“Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots” (nytimes):
Students gain entry into the specialized schools by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English. Some students spend months or even years preparing for the exam. Stuyvesant, the most selective of the schools, has the highest cutoff score for admission, and now has the lowest percentage of black and Hispanic students of any of New York City’s roughly 600 public high schools.
My comment on the piece:
What if you heard about a reporter and some editors who hung around outside an academic testing center and noted the skin color of every person who failed a test? And then published the observation that people with a particular skin color were very likely to fail?
If that isn’t racist, what would be?
Readers: What does this story even mean? If Elizabeth Warren had gotten into Stuyvesant, would the NYT have included her in their Native American participation statistics? Who is the arbiter of race or skin color in the NYC public schools? Also, how does it help a group of people when there is a front page story underlining for employers the correlation between membership in this group and low academic achievement?
Thought Experiment: Suppose that Fox News had run a story revealing the same statistics and then Donald Trump had referenced that story in a Tweet. What would the NYT Editorial Board have said?
Related:
“Also, how does it help a group of people when there is a front page story underlining for employers the correlation between membership in this group and low academic achievement?”
This will be taken by many readers of the NYTimes as evidence that “the system is failing” these groups. Therefore something should be done to “fix” the system, to the benefit of the under represented groups. How do you interpret it?
Patrick: We don’t have to guess how readers interpret a NYT article. We can look at the top-voted Reader Picks comments.
The top-ranked comment says “The central question here is why are so few black students doing well on the exam? It can not be that the Asian students have some kind of magic solution to acing these exams. If it is a matter of discipline, perseverance and hard work, then they deserve entrance and the students having difficulty getting in would be better served by having programs available to them to help them prepare to get into a specialized high school. Being prepared for a rigorous program involves so much more than acing an exam. The preparation begins in the home at birth, reading to the child, taking him or her to museums, family discussions of world events. This does not require affluence, but it does require a family system that provides the emotional support for the child to do his or her best in school.”
(i.e., she blames black families, not “the system”)
#2 in popularity: “De Blasio lives in a fantasy world in which black and Hispanic students are being discriminated against, while Asian students are somehow not — a notion which, speaking as someone who is himself Hispanic, I find laughable. The reality is that these kids are leaving elementary school unprepared, and no, that is not because the schools they go to are magically bad — if you sent an Asian kid to the same school, he would do fine. A teacher who worked with poor kids in New York City schools once told me that when unqualified minority kids are put in an accelerated program, they fail and then feel that they’ve failed their families.”
(i.e., Asians are better)
#3: “Black and Hispanic students are not ‘grappling with increasingly steep odds of admission.’ They are grappling with the same odds of admission – that’s why there is a single race-blind test. The question is why are equally disadvantaged children from other ethnic communities passing this test?”
(i.e., Asians are better; separately, I think the commenter is wrong about the admission odds. Due to population growth, the odds of getting into an elite program are, in fact, “increasingly steep”)
#4: “Reading this made me wonder about the demographics of the NBA.”
(i.e., the NYT point of view is ridiculed with an example)
From “Asian man”: “That means they got to study harder and make academics their priority if they want to get in those schools. Plain and simple.”
Jose: “Right. Tarnish the black students who actually made the cut on merit with the stigma of affirmative-action.” Reply: “This is what’s been happening for the last several years in industry with diversity hiring quotas. The few that are actually qualified are distrusted by their coworkers.”
Would you say that the reputation of African-Americans for academic achievement was enhanced in the minds of these commenters and the thousands of people who clicked “Recommend” on their comments?
Hey Philip,
You presented comments that are “Readers Picks”. Did you happen to notice how different the “NYT Picks” sound? Also, when you click on Comments, the “NYT Picks” come up first, it took me a minute to realize there were other lists.
#1 “New York City consistently ranks among the top three segregated school systems in the United States. Period. It’s been that way for a long time.
New York City benefited from slavery and its history is such that the city did not vote for Abraham Lincoln, and later, the apartheid of Jim Crow laws informed how the city treated its Black citizens, including vis-a-vis education.
…”
continues on in that vein.
#2 “Unfortunately, few address the elephant in the room.
The New York school system has always been one of the most segregated systems in the nation.
Too many people suggest a solution to avoid what is obvious: so-called “merit” based testing has historically been used to exclude Blacks from everything from voting to access to school systems that have been structurally devised to benefit those who do not live in largely Black neighborhoods.
We need to get rid of the so-called “merit” based testing, and, implement affirmative access that diversify these elite schools.
…”
“NYT Picks” is not evidence of how readers understand the article. They’re selections made by the same people who write and publish the original story. It isn’t surprising to me that out of 1,500+ comments they were able to find a few that support a particular angle they are trying to convey to the masses. But despite the prominence given to these official picks, and therefore the accessibility of the “recommend” button for those picks, the unwashed masses up-voted comments with very different themes.
