Opinion

NYC’s entrance exams: do the tests discriminate?

The Issue: A lawsuit alleging admissions tests to top NYC schools are biased against blacks and Hispanics.

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Mark Schulte laments the teachers union’s delegate assembly voting to support a lawsuit by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that seeks to throw out the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which it believes discriminates against blacks and Hispanics (“Race, the UFT, and NYC’s Top Schools,” PostOpinion, Jan. 31).

But there is no lawsuit.

The LDF filed an administrative complaint with the US Department of Education, claiming the test violates federal education civil-rights law. Their burden of persuading the government agency to blame the test will be considerable.

Even if there were a lawsuit and plaintiffs who actually claim injury and present evidence of discriminatory intent or effect of the test, that evidence would be carefully weighed and adjudged by courts that couldn’t care less about the votes of teachers’ delegates.

It is no surprise that teachers would blame the test rather than ineffective teaching for minority students’ underperformance. Schulte’s solution is no less naive; private tutorials of minority fourth-graders in all five boroughs would still require effective “tutors,” a k a teachers.

Michael Meyers

Executive Director

New York Civil Rights

Coalition

Manhattan

The well-worn “disparate impact” ploy is a surefire way to destroy meritocracy and what remains of the elite schools.

Schulte is overly optimistic when he suggests that tutoring programs would substantially redress existing imbalances. Until popular culture becomes anathematized by minority teenagers and single-parent families are no longer the norm in the inner city, ethnic breakdowns in the Big Three schools will stay the same.

I wonder if the NAACP has ever presented an example of an admissions test that it did not consider racist. The NAACP has too many lawyers who make too many excuses. Kudos to Schulte for his vigorous endorsement of Al Shanker’s educational principles.

David Rabinovitz

Brooklyn

The lawsuit filed by the NAACP in conjunction with the UFT is grossly misrepresented.

Stating that the specialized high-school admissions exam is the sole benchmark is a farce. Students are tested yearly in math and science.

If these state tests are really designed to measure student learning, then those measures — along with student interviews, class grades, transcripts, work portfolios and letters of recommendation — are surely sufficient to decide whether a student is capable of being successful in the outstanding educational programs the specialized high schools provide through the city.

Bill Woodruff

Manhattan

Schulte makes the right diagnosis, but his prescription is only half right. He’s right that the problem is family structure. Nationally, minority children are more often born out of wedlock.

But why should the additional tutoring and other support be limited to blacks and Hispanics, rather than being made available to all kids who can use it?

While a higher percentage of blacks and Hispanics can benefit from these programs, there are plenty of white and Asian kids who can, too, and there is no need to exclude them because of skin color.

Roger Clegg

President

Center for Equal

Opportunity

Falls Church, Va.

The suggestion to raise private funds to tutor African-American and Latino students might help some, but what is needed is a total makeover of NYC high schools.

Portfolio schools aside, the vast majority still attend the century-old, factory-model schools where students change subjects and teachers every 45 to 90 minutes in response to a bell.

Half the kids have never benefited from that arrangement. Top students do well despite it, but many more would experience advanced achievement if their schools resembled highperformance workplaces where employees and supervisors stay together long enough to produce excellence.

Barry Stern

Round Hill, Va.