Law Affirmative Action Abolished: U.S Supreme Court Outlaws Racial Discrimination In College Admissions.

Whenever I have these discussions with someone, I like to put the shoe on the other foot.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I just I can't imagine that you'd be OK with any subjective criteria that resulted in black people having to score 380/1600 extra SAT points to reach parity.

If 6% of black people with 3.2s and 40%ile MCATs were getting into med school while 60% of white with those numbers people were, you wouldn't be OK with that.

If anyone tried these arguments like "white people have better personalities than black people and so black people need to score 380 SAT points higher than white people" that you're presenting to justify it, you'd call them racist. I could be wrong. But it's just the strongest gut feeling ever.

No, I wouldn't call anyone racist because I know that personalities don't always mesh.

Shoe on the other foot?

I posted a link to about when I was hiring staff. I realize that sometimes the best paper resume isn't the best candidate for the job. I've hired staff for years. And while you need a certain level of technical ability for any job, you also know that some people don't have what it takes to do more than the technical stuff at a high level.

Take a lawyer - it's great that you can cite the law backwards and forwards and know the procedural guidelines like the back of your hands. But can you persuade an adversarial party to take a course of action that's in your client's best interest? Can you make a judge like you within a few minutes of the trial starting? Can you convince a decision maker to hire you over the charming guy he met 20 minutes ago? None of that is on your resume.

Now before we go too far down the road. See my other post about donors, legacies, athletes, students from select high schools. Factor that into the conversation and then come back to me with the race stuff. Are Asians large donors? Are they legacy admits? Are they big athletes? Did they go to the select high schools? ARe they low income applicants? If they are - were they not admitted while others who met those criteria were?

Because Asians make up 20+% of the Harvard population while they're only 5% of the population. So, there's no discrimination strictly on the numbers - they're over-represented. So to say discrimination - you need to show that Asians are being discriminated against even within these non-race areas with specific lower performance - donors, legacies, athletes, low income students.
 
@panamaican We are having a philosophical debate where you are bringing up facts or reasoning that I don’t disagree with. You’re comparing your own micro-level business good faith personnel decisions to Harvard’s bad faith acceptance decisions that are discriminatory and on a much broader level. What we clearly disagree on i suspect is the actual forensic facts of the case. If there’s a genuine process to accept on whatever criteria that they choose that doesn’t take race into account then I may not totally agree with that process but I won’t say it’s illegal or overly unfair but I simply don’t think this is the case. So we’ll see how the suit plays out.
Actually, you're assigning bad faith to Harvard and then filtering things through that lens. A neutral analysis requires that we first acknowledge what Harvard is looking for. You call it bad faith but you're substituting your search criteria for theirs, that isn't a legitimate point.

If someone won't treat their criteria as legitimate then they are being unfair to the decision making party. It's like saying you're looking for leggy blondes and someone says "Stop turning down all the busty brunettes." It's your criteria, not theirs. You know what you're looking for and you're the one who's going to be stuck with the outcomes. Now, if you say you're looking for leggy blondes but keep turning them away for waifish red heads - now there's a problem.

You can't substitute your criteria for Harvard's. You have to see if Harvard is discriminating based on their own criteria.
 
Read slowly:
1) 10% of the Harvard Class comes from 19 schools. 3% comes from just 2 of those schools. This is predetermined. These seats are set aside for those schools.
2) 83% of Athletes get admitted. A school with a <5% admissions rate is admitting 83% of its athlete applicants. Do you really think that the Athletes are just that much smarter than the regular applicant pool?
3) More than 25% of the admittees have a family member who previously went there. Again, <5% admissions rate but they can fill a full quarter of their class specifically for legacies.

Glad that you can finally acknowledge that are many different factors to the personal score. And that within Asian applicants, Asian scores differ based on those factors...just like for everyone else. Low income students scored differently. Extracurriculars scored differently. In fact, within Asians, all of the various non-academic criteria were scored based on the specific criteria...just like for everyone else. All high income students were different from low income students. Harvard specifically sought out low income students. All extracurriculars were different based on the extracurricular. Asians with the right extracurriculars scored higher than those with the wrong ones.

You keep retreating to the SAT scores. Why don't you address the actual data which showed that Asians didn't need high SAT scores to overcome their low personal scores. They needed high SAT scores to overcome legacies, donors and athletes.

But that doesn't fit your race-based obsession so you're ignoring it.

