De Blasio’s war on meritocracy and the public exam schools of New York
They’ve been the jewel in the crown of New York City’s public school system: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech (here’s a longer list). They provided a chance for any of New York’s students, regardless of finances or race or creed or religion, to pass the qualifying test and get a fabulous education among their peers.
But that opportunity has met the diversity police in the form of Mayor De Blasio, who has proposed an end to all that:
…[aiming] to make the student body at the top high schools more closely reflect the citywide student population, which is 70 percent black and Latino. As it stands, black and Latino students make up about 10 percent of the 15,000 enrolled at the most selective public schools.
That is a serious and longstanding concern, but a fundamental problem with the argument that the schools are not diverse is that Asian students are the single-largest group at most of the schools. They constitute 73.5 percent at Stuyvesant, 65.6 percent at Bronx Science and 61.3 percent at Brooklyn Tech. Overall, Asians of all backgrounds comprise less than 20 percent of students.
Their extraordinary presence in the top schools belies de Blasio’s claim that the schools are exclusionary because many Asian students belong to poor, immigrant families where English is not spoken in the home.
That’s An Inconvenient Truth that must not be allowed to stand:
De Blasio’s plan would be phased in over three years and do away with the single entrance test, instead offering admission to the top 7 percent of graduates from all middle schools. That would make up 90 to 95 percent of admissions, with the remainder coming from a lottery.
If this plan is implemented, either the failure rate will go up or the curriculum will be dumbed down, or both. I wrote “if this plan is implemented,” but it sounds as though it will not be implemented, at least not at present:
The only silver lining is that eliminating the test for some of the schools requires state legislation, and there is little chance of that happening now. Gov. Cuomo, thankfully, doesn’t appear interested, so opponents, including Asian parents’ groups, have an opportunity to organize and stop the quota travesty in its tracks.
So for now this particular bad idea may be stopped in its tracks. But the left never rests, and are highly unlikely to give up on this idea. It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s famous challenge to a leftist political opponent (in her case, it was about economics), in which she pointed out that he was more interested in lowering the upper group than raising the lower group:
People consistently fail to realize that the seeds of socialism’s failure are built into its own philosophy. The great target of socialism is the redistribution of wealth. Socialist policies, however, provide no opportunity for creating any wealth to be redistributed.
Since socialism can, therefore, only survive as a parasitic philosophy within some other wealth producing socio-economic system, two Thatcherisms are true. The first is, famously, that eventually socialism runs out of other peoples money. The second is, as she notes here, that socialists are intent on keeping the poor poor. They don’t propose solutions for eliminating poverty, but attack wealthier individuals because of any invented excess. Why? Once s/he ceases to be poor, s/he is less likely to support socialist policies that require them to share their own earned wealth.
And one additional comment. What I wrote above is true regardless of whether that “wealth” is monetary or intellectual. Socialism, like mathematical averages, is, in all things, a regression toward the mediocre.
1. You have people in this world who fancy the signs of accomplishment are intrinsically valuable.
2. You have people who fancy other people’s accomplishments are something other than accomplishments – the function of patronage (which they call ‘opportunities’).
3. You have people who run on self-congratulation, and one means toward it is to build patron-client relationships. Keep in mind about diBlasio: he has no authentic profession. Politics is his business. Keep in mind about diversity apparatchiks: same deal. Keep in mind about the faculty: many and perhaps most despise the natural clientele of their institutions, and resent it that their livelihood is a function of teaching such people.
This sort of thing ruins institutions and wastes the time of every significant party. Why is it done? Because, while destructive, the pretense that you’re helping someone feeds the ego of the decision-makers in question.
Most black Americans are wage-earners and most such wage-earners are in desultory jobs. A great many really don’t have the chops for non-desultory jobs. You want to benefit blacks, improve the quality of public spaces and common institutions, consolidate a mess of welfare programs into a schedule of tax rebates which provide matching funds for earned income, construct stable actuarial pools in problem markets like that for medical services and long-term care, and provide a legal and financial architecture which will connect individual households with the sort of schooling of greatest benefit to said households. That can mean academic secondary schooling, but it’s going to usually mean basic education (literacy and numercay with some civic education as levaning) followed by vocational instruction. It’s also going to mean shoveling the obstreperous youths out the door. Philanthroplic provision, financed by vouchers.
None of that creates job opportunities for aspirant human service professionals. For people recognizing new ‘needs’ every other week, a small menu of common provisions, mechanistically calculated, is simply unacceptable.
Keep in mind about diBlasio: he has no authentic profession. Politics is his business.
–Art Deco
I second this. It’s jaw-dropping how many liberal/left politicians have never worked an honest job. They just climbed the ranks of non-profits, unions, administration positions, and community organizing.
Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn (UK Labor Party) are much the same.
I wasn’t that impressed with Trump’s resume but compared to most Democrats, Trump has a Ph.D in the Real World and I think it shows.