Where this dichotomy is most apparent is on a NYT pro-immigration article. The Reader Picks will often be hostile to low-skill immigration and/or say that the U.S. is overpopulated and doesn’t need any immigration. Look at
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-crossing-increase.html (NYT #1 pick is about how bad Trump is; #2 is about how Trump’s policies are failures; a bit lower down: NYT #4: “The US ought to follow all international rules related to providing asylum to immigrants.
Also, conditions in Honduras and El Salvador are dire.” Readers’ #1 pick: “76,000 people illegally entering the country in February is not good for anyone.”; Readers’ #3 pick: “Detaining migrants and then releasing them INTO the USA makes no sense. Of course they will disappear for years and then reappear a decade later demanding citizenship. It’s insane…! Send them home.”; Readers’ #4: “Without a wall, wouldn’t folks just overwhelm the border?”)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/opinion/australia-manus-nauru-refugees.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/nyregion/family-separation-hiv.html
(they apparently had to shut down comments quickly due to reader hostility toward immigrants that need costly medical care: “USA should not be dumping ground for everyone who faces tough circumstances at home.”)
@philg:
“taking him or her to museums, ”
The reader’s top comment used hate-speech! If you’re not using the singular they (them), you are violating a subject (object) that decided to change gender identity.
My solution is more practical, if there is any doubt about the gender, I would use the appropriate pronoun ‘it’!
Halfhearted, Lukewarm Exegesis: part of the meaning and intent is to jack Mayor de Blasio up on his pledge to diversify the elite schools, and so this article will hold his feet to the fire. You can’t expect things to get done if nobody complains! Now people can write letters and ask this question at press conferences, on Twitter, on television, the radio and during his still-imaginary Presidential campaign (see below.) Once the problem has been identified and an article has appeared in the New York Times, it becomes a part of the Record and legitimized as a line of questioning. That’s one of the most important functions of any big city newspaper: to legitimize issues. People can call the school, they can put pressure on the Mayor’s office and the heat can be turned up until someone starts to dance.
Conjectural Window Dressing: This is still a part of the (waning) power factor of large, dominant newspapers like the NYT. If they don’t talk about it, to some extent even to this day, it doesn’t exist.
Hypothetical Blather: it’s also worth noting that this article appears today, in the immediate context of the growing chatter about de Blasio contemplating a 2020 Presidential election bid. A lot of self-described “very, very” progressives don’t want to see him run. He is going to be testing lots of waters and reading lots of tea leaves and feeling a lot of gut impulses in the next few weeks and months to make a decision. I think this is the perfect time for the New York Times to turn the “You Didn’t Deliver on your Elite High School Diversity Pledge!” screws.
https://thebulwark.com/bill-de-blasio-2020-is-a-terrible-idea/
Finally, I didn’t read the article, because I don’t subscribe to the Times. Did they mention what race/ethnicity/etc./etc. the rest of the kids at Stuyvesant are? Do Asian Americans get in disproportionately to their demographics?
Hi Phobophobia,
“Did they mention what race/ethnicity/etc./etc. the rest of the kids at Stuyvesant are? Do Asian Americans get in disproportionately to their demographics?”
There was a graphic in the article that showed in 2019, at Stuyvesant High School: 7 out of 895 students are black, 66% were Asian, 22% were White.
In contrast in New York City, 44.6% of the population is white, 25.1% is black, and 11.8% are of Asian descent.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/new-york-city-population/
So the Asian proportion at Stuyvesant is almost 6X their population proportion while:
Whites are about 1/2.
Blacks about 1/32.
Another way of looking at those numbers: a random Asian kid is around 180X more likely to go Stuyvesant than a random Black kid,
Companies should hire asians and avoid blacks unless forced or desperate?
“Companies should hire asians and avoid blacks unless forced or desperate?”
I strongly suspect that was not what the NYTimes had in mind.
Thanks Patrick. AOC is all over it like brown on wild rice today, or white on rice if you like white rice. Or yellow on rice if you’re into saffron. Anyway, it’s a staple for her today, she’s boiling mad:
https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/19/new-york-school-black-students/
Eine Antwort auf dein Gedankenexperiment: “Trump Attacks Predominantly Asian-American High School?”
Since 74% of Stuyvesant’s students are Asian-American, if de Blasio decides to diversify the school by force, will they then have to bus a bunch of those students to a different school to keep the overall enrollment where it is, or will they just increase the class sizes to accommodate the diversity students?
Among those kids who actually sat for the test, the acceptance ratio for Asian kids is about 29% while that for Black kids is about 3.5%. See below.
https://twitter.com/Bklyndad718/status/1108001239349035009
Thanks Yue Zhang, interseting numbers.