Legacies, athletes, the children of donors and the kids who went to the right high schools (10% of the freshman class comes from 19 pre-selected high schools) all received preferential admissions criteria and had test score well below the Harvard average.

Not blacks, not whites. Donors. Legacies. Athletes. Students from 17 boarding schools. 61 students from 2 private schools in Boston.

But hey who cares about being accurate when you can be a hypocrite and just accuse people of taking a position based on race?

You keep saying the same thing over and over.

No one is refuting that legacies, athletes, donors, people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, etc don't have a leg up.

Who is refuting that? I already acknowledged that and that isn't new or surprising information.

Legacies, donors, children of staff or being an athlete is more of an advantage than being black or Latino. Again I have to reiterate - NO ONE IS REFUTING THAT.

But that's NOT what the lawsuit brought by the Students for Fair Admissions is about. The data analysis shows- (TAKING OUT LEGACIES,DONORS, etc) that Asians have to score far higher than other groups ALL ELSE EQUAL. Except for this "personal score."

They analyzed admission data while TAKING OUT legacies, children of staff, etc from the data pool. They are trying to isolate the effect of RACE in admissions.

The Ivy's have already fought in court to be able to consider race in admissions. So don't try to claim race is not a factor. Race obviously plays a role.

We already know for a fact - race is a factor in admissions. The question is how much of a factor should it play.

I know you're a lawyer and intelligent so you know exactly what I'm saying. So stop being deliberately obtuse and obfuscating the issue with points that NO ONE IS REFUTING.
 
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Also - Pan American - I don't believe you are looking at this issue objectively and being honest. You have an agenda to minimize the role of race in admissions.

You have already been caught LYING in this thread about this.

You claimed the leveling off of Asian students at Ivy Leagues correlates with their population numbers leveling off. But they didn't level off at all. Their population numbers increased exponentially and is still growing rapidly in the US.
 
You keep saying the same thing over and over.

No one is refuting that legacies, athletes, donors, people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, etc don't have a leg up.

Who is refuting that? I already acknowledged that and that isn't new or surprising information.

Legacies, donors, children of staff or being an athlete is more of an advantage than being black or Latino. Again I have to reiterate - NO ONE IS REFUTING THAT.

But that's NOT what the lawsuit brought by the Students for Fair Admissions is about. The data analysis shows- (TAKING OUT LEGACIES,DONORS, etc) that Asians have to score far higher than other groups ALL ELSE EQUAL. Except for this "personal score."

They analyzed admission data while TAKING OUT legacies, children of staff, etc from the data pool.

I know you're a lawyer and intelligent so you know exactly what I'm saying. So stop being deliberately obtuse and obfuscating the issue with points that NO ONE IS REFUTING.
That's not what the lawsuit is about.

No is claiming that the average Asian test scores are not higher.

The lawsuit alleges discrimination against Asians. To discriminate against them would mean that they are being treated differently from other students. To be treated differently would mean that (1) Given the same criteria Asians are being treated differently under the criteria. It would also mean that (2) Asians are being held to different criteria than other students.

In Circumstance #1, you have to establish the criteria and then establish that the Asian treatment is different. Nowhere is it written that the criteria for admittance to Harvard is that the applicant must have the highest test scores and/or GPA. The criteria for admittance is that you help round out the student body in a way that furthers Harvard's education goals.

So, whenever you discuss GPA's, SAT/ACT scores, you must discuss them within the criteria of rounding out the student body in a way that furthers Harvard's education goals.

In Circumstance #2, you have to establish that there are 2 different criteria in play. But again, there is no criteria that states that Harvard is seeking the highest GPA, SAT/ACT scores. It is not the criteria for Asian students and it is not the criteria for non-Asian students. It simply is not a requirement for admission to Harvard.

The criteria for admission to Harvard is that the student rounds out the student body in a way that furthers Harvard's education goals. This means that you cannot discuss any singular variable. Nor can you discuss any singular student's characteristics in a vacuum. They must be discussed in comparison to the overall Harvard student body neet.

The reason I keep bringing up those other categories is because you keep attempting to discuss the Asian applicants solely in terms of 2 characteristics, the test scores and the personal scores. But to discuss the personal scores you have to unpack what goes into the score in its entirety. To discuss the test scores and the personal scores you have to put them in the context of the entire student body.

