Parents of three Asian middle-school students yesterday filed suit in fed eral court, charging that their children had been unconstitutionally barred on the basis of race from a city-run program designed to prepare students for the entrance exams of New York’s elite public high schools.
We wish them well.
The program, the Specialized High School Institute, was created in 1995 to help talented but underprivileged students compete for coveted spots in schools like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant.
Nothing wrong with that, of course: Back in the day, such exams – which the program’s students still had to pass – were the last bastion of challenging standards in the system, and the quality education they unlocked was the fastest ticket out of poverty.
The problem was in how you qualified for the test-prep program.
The Department of Education says that all students eligible for a free or reduced-price school lunch got priority spots. But so, too, did students from the right “underrepresented” minority groups – mainly, blacks and Hispanics – irrespective of economic circumstances.
Inexcusable racial discrimination, says lead plaintiff Stanley Ng.
Adding to the injustice, the plaintiffs’ counsel has unearthed a 2007 district memo instructing principals to give program applications only to students of designated ethnicities – in other words, not to give them to poor whites or Asians.
The DOE insists that the memo doesn’t reflect city policy, but that – thanks to a recent anti-quota Supreme Court ruling – it is reviewing the program’s acceptance guidelines before next year’s cohort starts applying.
It would do well to scrap the racial qualifications entirely.
The entire spirit of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s laudable reforms, after all, is that improving education for the worst-off students requires standards and accountability across the board.
Nothing could be more inimical – or damaging – to that spirit than treating students differently entirely on the basis of race.
The preferences need to go.