There is consistency of purpose when the teachers union supports dumbing down standards at the top city high schools. The union, remember, demands that the absolute worst teachers and proven perverts remain in the classroom, so there’s no surprise when it says poor performance by students is good enough for New York.
The mayor and the chancellor are a different story — or should be — and so their embrace of academic mediocrity is an outrage.
The push to eliminate the single standardized test for eight high schools is an old whine in a new bottle. Back in 1971, the Specialized High School Admissions Test was put into state law so that the selection process for Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech couldn’t be manipulated. Five more schools were added later, so the eight attract most of the cream of the public crop.
But Mayor de Blasio, Chancellor Carmen Fariña and a smattering of busybodies in the City Council and Albany insist the admission results are racially skewed.
They have a point — but it’s the wrong point. The fact that Asian students, who make up only 15 percent of the total student population, got 53 percent of this year’s coveted seats annoys them. Although black and Hispanic students make up 70 percent of the population, they got only 12 percent of the seats in the eight schools. White students got 26 percent of the seats, while making up about 12 percent of the population.
The so-called reformers want to add subjective measures to the applications so the classes look like the city as a whole. They won’t say it, but they want a racial quota system.
That means winners and losers based on race, and their logic leads to something else they won’t dare say: There are too many smart Asian kids driving up the curve on the tests, and hogging the seats. So the number of Asians at the best schools must be reduced out of “fairness.”
Consider that at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, Asians have accounted for over 70 percent of the students for years. That’s a problem for those who believe not just in equal opportunity, but also in equal outcomes.
One way to read their attacks is that de Blasio and Fariña are guilty of anti-Asian prejudice, which would be the cold result if they get their way. Asians with superior achievement would be blocked simply because they are Asian.
If that isn’t prejudice, what is it?
Jews, of course, experienced the same bias when their numbers were capped at Ivy League schools two generations ago. That’s now widely recognized as a mistake, yet it could be repeated with Asians.
This is un-American. Even to credit the “reformers” with good intentions is too kind. They are wrong, and their approach is destructive to individual liberty and achievement.
The right way to improve the racial balance and lift student performance is to understand how Asians have succeeded so wildly and try to duplicate it among black and Hispanic students.
Indeed, many successful Asian students overcome a trifecta of obstacles. They are poor, come from non-English speaking homes and are often immigrants. That they still manage to excel in such disproportionate fashion ought to be reason for celebration — and copying.
That is not the de Blasio way. His vision for a racial-spoils system insists that academic success and other skills should be widely distributed among demographic groups.
This is nonsense on stilts, yet it remains the heart of the progressive creed.
To wit, if an individual is failing, it’s the political class’ obligation to level the results. Redistributing wealth, blocking anti-crime tactics in nonwhite neighborhoods, even though crime is higher there, and lowering academic standards are tentacles of the creed.
New Yorkers who know better must fight back. The elite schools are the crown jewels of the system.
They are not broken, and there is no need to fix them.
Wealth of reasons to be fed up with Hill
Hill enough already? Her first big interview on her book-campaign tour produced a clear reminder about the ick factor of all Hillary, all the time.
She answered a question on TV about her family’s earnings, estimated at $100 million, by saying she and Bubba were “dead broke” when they left the White House. Not true — she signed an $8 million book deal while still first lady — but the claim let her duck the question.
Then yesterday, after much scoffing over her poor-mouthing, she walked back the “dead broke” claim, insisting she “fully appreciates how hard life is for so many Americans.” And confirming her habit of looking backward and playing the victim card, she accused President Obama’s campaign of sexism in 2008.
So sensitive, so clever, so . . . calculating. That’s Hillary, each time and all the time. Did you really miss it?
Bam’s buck stops… there
You can tell the White House is feeling the heat from the Taliban prisoner swap: Aides are now saying Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel made the final decision.
Never mind that President Obama took Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s parents to the Rose Garden to announce his return. Obama was in full victory-lap mode then — until the backlash. Now it’s all Hagel’s fault, according to a White House briefing of Congress.
This would be comical, if it weren’t tragic. A president who takes credit but never responsibility isn’t a leader. He’s a cheerleader — for himself.
Taint by numbers
The politically correct crowd should be happy as clams about the big ongoing federal corruption trial. Democrats and Republicans, whites and blacks, city and suburbs — they’re all represented in the dock.
The chief defendants, Malcolm Smith, a black Democratic state senator from Queens, and Daniel Halloran, a white Republican and former city councilman also from Queens, are accused of bribery and other crimes in a bid to let Smith run for mayor on the GOP line last year.
A crooked upstate-developer-turned-FBI-informer helped set up the sting, which apparently wasn’t hard to do. Smith needed three of the five borough GOP leaders to sign off on his candidacy, and testimony shows that bribery was key to his plan. Evidence also shows Halloran was admirably broad-minded and open to taking either cash or checks for his role.
While nothing warms the liberal heart more than a rainbow of colors, the rest of us are happy when the crooks end up in jail, no matter their race or party. After all, crooks are crooks.
They ask this now?
After two days of intensive talks on Iran’s nuclear program, France’s foreign minister told a radio interviewer that, while there had been progress, a key issue remained.
“So the question that will be asked in the coming weeks is if the Iranians really accept renouncing nuclear weapons or not,” he said.
Excuse me, but that’s been the question — the only question — from the start. Everything else is a diplomatic dance around the truth.