For further explanation. Harvard has a humanities department. If 1000 applicants apply for the biology department and one student applies for humanities then the 1 student applying for the humanities has a greater chance of admission than any individual student applying for biology. This is not preferential treatment, it's that the humanities student is facing less competition for admission to that department.

Swinging back to the lawsuit itself. The lawsuit alleges discrimination against Asians. That requires establishing that discrimination, as described above, is taking place even after you account for all of those other things.

So, you cannot say that Asian test scores are really high even after the legacies, donors, athletes, etc. and that it's the other minority students who are the problem. See, those other minority students are also being affected by the legacies, donors, athletes, etc. They are bringing their own strengths and weaknesses to the campus.

Let's make it more concrete. Harvard has a Department of African American Studies. If someone black is applying because that's what they want to major in, they are not taking a seat away from an Asian who wants to major in English - only from an Asian who also wants to major in African American studies. If a Hispanic student wants to major in art, they are not taking a seat away from an Asian student who wants to major in genetics, only from an Asian who wants to major in art.

A student with an interest in the debate club is not taking a seat away from a student with an interest in the chess club. They are taking it away from another student interested in the debate club.

Do you understand? You have to take the entirety of Harvard's academic and non-academic interests and determine if Asians are being discriminated against across the entire spectrum. Focusing on GPA and SAT/ACT scores essentially disregards every other element of Harvard's interests and needs.

This is why you cannot dismiss the donor, athlete, legacies by simply saying that you don't "refute" them. An athlete, with an 83% admission rate, still have to pick a major and still takes up a seat in that major. The same for donors, legacies, the kids from the prep schools. Their impact on the admission class goes beyond their test scores.

The personal score operates on the same criteria...except that you have no idea what goes into the criteria. I keep telling you that it covers far more than the interview (assuming you take the interview since it's not mandatory). Well, what goes into it? You can't just look at the final score and say "these students score lower on this therefore there is discrimination across the admissions apparatus." You have to look at the components of the personal score and see if there's discrimination within those components.

Yes, I am a lawyer. I've been spending weeks trying to explain to you, not if Harvard discriminates or not (I don't know and this case doesn't matter because both sides will appeal if they lose), but that you cannot evaluate the case from the very narrow perspective that you are applying.
 
This isn't exactly true though. Sports are a meritocracy. Getting drafted into a sport isn't nor is getting a chance to play college sports.

2 basketball players. Similar skill. One plays for Duke, the other plays for a D3 program. Which one gets drafted? The guy from Duke. Why? Because Duke has a reputation and D3 programs don't. 2 football players at the same position, one plays for Alabama, the other for the University of Delaware. Which one gets drafted higher - the guy from Bama.

How many great athletes get dumped into JUCO programs because they don't have the grades? When draft day comes up, many of them get overlooked for kids who went to big name programs. And how do you get into big name programs these days? Talent? Sure. But you also need the right connections. Play for the right camps, meet the right guys who can get your name on a coach's radar.

Sports are about athletic ability - right? But if you don't have the academic performance you don't get a scholarship to the schools that can get you drafted. So colleges are recruiting athletes based on something that has nothing to do with athletics. That's not sports meritocracy.

People commonly overlook that. In fact, they often argue that it's perfectly reasonable to recruit for sports based on the non-sport component of the applicant.

So, let's not stretch the sports analogy too far.

My point is simply that in professional sports, where the opportunity to make millions is very realistic, only talent seems to matter, not how diverse your fucking team is. There is very, very little diversity in most sports. Asians are underrepresented by a large margin. But there is no pressure to fix that. Why? Because of how much money is involved. Sponsors, the leagues, the gambling-billions of dollars. No one is going to be able to fuck with that. Again, why? It is a job like any other, requires talent and ability like any other job. But no diversity being forced upon them.

Now any other job, take Silicon Valley for example, there is a big push and lots of criticism because of the lack of diversity. White and Asian males, mostly-and oh my god, we have to do something about that!!! So some Asian male designer of software, will not be hired because the company needs more diversity, even though he is probably a better fit for the job.
 
You don’t know a lot about professional sports. They discriminate all the time. Or did you think black people only just figured out how to throw a football instead of just catching them 10 years ago?

Well, I can count on one hand the number of Asian males in football, basketball, or hockey. White males are not in proportion to the population in basketball, and there is no 13% black in hockey. The bottom line is talent-the hands off approach due to giant sums of money, that allows the sports teams to make an almost entirely black team, or white team. That hands off approach is not permitted in business.
 
