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/
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)