Those schools have magic bricks. The students who have entered those schools benefited from those magic bricks, which made them smart and successful. It is now time to share those magic bricks more equally with the general population, because all students enter schools as completely blank slates.
In other news, we have noticed that rain is highly correlated with wet streets. Next time California has a dry year, they can water the streets, and then they’ll get all the rain they want.
I await DeBlasio’s order that “All MUST Pass!”
De Blasio is also trying to undermine the remarkably successful and hence increasingly popular neighborhood charter school system:
https://nypost.com/2018/05/03/de-blasio-is-trying-to-kill-nycs-charter-schools/
And then there’s this “appreciation” of “hizzonah”:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/13/bill-de-blasios-socialist-dream-david-boaz-column/659138001/
Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn (UK Labor Party) are much the same.
Sanders had a series of dead-end wage jobs up until age 40. Not accomplished, but he wasn’t earning a comfortable living in settings where there were no operational measures of competence. He was just making rent/
One of the better examples would be the erstwhile Mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges. Over a period of 22 years, she’d held a succession of staff positions with small time advocacy groups and private social work projects. She’d spent two years in an academic graduate program ‘ere being awarded and MA and sent packing / leaving. She had no vocational instruction at all, just arts and sciences. She’d held a city council seat. The newspapers and Democratic voters got the idea in their head she’d make a capable mayor; she was as good an administrator as her past work history suggested.
“If this plan is implemented, either the failure rate will go up or the curriculum will be dumbed down, or both. neo
Which won’t bother them in the least, since its not about results but rather control and virtue signaling.
I hope it does get implemented, those Democrat voting Asians need to have the results of their votes rubbed into their faces.
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”
Supreme Comrade Stalin
The left wants to not only disarm the peasants, they want to force the peasants to have only the ‘correct’ ideas. Dumbing down the peasants in elite, merit based schools is a necessity to achieve their goal of creating a leftist dystopia.
There are those in our midst that cannot accept that we all are not exactly equal in terms of ability, drive, and motivation. Margaret Thatcher says it perfectly, they would rather that the poor be poorer and the rich less wealthy so long as the gap between the two is smaller.
Years ago in Boston it was proposed that there should be more females in the Fire Department. The reason they were not better represented was identified: women applicants were incapable of completing the physical performance test that included, among other challenges, carrying a human body of a certain size and weight. The proposed solution was to have two tests, one weight requirement for men, the standard test, and another, lesser weight, requirement for women. All well and good until there is a real fire and a real person that needs rescuing.
She was SUCH a pistol.
Texas has a similar scheme, the top such-and-such percent of graduates from each high school are eligible to attend the University of Texas. It is a trick to smuggle in a so-called affirmative action scheme after the legislature, the courts, or the people strike overt AA down.
DeBlasio famously honeymooned in Communist Cuba, at the height of the Cold War no less, in solidarity with its revolutionary ethos. Why would he not sabotage the cities few remaining schools which actually produce competent and educated children?
The Socialist desire to destroy in order to rebuild runs contrary to both evolutionary principles and nature. Darwin postulated that a divergent species would exploit an evolutionary niche to be a better or stronger thing ( animal, plant, etc) and therefore succeed in Being with a greater chance of surviving and procreating. Socialism as taught by Marx was written in same era and captured the attention of intellectuals who associated the two as related science-philosophy thought. Marx appealed to the humanitarian ethos and desire to do good by painting a picture of a perfect, balanced world in which all base needs are replaced with plenty and humanity has socially evolved. The lie inherent in Socialism, and DeBkasios delusion, is that to build the utopia first all else must be abolished. This is contrary to nature in which strong or ascendant species move into and occupy existing environmental frameworks with minimal displacement.
Socialism literally burns down the Rainforest of humanity and it’s near infinite interactions to plant a mere half dozen human behaviors under the incompetent leadership of politicos who never grew anything in the first place.
Evergreen Heinlein quote: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded – here and there, now and then – are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
It seems that this “extremely small minority” is now these most talented Asian students in USA liberated both from oppressive traditionalism of their countries of origin and from just as oppressive illiberal identity philosophy of the American Left. They are now treated by US universities like Jews in USA before WWII. Eventually they will create their own educational opportunities like these Jews did and will form the most advanced creative American elite. They have potential for that, both biological and cultural.
Just look what happened in Singapore where the meritocracy based on academic achievement was adopted as a government policy: her students are now champions at every international student competition, and the country is the world most advanced nation in every aspect.
Let’s NOT forget that DeBlassio’s son went to Brooklyn Tech after NOT making the cutoff for Stuyvesant or Bronx Science.
I wonder why he has this fetish – of course his son should have gone to Stuyvesant. Those darned test scores
Disclaimer:
I’m BxSci class of 80, my daughter is class of 15, my son class of 19
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Social justice, distilled down to its essence, demands race trump merit. It is racism dressed in the robes of justice.
This is the latest version of bussing students. Remember when bussing those black students to predominantly white schools was going to turn all those students into grade A students?