In Circumstance #1, you have to establish the criteria and then establish that the Asian treatment is different. Nowhere is it written that the criteria for admittance to Harvard is that the applicant must have the highest test scores and/or GPA. The criteria for admittance is that you help round out the student body in a way that furthers Harvard's education goals.

So, whenever you discuss GPA's, SAT/ACT scores, you must discuss them within the criteria of rounding out the student body in a way that furthers Harvard's education goals.

In Circumstance #2, you have to establish that there are 2 different criteria in play. But again, there is no criteria that states that Harvard is seeking the highest GPA, SAT/ACT scores. It is not the criteria for Asian students and it is not the criteria for non-Asian students. It simply is not a requirement for admission to Harvard.

Again stating the obvious as if it's some new information. Who the hell said Harvard is ONLY looking for the highest test scores? Show me where I said that.

Harvard takes into account grades, scores, extracurriculars, and PERSONAL with recommendation letters and Alumni interviews as supplementary factors.

The Asian students scored higher on average on all other factors except PERSONAL (personal score which includes diversity.)

The lawsuit is alleging Asian students must score much higher on average for every other metric to make up for the lower scores they receive on "personal score."

Swinging back to the lawsuit itself. The lawsuit alleges discrimination against Asians. That requires establishing that discrimination, as described above, is taking place even after you account for all of those other things.

So, you cannot say that Asian test scores are really high even after the legacies, donors, athletes, etc. and that it's the other minority students who are the problem. See, those other minority students are also being affected by the legacies, donors, athletes, etc. They are bringing their own strengths and weaknesses to the campus.

The admissions data brought forth by the Students for Fair Admissions already TAKES INTO ACCOUNT legacies, donors, athletes, etc.

They analyzed the admissions data EXCLUDING legacies, donors, children of staff, etc.

So if you are an Asian student that is NOT a legacy, children of staff, a donor, an athlete, etc, you will have less of a chance to get in than a white/black/latino student that is ALSO NOT a legacy, children of staff, a donor, an athlete, etc.

They isolated the effect on race alone on admissions.

So why do you keep bringing up legacies/donors/etc as if it is pertinent.

Yes we know Legacies or children of donors have an advantage.

Yes we know athletes have an advantage.

Yes we know children of staff have an advantage.

That's not what the lawsuit is about.

This lawsuit is alleging preferential treatment based on race alone.
 
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Well, I can count on one hand the number of Asian males in football, basketball, or hockey. White males are not in proportion to the population in basketball, and there is no 13% black in hockey. The bottom line is talent-the hands off approach due to giant sums of money, that allows the sports teams to make an almost entirely black team, or white team. That hands off approach is not permitted in business.

Did you see the TM Landry story? The biggest problem of AA is that kids who do not deserve to be placed in elite spots will drop out or fail, but they don't care about that part. As long as they get accepted, it doesn't matter after that.
 
Washington State Plans to Restore Affirmative Action
By Scott Jaschik | May 6, 2019

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Legislature repeals ban imposed by voters, but opponents of consideration of race in admissions are already mobilizing for a new vote.

Washington State could become the first state where voters barred public colleges from considering race in admissions to reverse that ban.

Legislation to do so has now been enacted and, in theory, will take effect in a year. The measure says that public colleges and other entities can resume considering race and ethnicity as one factor in decision making on admissions. The measure explicitly states that the universities may not make decisions solely based on race or ethnicity (something that the Supreme Court already bars them from doing).

Twenty years ago, Washington State voters put in place the ban that the Legislature is now lifting. In Washington State, the Legislature has the power to repeal such referenda; in some other states with bans, the state's voters would need to repeal them. But just as voters once decided the issue, they could do so again. Already critics of affirmative action are organizing a campaign to restore the ban. And campus Republican groups are organizing events to oppose the legislative action to restore the consideration of race in admissions.

A petition seeking to keep the ban on affirmative action says, "I-1000 [the measure passed by the Legislature] can be summed up in one sentence: it would abolish the standard of equality for all, regardless of race, as required by I-200, and replace it with a system that uses different rules for people of different races."

The developments in Washington State come at a time when a lawsuit against Harvard University over affirmative action -- if appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court as expected -- could have an impact on colleges nationwide. Washington State shows that the impact varies in part based on state populations and the competitiveness of public colleges and universities.

