WHY ARE BLUE INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF HATRED FOR EXCELLENCE, AND FOR ASIANS? How It Feels to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School.
Tausifa Haque, a 17-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, walks in the early morning from her family’s apartment in the Bronx to the elevated subway and rides south to Brooklyn, a journey of one and a half hours.
There she joins a river of teenagers who pour into Brooklyn Technical High School — Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian, Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American. The cavernous eight-story building holds about 5,850 students, one of the largest and most academically rigorous high schools in the United States.
Her father drives a cab; her mother is a lunchroom attendant. This school is a repository of her dreams and theirs. “This is my great chance,” Tausifa said. “It’s my way out.” . . .
Liberal politicians, school leaders and organizers argue such schools are bastions of elitism and, because of low enrollment of Black and Latino students, functionally racist and segregated. Sixty-three percent of the city’s public school students are Black and Latino yet they account for just 15 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s population.
For Asian students, the percentages are flipped: They make up 61 percent of Brooklyn Tech, although they account for 18 percent of the public school population.
Some critics imply that the presence of so many South and East Asian students, along with the white students, accentuates this injustice. Such charges reached a heated pitch a few years ago when a prominent white liberal council member said such schools were overdue for “a racial reckoning.”
Richard Carranza, who served as New York’s schools chancellor until last year, was more caustic. “I just don’t buy into the narrative,” he said, “that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”
Yes, by all means we must quash the overweening privilege of daughters of Bangladeshi cab drivers and lunch ladies.
And it’s not just New York:
Officials in Fairfax County, Va., replaced the entrance exam at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology with a combination of grades and socioeconomic criteria. The next year the percentage of incoming Black and Latino students jumped and the percentage of Asian students, who skew more middle and upper middle class than in New York, declined. White student enrollment increased.
When Asian parents sued, a federal judge told their lawyer, “Everybody knows the policy is not race-neutral and that it’s designed to affect the racial composition.”
That case is awaiting a decision.
The imbalances are huge but — shockingly — they’re the result of bias on the part of lefty school officials:
Decades ago, when crime and socioeconomic conditions were far graver than they are today, Black and Latino teenagers passed the examination in great numbers. In 1981, nearly two-thirds of Brooklyn Tech’s students were Black and Latino, and that percentage hovered at 50 percent for another decade.
Black and Latino students account for 10 percent of the students at Bronx Science; that percentage was more than twice as high in the 1970s and ’80s.
To understand this decline involves a trek back through decades of policy choices, as city officials, pushed by an anti-tracking movement, rolled back accelerated and honors programs and tried to reform gifted programs, particularly in nonwhite districts.
Black alumni of Brooklyn Tech argue that this progressive-minded movement handicapped precisely those Black and Latino students most likely to pass the test. Some poor, majority Black and Latino districts now lack a single gifted and talented program.
The enemies of excellence — who mostly hate excellence because they themselves are far from excellent — hurt the poorest and worst-connected of the excellent students the most. If you wish, you can try to convince yourself that this is an unintended consequence.
If the money followed students instead of schools, parents could send their kids to the place that best fit their needs. This is the education professionals’ worst nightmare, of course.
Plus:
These students voice a fear that harks back to earlier generations of working-class Jewish students who dealt with antisemitism. If officials toss the test and substitute portfolios, interviews and extracurricular accomplishments, it could be easier to dismiss Asians as faceless “grinds,” the students said.
Well, especially if you’re at an Ivy League admissions office. Related: Asians Get The Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.
But there’s this hopeful bit from one student:
“I don’t feel like a minority,” he said. “We resist being pitted against each other at this school.”
Good.