• LOWERING STANDARDS - Killing the elite-schools exam is just shooting th

    From That Idiot Biden@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 3 04:33:11 2021
    XPost: alt.politics.democrats, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
    XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

    New chancellor, same old response to the vexingly few black and
    Hispanic students scoring seats at the city’s top public high
    schools: Like her predecessor, Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter
    blames the test itself.

    In the latest round of acceptances, Asians won 53.7 percent of
    all seats; whites 27.9, Hispanics 5.4, African Americans 3.6.
    Why? The central problem, in reality, is in the school districts
    serving predominantly black and Hispanic children. For starters,
    they’ve largely scrapped Gifted & Talented programs — a key
    pipeline to being ready for the specialized-high-school exam.
    That leaves talented kids stuck in regular classes at K-8
    schools that are too often among the city’s worst.

    A lesser issue: Many of the city’s brightest black and Hispanic
    minds get recruited out of middle school to enroll at elite
    private prep schools here and around the country.

    And, sadly, rather few black and Hispanic kids sign up for the
    admission test. That’s partly the result of the constant
    drumbeat by activists and too many educators that “the test is
    unfair”: Why try when the chancellor herself claims the game is
    rigged against you?

    To be clear, that issue predates this mayor: The Bloomberg
    administration did yeoman’s work advertising the test,
    recruiting minorities to enroll in test prep and to register for
    the test, yet then-Chancellor Dennis Walcott lamented that
    sometimes more than half of the kids recruited would fail to
    show up on test day.

    Look: If the problem were bias favoring the wealthy, why would
    Asians — who as a community are predominantly immigrant and low-
    income — do so well? It’s telling that the various “remedies”
    pushed by Team de Blasio would mainly purge Asian students, not
    whites, from Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and the
    other “elites.”

    The true solution is obvious: Create more good schools. More
    good K-8 schools in lower-income neightborhoods (lots of
    excellence-oriented charter schools would open if the
    Legislature would just allow it) and more “selective” high
    schools so there are more quality seats to go around.

    Killing the exam is a lot easier, but all it does is undermine
    the existing “elite eight” high schools — oh, and make it harder
    for parents to realize how badly the city schools fail their
    kids.

    An easy answer that keeps parents ignorant: We fear that’s why
    Porter and her allies really focus on it.

    https://nypost.com/2021/04/30/killing-the-elite-schools-exam-is- just-shooting-the-messenger/

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