In the state, about 4 percent of the population is black, 2 percent Native American, 9 percent Asian American and 13 percent Latinx.

The University of Washington's main campus in Seattle is the most competitive in admissions in the state, and the one where Initiative 200, the ban on consideration of race passed in 1998, has had the greatest impact.

The most recent federal data show the university's student body mix has more Asian Americans (25 percent) than their share of the state population. But the shares of white (42 percent), black (3 percent), Latinx (8 percent) and Native American (less than 1 percent) students lag their share of the state population. (The numbers do not add to 100 because of those who don't identify their background, those who identify in multiple categories and so forth.)

A 2006 article in the journal Sociology of Education documented the impact of Initiative 200 on applications to the University of Washington. The article (abstract available here) found that, in the year following passage of the initiative, the percentage of nonwhite new high school graduates who went on to college dropped by two to three percentage points. Statewide, the drop was in part reversed.

The impact was greatest, and was sustained, at the University of Washington, the study found. Black, Latinx and Native American enrollment made up 8.2 percent of freshman enrollment at the University of Washington in the last year before 200 passed. It fell to 5.7 percent in the first class after 200, according to the study, by Susan K. Brown and Charles Hirschman.

The university is holding off on changing policies for now, due to the campaign to reverse the legislative reversal. But officials have spoken out about how the impact of the repealed ban extends beyond admissions, University of Washington officials say.

In remarks last week, Ana Mari Cauce, president of the university, said that "I-200 puts the University of Washington at a competitive disadvantage when seeking to hire the best faculty and staff to lead our university. It also hampers our ability to attract and enroll the strongest students from underrepresented backgrounds, who are so highly sought after by other universities because having a diverse student body creates a richer learning environment for all students.

"As one of our nation’s top research universities, we compete with institutions like Stanford, Texas, Wisconsin and UNC Chapel Hill when trying to attract the most talented faculty to teach and lead cutting-edge research with our students. To those top faculty and staff that we wish to recruit, I-200 sends the message that the UW, and Washington as a whole, does not welcome or value diversity, and when we lose out on attracting these desirable teachers, researchers, innovators and administrators, it is our students and our state that pay the price."

Cauce added that "I-200 also makes it harder to compete for the highest-achieving underrepresented minority students in Washington State, especially when they are middle or upper middle class. These talented and promising students are especially targeted and heavily recruited by private universities as well as public universities in other states, and when they leave our state to attend college, they are less likely to return. This costs our work force and our innovation-driven economy at a time when we’re recognizing the need for more diversity in the tech and health industries."

Debate Over a Bake Sale

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The Legislature's action has prompted some to organize petition drives for a new referendum.

The College Republicans at the University of Washington are backing that effort and held a bake sale Friday to support it. As in similar bake sales to oppose affirmative action, the Republicans set prices based on race (see sign at right).

The group explained the approach this way: "Our bake sale priced are based on affirmative action, which as of last week is a legal policy in the state of Washington. I-1000 allows for race to be a factor in college admissions. This is a policy that has historically discriminated against Asian American students and blatantly allows the government to discriminate based on race. We are against this blatantly racist law and we hope to see it repealed."

https://www.insidehighered.com/admi...-legislature-votes-restore-affirmative-action
 
Diversity By Decree: Is NYC's New Policy For Elite High Schools Constitutional?



New York City’s specialized high schools (SHS), which include Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, are among America’s most prestigious.

Asian-Americans consistently outperform other groups on the admissions tests for these schools, and now constitute a majority of their students. In an effort to increase diversity, New York has changed its admissions policies, starting in 2020, to effectively bar applicants from predominantly Asian-American middle schools from 20% of the seats offered at SHS.

In response, parents and Asian-American advocacy groups, represented by the nonprofit Pacific Legal Foundation, have sued, arguing that the new policy amounts to unconstitutional discrimination. On February 21, Manhattan Institute hosted a panel to discuss the mandate through the lens of constitutional law, education policy, and real-world effects on students.
 
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At forum on NYC's high school admissions, frustration rules
The mayor and schools chancellor found little support for their plan to eliminate an admissions exam for the city’s specialized high schools.
By Chris Fuchs | April 12, 2019

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New York City’s mayor and schools chancellor faced harsh criticism at a community forum in Queens on Thursday night as speaker after speaker pilloried their plan to eliminate an admissions exam for the city’s specialized high schools.