Micha Elyi Says:
About that. The State legislature passed that to deal with racial discrimination. A&M has the same program, and seems to be making it work. After all, if a student is stuck in a low performing high school, there are real and severe limits on what they will learn. Either from being held back by being in a low peer group, or teachers who have diluted the curriculum to achieve success. However, if they are in the top 10%, the students have demonstrated some drive and potential. I recall a study which found A&M was aggressively working with those students, who were being successful, and UT. Well, UT was just wringing their hands and crying for more help, help for UT>
Free public education is a plank of the Communist Manifesto. Decriminalize school truancy! When it is not mandated by law, what will academic outcomes by socio-economic and racial groups look like?
DeBlasio famously honeymooned in Communist Cuba, at the height of the Cold War no less, in solidarity with its revolutionary ethos. Why would he not sabotage the cities few remaining schools which actually produce competent and educated children?
The height of the Cold War was during the Korean War and diBlasio and his wife weren’t born yet. Supposedly, he married Chirlaine McCray in 1994. The Cold War was over.
Texas has a similar scheme,
Cooked up by George W. Bush’s minions, IIRC. The Republican Party was, prior to 1989, rhetorically opposed to racial preference schemes. The Bushes and the Republican establishment torpedoed that.
After all, if a student is stuck in a low performing high school, there are real and severe limits on what they will learn.
Turn the incorrigibles over to day detention centers run by the sheriff’s department, institute vigorous academic tracking, and have state regents exams for quality control. Slum kids of similar interests and disposition to the mode in the doctors’ suburbs will do all right.
I went to Bronx Science over fifty years ago, and the same concerns were being raised even back then. Two differences between then and now:
1) As liberal as it has always been, NYC is a lot more “woke” today. Hence, a leftwing turd like DeBlasio living in Gracie Mansion.
2) The competition to get into Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech wasn’t quite as heated as it is today because the neighborhood high schools weren’t as bad as they are today and offered a reasonable alternative that could just as easily lead to MIT or the Ivy League for students who were good enough. In my career I had one boss who went to Columbus and another who went to DeWitt Clinton, and I can tell you both were a lot smarter than me–technically and politically.
@KG2V
If I recall correctly, the same entrance exam is used for all three schools. Back in my day one had to pick one of the three to apply.
Today the competition is skewed. While all three schools were once considered comparable, today there’s no doubt that Stuyvesant has pulled away from the other two in terms of prestige and performance, which is why it is so desirable.
Complicating the picture for Bronx Science is the changing demographics of the Bronx. In the 60s when I attended, most of the students were located fairly close and the school was 70% Jewish. Today the Bronx is overwhelmingly minority, resulting in the conditions DeBlasio finds intolerable.
Bronx Science today is considered less desirable also because of its inconvenient location for the students who now attend–many of whom make the trek in from the deeper parts of Queens and Brooklyn. I lived just a few blocks from the school when I attended, but I had classmates who made the daily gauntlet on the subway from those further reaches of the city. Today, in fact, there are dedicated bus services from Queens for such students at $2K per year and up, since there are enough of them to support such service.
An under-appreciated aspect of the DeBlasio proposal is that it will pose a real problem for a number of sought-after, successful middle schools that are right now presumably sending much more than 7% of their students to the top high schools.
If a middle school is currently moving 20% of its students to the top HS but will be capped at 7%, parents will have to carefully gauge their own child’s class rank, with an eye to having them spend their last middle school year in a, well, less high achieving middle school.
For the doctors, lawyers and financiers whose kids go to PS 199 on the Upper West Side (64% white), its move to the suburbs or pay for private high school.
For poorer Asian families, well, welcome to America. And stop hating.
sestamibi i lived over there too…
if not for a few years, we may have known each other…
“Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, [a Socialist] is perfectly capable of displaying hatred–a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred–against the exploiters.” –Orwell, “The Road to Wigan Pier”
“Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” –Orwell, “1984”
I agree with De Blasio on this one. For decades, liberals have been calling on everyone else to send their children to racially mixed schools while they themselves sent their children to elite public schools with few black or Hispanic students. If liberals are going to demand racially mixed schools then they should have to send their children to such schools.
If liberals are going to demand racially mixed schools then they should have to send their children to such schools.
The constituency diBlasio plans to injure is not ‘liberals’ but Oriental Tiger Moms.
Art Deco,
Orientals are carpets, Asians are humans.
It fits here to reprise a remark I made on the “goverment journolist” thread:
* * *
Matthew M Says:
June 6th, 2018 at 7:08 pm
Although from the field of economics, the story of John Cowperthwaite is one of the most inspiring illustrations of thwarting bad government.
* * *
I loved this other statement of his:
“At some point during our first conversation I managed to irk him by suggesting that he was chiefly known “for doing nothing.” In fact, he pointed out, keeping the British political busy-bodies from interfering in Hong Kong’s economic affairs took up a large portion of his time. “
It’s best to keep the government out of ALL our affairs, schools included.