Mayor de Blasio is obsessed with leveling the playing field throughout the city, i.e., producing equal outcomes.
In response to a reporter’s question about the city’s specialized high schools last month, de Blasio repeated his assertion that the “schools don’t look like New York.” I’m sure that came as a surprise to the students, parents and alumni.
“I don’t want them messing around with the Bronx Science test,” said my cousin Kenon during our discussion of Mayor de Blasio’s social agenda.
Kenon, a graduate of Bronx Science and Carnegie Mellon University, added, “It’s one of the few bastions of fairness.”
Like me, Kenon recalls Bronx Science as a tolerant environment because everyone had earned their place there.
He says the situation at Carnegie Mellon was different because some white students assumed black students were there illegitimately, either as recipients of athletic scholarships or from affirmative action.
Joyce Johnson, a former aide to city Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, views the Specialized High School Admission Test, or SHSAT, as a standard that black and Hispanic kids should work academically to meet.
During a brief stint in the Carnegie Mellon admissions office, Kenon learned that admission officers were more inclined to take students from the specialized high schools than from any of the city’s zoned high schools.
In fact, Bronx Science had the largest contingent of graduates in his freshman class at Carnegie Mellon.
And a majority of those kids were Asian.
Asian students and their parents are opposed to lowering standards or instituting quotas. In fact, they feel targeted for being high achievers.
Who could blame them? They invest in their education and then suddenly get penalized for being “overrepresented” at specialized high schools. Similar concerns over the “overrepresentation” of Asians at California public universities and colleges recently prompted an effort to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative-action admissions — until a grassroots movement arose to thwart an effort.
Polly Low, president of California’s Chinese-American Elected Officials Association, believes that the backlash reflected the intense anxieties that the education issue triggers among Asian immigrant parents.
Jewish-Americans no doubt recall the “gentlemen’s agreements” that for decades limited their numbers in elite US colleges and universities.
Here in the city, some critics of the admissions test propose offering admission to the top students at every middle school or creating a portfolio of admission criteria, including extracurricular activities.
But the uneven academic quality at city middle schools casts doubt on the true scholastic abilities of those valedictory and salutatory students.
Leveling the academic playing field should begin by desegregating middle schools, maintaining high standards, challenging curricula and increasing support for our low-performing middle schools (which are in predominantly black and Hispanic communities).
Polls show that New Yorkers believe that education should be a priority.
Ending unequal middle-school education should be the answer — not simply sidelining the tests that expose that inequality.There is no doubt that a high-quality middle-school education cuts dropout rates and increases on-time high-school graduation rates.
Once we revamp the city’s middle schools, raise expectations and improve achievement, the number of blacks and Latinos at the very best public high schools will increase.
An SHSAT entrance examination is the only truly fair arbiter because every student admitted will have earned his or her place.