“Not only is the rollout racist, but the whole concept is racist,” said David Lee, an alumnus of Brooklyn Technical High School, one of eight highly selective schools where the sole criterion for admission is passing a competitive test.

Lee’s remarks, and others like them, drew applause from a packed room on the second floor of Queens Borough Hall.

The forum was the first in a series of community meetings on diversity in specialized high school admissions. It was held by state senators, including John Liu, a Democrat from Queens who chairs the Senate’s New York City education committee.

“This is necessary because last year the city proposed a plan without including many parts of the city,” Liu said at the beginning of the meeting. “In particular, the Asian community was completely excluded, not inadvertently, but intentionally and deliberately.”

How and whether to diversify the city’s highly selective public schools — where three in five students are Asian — is a question that has touched off fierce debate across the city.

Anger has become particularly intense in the Asian American community, whose members rallied outside Queens Borough Hall before the forum as police officers looked on.

In June, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza announced a plan to phase out the required exam for specialized high schools and replace it with a model that admits top students from each of the city’s middle schools.

The city says the move will help boost diversity at specialized high schools, where blacks and Latinos account for just 10 percent of students, even as they make up nearly 70 percent of the city’s overall student population. Asian Americans are about 14 percent of the city’s students.

Because the Specialized High School Admissions Test is written into state law, ending it requires legislative approval. Bills have been introduced in both the state Assembly and Senate.

Some attendees expressed support for the mayor’s plan.

“It's very offensive to hear all the racial coding that African Americans are not good enough, if more of us are accepted into the specialized schools that it’s going to bring down the standards,” said Mary Alice Miller, who had tested into a specialized school.

But many said they disagreed with de Blasio’s call to end the test.

Horace Davis, a Brooklyn Tech graduate and president of the Caribbean American Society of New York, told attendees that blacks and Hispanics accounted for many of the students at his school during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

He said the fact that the admissions process remains the same suggests the test is not to blame for the lack of diversity.

He was one of several critics who accused New York City’s school system of failing black and Hispanic students long before they get to high school. The city, they said, should create more gifted and talented programs in boroughs with underserved communities and establish more specialized high schools.

“Underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics at specialized high schools is a symptom of a much larger problem,” said Davis, who noted that his child now attends his alma mater.

City Department of Education spokesperson Doug Cohen said in an email before the forum that “a single test doesn’t capture the full talent of students.”

“Our proposal will expand opportunity for the highest-performing students in middle schools across the City and make our specialized high schools academically stronger,” he said.

A study from the New York City Independent Budget Office, released in February, found that if the system proposed by de Blasio were fully in place, blacks would make up around 19 percent of all specialized high school offers and Latinos 27 percent.

Compared to actual enrollment numbers for the 2017-18 year, that’s about a fivefold increase for blacks and more than a fourfold increase for Latinos.

Asians would still account for the largest share of offers, though their numbers would be cut in half, from 61 to 31 percent.

For fall 2019 admissions, around 11 percent of offers went to blacks and Latinos combined, while 51 percent went to Asians and 29 percent to whites, city Department of Education data show. A total of 27,521 students sat for the exam.

For many Asian American parents, having their children earn a spot in a New York City specialized high school is crucial to ensuring their academic future.

“Taking away the test will marginalize opportunities for thousands of students, mostly low-income and mostly immigrant,” Lee said. “At this particular time, it also will marginalize mostly Asian students.”
The Test
The Calandra-Hecht Act of 1971, a New York state law, established the three-hour exam as the sole method by which students were admitted to what were then only three specialized schools: Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech.

A fourth, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, does not use the exam, instead basing admissions on a competitive audition and academic records.

The city Department of Education has since added five more schools to the list requiring the test.

Over the last few decades, schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech have seen their Asian American enrollment soar, as more and more people of Asian descent, among them first-generation immigrants, move to the city.

Asians account for 74 percent of students at Stuyvesant, 66 percent at Bronx Science and 61 percent at Brooklyn Tech, according to school data.

By contrast, blacks and Latinos combined make up just 4 percent of students at Stuyvesant, 9 percent at Bronx Science and 13 percent at Brooklyn Tech.

The percentage of white students was 19 percent at Stuyvesant and 23 percent at Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, figures showed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-...h-school-admissions-frustration-rules-n993966
 
Amid Racial Divisions, Mayor’s Plan to Scrap Elite School Exam Fails
By Eliza Shapiro and Vivian Wang | June 24, 2019

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Richard A. Carranza, the city schools chancellor, insisted last week that the plan to eliminate the entrance exam that dictates admission into Stuyvesant High School and the city’s other top public high schools was gaining traction.

