact, if you live in NYC and are not super rich, you tend to be relatively poor.
That's simply untrue. The super rich, and even just plain rich, in NYC send their kids to private schools. The middle class do their best to get their kids into the few good public schools.
This is a good example of where we are at as a culture today - rather than asking what is wrong with the prospective students that results in such skewed results, the instinct of the media and the politicos is to assume there must be a flaw in the selection system. Pattern recognition is a thoughtcrime when it comes to race or 'equity'.
This is going to be a major social problem as the US gets more diverse and the long-standing and well-documented differences between different groups remain and frankly look even more stark. The standard talking point of the left and unquestioningly repeated by the media is that the only possible answer is systemic discrimination, thus heavy-handed intervention by the state and institutions to tip the scales is necessary. This is not going to go down well with a rising Asian population OR a shrinking white one, as it means foregoing educational and economic opportunities for themselves and their children.
The mainstream right is mostly silent about this, and the left uses the idea that there are societal forces working against blacks and latinos as a way to keep its otherwise fractious political coalition together. I don't know how we, as a society, get out of this knot as it raises very uncomfortable issues and would require the left abandoning one of its most effective political weapons.
The problem is that we have built an economy that rewards whatever is measured by and correlates to academic performance disproportionately. Of course it also produces abundance unparalleled in world history. So tear it down knowing that.
How many poor students. I don't care about skin color.
My three-year-old grandson was at the playground Sunday. Another little boy was playing there. My grandson commented, He's blue! I don't know how many black kids he's seen in our neighborhood, but the kid's bright shirt was far more interesting to him.
I would love to know how many of the Asian kids come from immigrant families. Why is it that immigrant Asian parents, with limited English can motivate their children to out perform American born kids whose parents would have a much easier time navigating the system without a language barrier, if they were so motivated?. However, any study of this would be racist because it would show that either Asians have higher IQs than the American born minorities, or that parents have different values, family dynamics and a different work ethic.
As a (non-Asian) PhD who has taught in high schools and universities in NYC and across the country, I will say that the culture of blacks and Hispanics too often work against the children. Inherently they have equal abilities, but they simply are not driven by parents to study the same way that, e.g., Asians are. My Asian wife studied 7 nights a week, for 6 months, for the GRE's (a little different from SAT's but the principle is the same) WHILE WORKING FULL-TIME. She scored almost perfectly. If more blacks and Hispanics want to get into school, drop the b-ball and whatever else is fun except for 2-3 times a week and buckle down. Quit bawling de Blasio.
I'll believe Blacks are as smart as anyone when they prove it.
Generally speaking, if you care about education and are not super rich, you don't choose to live in NYC.
This is a strange thing to say, because NYC takes great pains to cater to talented students, testing all kids in all schools and guaranteeing those who score in the top 10% a spot in either a school for gifted students or a seat in a gifted & talented program in their district. Even if your kid doesn't get a spot there, between charters and other lottery schools, there is a truly bewildering array of school options. There are a ton of bad schools, which are mostly in low-income areas, but the city does an impressive job in this regard. Kids with parents who care enough to navigate this complex beast can get spots at good schools or special programs within underperforming schools.
Living in NYC with 3 kids, oldest in middle school, this is a topic on which I've become expert. The toughest high school to get into in NYC is Hunter College High School, a CUNY run school for gifted students. It has a lot of Asian students (about 1/3 the student body), but they do not predominate there as they do at the city-run magnets Stuyvesant/BrooklynTech/BronxScience. Not yet, anyway.
The admission process to HCHS is all about IQ. If you live in Manhattan you can join Hunter College school in kindergarten: a psychologist administers an IQ test and then the top scorers are invited for supervised play. Kids who do well in their small middle school get a place in the high school. Vast majority of students join in 7th grade, based on a test administered to 6th graders. The test is open to any NYC child who scored in the top 10% of the Gifted and Talented test given to all public school kids, or for kids who go to private school and got top scores on the tests administered there. The entrance exam is basically an IQ test for high IQ kids rather than a knowledge test, and there's also an essay. Your grades from middle school are not even considered.
Fewer than 10% of kids who take the exam get an offer. If the demographics of the test prep center I saw are an indicator, it will eventually be majority Asian--stats for HCHS are harder to come by than DOE schools, but it's trending that way. HCHS doesn't have the reputation of the Asian-majority magnet schools for being an absolute grind. That reputation is so strong, most parents I know of academically gifted kids are looking at other top public schools like Beacon and Bard, and not even applying to the famous magnets. It's very hard work to succeed in the magnets, so much so that the first couple of years of college are typically a breeze for graduates. Admitting students who aren't academically prepared or capable will make for a miserable experience for those kids.
@daskol - thanks for that overview. I was unaware of Hunter College High School.
"Admitting students who aren't academically prepared or capable will make for a miserable experience for those kids." Perhaps at first, but in the longer run, won't we see a watering-down of the curriculum so that all the kids admitted will end up graduating? And with honors? It probably wouldn't be anything as overt as weakening the science/math curriculum, but maybe by adding a less-challenging track for those who can't handle the rigorous stuff. Universities have done this, so why not selective high schools?
That's the direction deBlasio would take, because once the demographics of admission were more to his liking, he and his ilk will dislike the demographics of the graduating classes and/or college admissions. Anything is possible, it's just very difficult for me to imagine the NYC school system going in this direction. I'm trying to emphasize just how cutthroat and objective the system, at its most selective level, is today. The culture around these schools has survived assault by the bien-pensants for decades, and hasn't mellowed in the slightest. It's still all about IQ or IQ-like tests, with attendance being the other factor that can keep you out if your record is poor. There have been teachers and principles critical of the system's disparate racial outcomes, and demagoguing politicians attacking it for as long as I can remember. These schools are just too important to too many people to let the grievance mongers fuck them up, or at least that's been the case to date. deBlasio is a clown who can't get much accomplished, but likes to blow hot air. He's not going to be the one to change things.
You just CAN NOT take the KKK out of the democrat party, no matter how much you try.
The campaign to "diversify" the specialized schools only scratches the surface of deBlasio's education perfidy. His other big move on becoming mayor was to go to war with charter schools, since he's a tool of the teacher's union and charters don't have to hire union. In particular he went after Eva Moskowitz and her chain of Success Academy schools. Her organization has set up charter schools in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the city, and grants places via lottery. These schools have no entrance requirements, but they kick out badly behaved and underperforming students, which the neighborhood schools can't do. They have an incredible track record for academic success according to test scores (regents), and they do it with students who are majority "free lunch" kids (e.g. kids from poor families who qualify for, well, free lunches at school). There are typically dozens of applicants for every spot in a new Success Academy. Andrew Cuomo got involved on Eva Moskowitz' behalf, and that made for some fun times, but it's not all that amusing: deBlasio and his "disparate outcomes" thinking has already deprived underprivileged kids of access to these types of charter schools. He's played dirty, selling buildings rather than letting them be leased to charters, and done whatever he can to slow the momentum of a movement that Bloomberg, Cuomo and others have been admirably advancing to give kids access to alternatives beyond their neighborhood/zoned school. He's not a good guy.
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