The head of NYC public schools has been very upset over this under-representation of minorities in the specialized schools and wants to eliminate the exam. He probably would have already if it wasn’t for a lawsuit brought against this by an Asian parents association. What these politicians miss or won’t tell the people they claim they are trying to help is that there is no magic in these schools. A kid who otherwise couldn’t pass the exam is not suddenly going to be on the fast track to success if they are just allowed in. What makes a school special is the quality of the students attending there. The highest performing students will demand and usually get the best out of their teachers. Putting a student in an environment where they cannot keep up does no favor to that student.
Hi demetri,
“The highest performing students will demand and usually get the best out of their teachers. Putting a student in an environment where they cannot keep up does no favor to that student.”
That might depend on the culture of the school. My sister was a teacher in a California public school system. She said her mission as a teacher was “to save the at-risk child”. The top half of her class was going to getting into college anyway, they could learn whatever they needed there. So she said she basically ignored them. She believed that was the philosophy of most of her colleagues as well.
The culture of an elite school like Stuyvesant currently might be very different. But if admission is changed so that is no longer based solely on an exam, maybe the culture will change to be more like what my sister described in California?
My point exactly. When you mix students of different abilities teachers will have to ease up so that some of them aren’t too harshly graded. I would expect most teachers to adjust the speed and difficulty of the material when most of the students are easily mastering the material.
“My sister was a teacher in a California public school system. She said her mission as a teacher was “to save the at-risk child”. The top half of her class was going to getting into college anyway, they could learn whatever they needed there.”
Really an argument for having multiple educational tracks instead.
What does this story even mean? If Elizabeth Warren had gotten into Stuyvesant, would the NYT have included her in their Native American participation statistics? Who is the arbiter of race or skin color in the NYC public schools? Also, how does it help a group of people when there is a front page story underlining for employers the correlation between membership in this group and low academic achievement?
What meaning are you looking for with these silly questions? Going on about Elizabeth Warren in this way is never amusing and makes no point. Generally people probably identify their own race when filling out forms and signing up for examinations. Are you not aware of that?
The article covers controversial proposal put forward by the mayor. There’s no way to write about it without mentioning the exam score issue.
“Going on about Elizabeth Warren in this way is never amusing and makes no point.”
No, what point could it possibly make?
Blacks can go to Harvard with 1100 SAT. https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sat-cutoff-scores-based-on-race/
Why study for SHSAT and work four years at Stuy when all you need is 1100?
Hi HomeBoy,
A couple of quotes from the nypost article you linked to:
“He said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600,”
“Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.”
That 1100 score gets blacks a recruitment letter, admission is a different story:
“A Crimson analysis of the previously confidential dataset — which spans admissions cycles starting with the Class of 2000 and ends with the cycle for the Class of 2017 — revealed that Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. Every section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800.
By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704.”
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/
So the average SAT score for math and verbal combined for blacks would be around 1408. That’s lower than whites at 1490 and Asians at 1543 but much higher than 1100.
I don’t think the act of observing the effects of racism is itself racist. In fact, we actually have to do it if we are to have some metric for determining what anti-racist measures are effective.
That being said, the NYT does take a weird glee in reporting some of these studies. How many minute breakdowns of the data on this topic have they done in the past few years?
The predominantly Asian-American students at Stuyvesant High School have done the impossible: they have proven that high achievement, studying hard, working hard with the support of their families and placing a premium on excellence is ***guaranteed*** to result in being labeled an “unjust” example of what is wrong with America in the eyes of the Newspaper of Record, Bill de Blasio and AOC. I hope their families take note of what is happening, fight for their kids if they have to, and get them the hell out of New York.
Also: having a 106 average IQ genetically passed down from your parents doesn’t hurt either. Doubtful any amount of studying, hard work, or family support for anyone born into an 85 IQ demographic is going to compete with that.
Gee, 106 doesn’t sound like a very high IQ test score. Kids with that score probably don’t get into those selective schools.
Some first-hand observations of the process as a parent if a white kid not quite smart enough and insufficiently tutored to make the cut.
Test prep is essential to get over the hump. The scoring process is complicated and opaque. the test preparation offered by the public schools is crap. You have to shell out your own cash to pay for private classes and tutoring for a chance to get in, unless you are a super-genius, and even then the verbal portion consists of material and questions the right answers to which require a suspension of understanding of good English prose to get right. E.B White would be appalled.
I would be interested in learning how many of the kids that got in used performance-enhancing drugs like ritalin and adderall. My observation is that quite a few of them do.