“There’s some real momentum,” Mr. Carranza said at the State Capitol.

Two days later, the bill died. The Legislature adjourned, having taken no action on the specialized school exam.

The contentious bill divided many of New York’s families along racial lines: Black and Hispanic students have seen their numbers at the prized schools plummet over the last two decades, while some Asian families argued that the mayor’s plan discriminated against the low-income Asian students who are now a majority at the schools.

But the extent of the proposal’s radioactivity was unusual in Albany, particularly during a session that was marked by the newly Democrat-controlled body’s willingness to take up issues that had long been considered off-limits.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to scrap the entrance exam attracted national fanfare when it was announced, but it soon collided with stubborn realities.

The mayor, a Democrat, has few friends in Albany, and did not make new ones in his approach to the bill, which some lawmakers dismissed as grandstanding. It touched off the same racial divisions among black, Hispanic and Asian lawmakers as it had among parents in New York City. And a well-funded opposition effort led by a billionaire graduate of one of the specialized schools sent African-American parents to lawmakers’ doors, urging them to reject the bill.

A month before the end of the legislative session, Mr. de Blasio announced he would run for president, a bid that has taken him to Iowa and South Carolina on most weekends since.

“When something is so poorly done, it never had a shot — and rightfully so,” said Senator John Liu, a Queens Democrat who graduated from a specialized school, the Bronx High School of Science, and holds a key position on an education committee.

Mr. de Blasio and others have argued that the only way to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the schools is to eliminate the exam. This year, only seven black students received offers to Stuyvesant High School, the most selective of the specialized schools, out of 895 seats. Albany has controlled the exam since 1971. Mr. de Blasio wanted to replace the test with a system that offered seats to top performers at every city middle school.

Some black and Hispanic students have said they did not even know the exam existed or could not afford preparation for the test, which quizzes students on concepts they may not learn in middle school.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio, with his wife, Chirlane McCray, at Brooklyn Arts and Science Elementary School. Mr. de Blasio had championed a bill to eliminate the entrance exam at elite public high schools.


But the bill never made it to a floor vote, and only passed out of the Assembly’s education committee last week after several of the committee’s Democrats aired grievances with the legislation and voted against it.

There were no rallies in support of the mayor’s plan on the Capitol’s grand staircase and almost no lobbyists pushed it — except Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Carranza and their staff members. During a visit to the Capitol last week, Mr. Carranza said he had not spoken with the bill’s main sponsor, Assemblyman Charles Barron of Brooklyn, about whether the bill might be brought to the floor.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — a fellow Democrat who is a frequent adversary of the mayor — spent no political capital in support of the bill. The Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat from Westchester, never released a public statement on the proposal. And the Senate Democrats, despite holding several hearings in the city, never discussed it as a group.

Senator Shelley Mayer, a Democrat from Yonkers who is the chairwoman of the Senate’s education committee, said she had “serious process concerns” about how the mayor’s plan was introduced. Many Asian parents had fumed that Mr. de Blasio did not consult them, or offer concessions to Asian families.

The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, appeared somewhat more willing to consider the bill. He held a hearing in Manhattan, and said in March that he wanted to see schools that were “more reflective of the city’s population.” But in the end he never publicly took a side.

Perhaps sensing some of his colleagues’ skittishness on the issue, Mr. Heastie did not bring it to the floor of the Assembly for consideration after it passed out of the education committee, dashing Mr. de Blasio’s hopes of even a symbolic vote in favor of his plan.

“It’s clear that our members are very thoughtful about this issue and want to find ways to provide all students an opportunity to get the best education possible,” Mr. Heastie said Friday.

Ultimately, only a handful of legislators were willing to publicly back the mayor’s plan.

“We’re going to sit here and say we’re progressive. Are we really progressive, or do we just want to kick the can down the line?” asked Assemblyman Al Taylor, a Manhattan Democrat, last week during the education committee’s meeting.

After considerable effort, Mr. de Blasio convinced the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Legislature’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Caucus to support the plan.

But ambivalence and pockets of support were drowned out by some lawmakers’ staunch opposition.

“Racial divisions have been instigated and fomented by this administration,” Mr. Liu said on Friday.

