NYC schools need more opportunity — not race-based ‘redistribution’By NY Post Editorial Board
February 21, 2022
New schools Chancellor David Banks last week basically apologized for the new “standards” for admission to the city’s screened middle and high schools — and rightly so.
“As I got here, there were a number of things that were already in motion,” Banks said at a Queens meeting. “For right now we’ve come up with this new admissions criteria. We had to make a decision because parents need to make decisions on admissions sooner rather than later,” saying he’d re-examine the issue next year.
In other words, he doesn’t endorse the changes; he just fears that another revamp at this late date would make things worse.
Maybe so, but parents are rightly outraged. Department of Education Chief of Enrollment Sarah Kleinhandler basically admitted the point was the racial re-engineering that obsessed the old regime: “When we modeled this, we saw that black and brown children had . . . the percentage of their access to these screened high schools [go] up 13 percent.”
To get there, the de Blasio folks created a complex algorithm with “buckets” that basically blur the kids’ achievements, so that children with grades averaging 85 have the same chance as those with 99s (among other anti-excellence moves). Then it’s just a lottery; luck, not your hard work, is the deciding factor.
Of course, all families should have access to high-standards public schools for their children, at every level. But right now the only sure way to get that is to manage to get them in as tots to a Gifted & Talented school that feeds directly into good schools all the way through grade 12 — or to win another lottery, for entry into a public charter system like the Success Academies.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/02/21/nyc-schools-need-more-opportunity-not-race-based-redistribution/
