The battle over the admissions standards at New York City’s elite public high schools has heated up again. After having failed to change the standards last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio is back at it, this time with some backup from celebrity freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As usual, their impassioned pleas about the lack of black and Hispanic students completely ignores that it is Asian, not white, students who would bear the brunt of the proposed changes.
At issue is the fact that these hyper-competitive high schools consider only a test score in deciding admissions. This meritocracy has created some of the best high schools in the world. They would have you believe that wealthy white parents game the system by hiring expensive tutors, but while they might, it’s not working. In fact, wealthy white kids are not dominating this process at all.
Yesterday Ocasio-Cortez had this to tweet:
Her math is correct, but what she fails to mention is that while Asian students make up only 15 percent of all students in New York, they are a whopping 74 percent of students at Stuyvesant, the school she references. She claims this is inequity and represents a racial wealth gap. But exactly what systems does she believe that New York City has in place that can explain the extraordinary achievements of Asian students? Are Asians getting better schools? More resources? In what way are Asians the beneficiaries of a racial wealth gap?
Don’t expect answers any time soon. This is a question Democrats and their allies in the news media have no answer for, and can barely even bring themselves to mention. The pebble in their shoe is that despite obvious racism that exists and has always existed towards Asian Americans, they succeed anyway, by almost every metric. – READ MORE