Still, he said he had heard wide agreement that the admissions numbers are unacceptable and believes there are other ways to increase black and Hispanic enrollment. “This debate is not dead. It’s just beginning,” he said.

In casting his “no” vote during the education committee meeting earlier this week, Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat, accused the mayor of creating a “nasty narrative” that pitted Asian families against black and Hispanic parents.

Mr. Carranza denied that legislators were avoiding the topic because of its explosiveness.

“This is a tough conversation, and we acknowledge that,” he told reporters at the Capitol.

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An April town hall meeting in Queens offered a window into how much passion — and tension — the elite schools can evoke.

Speaking before a packed room, Mary Alice Miller, a black alumna of Stuyvesant, said the arguments against change were filled with “racial coding.”

“It’s very offensive to hear all the racial coding: that African-Americans are not good enough, if more of us are accepted into the schools, the specialized schools will bring down their standards.”

“The schools are a public good for everybody,” she added. “We do not want to be displaced from the schools that we helped build.”

Before the meeting, Bernard Chow, a Queens activist, spoke against the mayor’s proposal.

“All the hard-working students, the students who are willing to give up basketball and stay home and study,” he said, speaking over “keep the test” chants and banging drums. “Those students who are willing to give up video games, and look at the book, it’s unfair to them.”

Wai Wah Chin, president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, likened Mr. de Blasio’s plan to the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1800s law restricting Asian immigration.

A few minutes later, Dulce Marquez, a recent New York high school graduate, called the entrance exam “a product of institutional racism.”

Now, with the proposal to change specialized school admissions dead in Albany, Mr. de Blasio will likely face pressure to confront the enormity of the city’s school segregation problem.

And he may face new questions about why he has not changed admissions at the five specialized schools — not including Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or Brooklyn Technical High School — that the city does control.

Though the city has acknowledged that it could eliminate the test at the other five specialized schools, the mayor has said he does not want a two-tiered system.

Even under the mayor’s plan to expand a program aimed at enrolling more low-income students in the specialized schools, offers to black and Hispanic students will increase to only 16 percent from 10 percent. Black and Hispanic students make up nearly 70 percent of the school system as a whole.

“Cities all over the nation have turned away from completely unfiltered, high-stakes testing and our state remains stuck in the past,” Mr. de Blasio said Friday. “Session may have ended, but our quest to provide our kids with the best opportunity possible has not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/nyregion/specialized-schools-nyc-deblasio.html
 
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Such an interesting issue.

As one of the people interviewed noted when pointing out the drop in enrolment among black students, the best place to try and intervene to correct the decline is much earlier in the system, before students have fallen behind, or early enough on that gifted children receive the preparation they need.

To me, that seems like the obviously better path, so much so that even if the admissions test was scrapped, I would personally still want the earlier-intervention instituted, as it would have a more lasting and important effect, even if the admissions numbers had been “shored up” by other means.

Of course the downside of that plan is that it takes time. It is not going to effect children taking tests next year, only ones coming into the education system next year. And even then if it was immediately implemented (oh, and a plan was researched and-designed and rolled out well) it would likely miss the mark and require many years of work and adjustment (what are the chances of getting something that large and complicated right on the first go?).


So you could either 1- begin to fix the system and wait to see the effects on admissions numbers or 2- fix the admissions numbers and hope that fixes the system.

1’s not guaranteed to work, at all if ever, and 2 is guaranteed to “work” immediately.
 
Its interesting. The idea of making people better seems to be dead. Its now more about leveling things out. I see this in schools too, where exceptional kids are no longer identified but instead waste away with the fuck offs.
 
Its interesting. The idea of making people better seems to be dead. Its now more about leveling things out. I see this in schools too, where exceptional kids are no longer identified but instead waste away with the fuck offs.


Yup, it's no longer about who is the most qualified, or best person for the job.

but rather, what is "most fair" and all about "equity."

This is precisely why leftists like Pan and many others hate Asians.
 
Yup, it's no longer about who is the most qualified, or best person for the job.

but rather, what is "most fair" and all about "equity."

This is precisely why leftists like Pan and many others hate Asians.
My daughter is in 7th grade and was reading Tale of Despereaux for school. She read that shit in the second grade. She's doing math she did in elementary school too. Its bullshit.
 
My daughter is in 7th grade and was reading Tale of Despereaux for school. She read that shit in the second grade. She's doing math she did in elementary school too. Its bullshit.

so what you're saying is...your daughter is a genius?
 
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