Wai Wah Chin A Win for Merit in New York City’s Schools The Panel for Education Policy passes a contract preserving the specialized high schools’ admissions exam.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-win-for-merit-in-new-york-citys-schools
After 11 p.m. on December 18, the New York City Department of Education’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP) voted to approve the contract for administering the specialized high schools admissions test (SHSAT): the final tally was 14 for, two against, with four abstentions. By then, many SHSAT supporters, especially the children, who had arrived before the 6 p.m. meeting began, had left and missed the roll-call vote. All are grateful to PEP for retaining the test.
A public comment period preceded the vote. The real issues of debate concerned not the contract’s cost—$17 million over five years, a mere speck of the city Department of Education’s $200 billion five-year budget—but questions of race and merit.
Many of the SHSAT supporters in attendance were immigrants of Chinese origin. In thick accents, they told their stories of hard work, sacrifice, and achieving the American dream. There was also a Bangladeshi (a member of one of Stuyvesant High School’s fastest-growing groups) and several people with Russian accents. But tribalism was not the point—this was about merit. From these specialized schools have come 15 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, awarded for inventions and discoveries with broad applications that have benefited humanity.
The SHSAT’s supporters spoke for all future students of any hue. The opposition responded with thinly veiled racism against the Asians in attendance: they’re protecting a system that favors them, they only show up for their own causes.
In fact, Asians are not looking for special favors or preferential treatment. In the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York’s lawsuit against changes to the specialized high schools’ admissions policy, the plaintiffs did not seek preferential treatment, such as racial set-asides or the implementation of Asian studies curricula. Instead, they sought a colorblind admissions process: equal rights for all.
The audience cried out “Hypocrite!” when those on the panel, who themselves or whose families had benefited from the specialized high schools, sought to pull the ladder up behind themselves by opposing the SHSAT. One such opponent, not in attendance, was Bill de Blasio, the parent of a Brooklyn Tech alum and former mayor who criticized the schools’ racial composition and tried for years to get rid of the test. De Blasio’s position stood in stark contrast to that of one father who, in the public comment period, said that, while his own children could not pass the SHSAT, he believed in merit and supported the test.
In the public comments, Asian attendees spoke of diligence and commitment, and of how the public libraries offered free access to test-preparation materials for students of all races. SHSAT opponents, meantime, disregarded hard work and repeatedly invoked systemic racism, ignoring the fact that Asians spend on average twice as much time on homework as do whites and nearly four times as much as do blacks, and how for 20 consecutive years—from the 1970s to 1990s—Brooklyn Technical High School was majority black and Hispanic. If the entrance exam wasn’t racist then, how could it be racist now? Stuyvesant High School had once admitted mostly Jewish students; now it admits more Asians, a reflection of the city’s changing demographics, not of the entrance exam’s racial bias. The exam had no “Jewish math” before; it has no “Asian math” now.
The test’s opponents spoke of underrepresentation, which, of course, implies overrepresentation of certain groups. Representation never made sense in this context, anyway: no student “represents” another. Proportionality by race is what these opponents really desire, but how are skin tones relevant metrics for determining academic excellence?
Some opponents called for dismantling the Hecht-Calandra law that protects the specialized schools and the test. Doing so, however, would only destroy the few bright lights of a largely failed public school system, in which less than half of students are proficient in math or reading.
It would have been a travesty if the DOE had abandoned the SHSAT and substituted other admissions criteria, such as subjective and inconsistent class grades. Grade inflation and grade fraud also make such criteria grossly flawed. Essays, extracurriculars, references, and interviews are similarly manipulable. Lotteries for admissions would indeed generate demographically proportional classes, but even a sixth-grader could see the absurdity of such a scheme. As one youngster asked the panel: Should we have a lottery for hiring and firing, too?
The fixation on eight high schools in a system with 400 high schools and 700 high school programs has no point other than to racialize and divert attention from the DOE’s failures. To produce real improvements that allow all students to flourish, the department should return its focus to academic instruction, improving K-8 education, and reinstating genuine Gifted and Talented programs. More charter schools and added support for homeschooling would increase competition and improve city schools.
In the end, the PEP got it right: New York must keep its proven specialized high schools and the SHSAT exam. Anything else would be a disservice to the city’s most talented students.
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