NYC Schools Ditch the MeritocracyNew York City is bleeding students as schools embrace the equity agenda.
Peter Van Buren
Nov 14, 2022
For most Americans, which high school their children attend is a pretty basic decision. They either send their children to the school designated by where they live (Smallville students from Smallville Middle School move on to Smallville High School) or they send them to one of a few private schools in their area, typically religious schools such as Our Lady of Grace of Smallville. Not so in New York City, where a combination of woke politics and 2022-style fairness leaves one wondering how much we really hate our children.
Until two years ago, NYC's high school system, which was similar for middle schools, had a very few specialty high schools at the top, including Stuyvesant High (STEM), Bronx High School of Science, and LaGuardia High School of Music, Art, and Performing Arts (The FAME! school; grads include Nicki Minaj, Al Pacino, and Timothée Chalamet) allied with the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts.
Each had specific requirements for attendance; the former two had an entrance exam, which produced a rank-order entrance list irrespective of grades and other factors. The schools were hypercompetitive and ended up racially tilted toward white and Asian students (in a recent year, only seven black students got into Stuyvesant, out of 895 spots). There are expensive consultants and prep programs available, themselves competitive, to tilt the odds in a student's favor.
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Under former Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio the first attack was against the specialty high schools, particularly Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and their do-or-die entrance exams. The predominance of white and Asian students matriculating into those schools after excelling at those tests could mean only one thing to the mayor's woke supporters: the tests had to be unfair to black and brown students. Earlier attempts to even the admission rates by providing free after-school tutoring (the Discovery Program) to black and brown students (and excluding many poor Asian students) had not succeeded.
So the next obvious step was simply to eliminate the entrance exams in favor of grades assigned by school teachers. That way a student from a "bad" school could have a teacher who issued A’s for effort and compete against a child from a rigorous school where an A represented college-level work in 8th grade.
Under New York state's system, dropping the STEM schools' entrance exam actually required an act of the state congress, who under extraordinary pressure from Asian families and lawmakers shunned the change (AOC studiously avoided taking a public stance on the matter). The bill in fact never even made it to a full floor vote, with one opponent accusing the mayor of creating a “nasty narrative” that pitted Asian families against black and Hispanic parents. Another likened De Blasio’s plan to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a 19th century law restricting Asian immigration to cut back on economic competition with whites. The STEM entrance exam remains in place today.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-york-city-schools-ditch-the-meritocracy/