Keep in mind that all the kids admitted are the cream of the crop of their neighborhoods. The reason that people are so desperate to get their kids into the specialized high schools is because the regular high schools are nightmares filled with the Asians (A very broad category that includes those coming from Bangladesh to China to Vietnam) and Hispanics and Blacks who don’t make the cut. Enough of these dummies are dumb as bricks and a burden on the school system and their fellow students who actually wants to learn.
Anyone with money who can’t get their kids into a decent high school moves to Long Island or Westchester, or sends them to a private school within the city.
I know students with perfect (800) SAT scores with only standard high school preparatory classes and a consistent personal work, with some parent checks care from time to time (maybe semi-annual or at best bi-monthly events). I strongly doubt that children of poor South East Asian immigrants whose parents are working food and garment industries and such and immigrated here with non-existing English skills spend a lot on math and English tutoring.
“I would be interested in learning how many of the kids that got in used performance-enhancing drugs like ritalin and adderall. My observation is that quite a few of them do.”
Good point. As I understand it, suitable diagnoses can also be used to request favorable testing environments.
It’s also worth noting that the same drugs are used by academics, all the way to tenure. We can wonder what the effect is on science.
I am not from the US. Can someone explain to me
1) why Asian Americans are not a minority? why not? If Asian Americans were, in fact, a minority, overall ‘minorities’ would be doing pretty well in these schools.
2) why is it ok to hate and be jealous of Asian Americans? if something is done for minorities and Asian Americans do well, they were, apparently, not the intended recipient. If Asian Americans do well even without any minority focused intervention it is apparently even worse.
Care to explain?
Minority in the US seems to be defined as groups that underperform. Jews from example don’t receive minority status notwithstanding that they make up about 2% of the US population. In fact blacks and Hispanics make up the majority of NYC residents. From a mathematical perspective that is. Do you get it now, Frederico?
Jack, by your measure whites are an underperforming minority (especially in NYC). Also you add a new facet in terms of minority definition — religion. I was not aware that qualifies (it is not in the NYT article).
You do not explain though how and why the woke do not celebrate asian achievement as the achievement of a minority. If anything the woke are hostile to asians that I can see.
The Stuy test is an IQ test (mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension) and IQ is way off limits. Give enough money to the welfare state and it can accomplish anything in terms of molding human beings. The pathetic racism of the NYT, denigrating poor Asians who study hard and are smart and may actually make a contribution to the US, is shall we say unfortunate.
I doubt that Stuyvesant acceptance criteria are rigorous. I attended strong engineering college post-admission events where audience was asked who was Congressional Merit Scholarship Finalist. Under 30% of those graduated from Stuyvesant who were present raised hands. Congressional Merit Scholarship is based on PSAT score and finalists are calculated on state basis. In that year, New York cut off finalist score was significantly lower than those of Massachusetts. PSAT is a standard multiple choice math and English in SAT format and it is relatively easy for intelligent students to score near the top. There are rare near savants that are very good at their narrow field and do not have good math or language skills but they are rare diamonds in the rough, and as a rule do not go through rigorous training to pass entrance examinations to prestigious school. We should expect most of Stuyvesant students do excellent on PSAT.
How did you measure what you did? by looking at the raised hands, memorising the faces and tracking down the school of provenance (how and why did you have this information?)?
Federico,
Admissions officer asked who graduated from special schools few questions prior, to highlight college exclusivity. Stuyvesant graduated raised their hands. They occupied 2 rows down my aisle in front of me, obviously they sat together since they knew each other. I think most of them were semi-finalists but being finalist is not rocket science..
I helped tutor my daughter for both the PSAT and the SHSAT before she took them. From the study materials and my daughter’s experience on the actual exams we both agreed that the SHSAT is much harder than the PSAT.
The Stuyvesant admission is not rigorous at all. In fact, it it rigged!!
My best friend’s daughter applied and failed the entrance exam last year. This is not fair! And where is Toucan Sam when you need him most?
East Asians are a bad race, they are not progressive enough for a true racial minority as they just don’t protest much. Therefore they are racists: just ask de Blasio, an advocate for the higher education quota.. Maybe having separate drinking fountains is the natural next step.
Many comments about how critical test preparation is. Not true in most cases. My kid got into Hunter College HS in NYC and never practiced for the test. Smart kids are smart, period (just got 170Q and 168V in the GRE, again, not test preparation). Test preparation is key for knowledge tests and certainly you need to know math and have a good command of English to be accepted to those schools, but smart, hard working kids have that without having to prepare for the entrance tests.
Rather than worrying about a few schools for excellent students, NYC should work on improving the “other” public schools, many of then horrible. A good first step would be to get rid of incompetent teachers (foreign language teachers who don’t speak the languages they teach, history teachers who confuse the ancient Romans and the Vikings, and math teachers who cannot solve a quadratic equation, by the way, the first two kinds also teach at the top public schools).