Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! (official U.S. government web site on the subject) This is when non-Asian American say-gooders get to lump together nearly 5 billion disparate people under the all-look-same doctrine. Folks who grew up next door to Idi Amin in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia can celebrate their kinship with folks who grew up on Mangareva.
Let’s look at a story from last month… “Only 8 Black Students Are Admitted to Stuyvesant High School” (NYT):
Once again, tiny numbers of Black and Latino students received offers to attend New York City’s elite public high schools.
Only 9 percent of offers made by elite schools like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science went to Black and Latino students this year, down from 11 percent last year. Only eight Black students received offers to Stuyvesant out of 749 spots, and only one Black student was accepted into Staten Island Technical High School, out of 281 freshman seats.
Over half of the 4,262 offers this year went to Asian students. … The percentage of Black and Latino enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical High School has hit its lowest point in the city’s recorded history in the last 10 years, a trend that has accelerated during the last several years in particular.
The city’s new chancellor, Meisha Porter, called on the state to eliminate the exam in a statement Thursday. “I know from my 21 years as an educator that far more students could thrive in our specialized high schools, if only given the chance,” she said. “Instead, the continued use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test will produce the same unacceptable results over and over again.”
[Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir] and his partner in the initiative, former Citigroup chairman Richard D. Parsons, promised to shower test preparation companies with money to better prepare Black and Latino students for the exam.
Despite over $750,000 spent on test prep over the last two years, most of which was funneled to existing nonprofit programs across the city, their plan has not made a dent in the numbers.
Discrimination against Asians is legal (see Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard) and Asian success is, as the top NYC school bureaucrat says, “unacceptable” to non-Asians, yet the comparatively unintelligent non-Asians can’t seem to get their discrimination dials set correctly.
Given that attending college doesn’t help the average person learn (see my review of Academically Adrift), I wonder if discrimination against Asians will drive them to learn so much prior to age 18 that employers will hire them straight from high school. Isn’t that how professional sports sometimes work? The best players are hired before college graduation, right?
Related:
- Oberlin College and how to meet women in New York City quotes Gary Shteyngart: “Whereas in Stuyvesant I was at the bottom of my class, at Oberlin I can maintain a nearly perfect average while being drunk and stoned all day long.”
According to Thomas Sowell, himself admitted to Stuy, African American enrollment in Stuy in 1980 was about 10%, similar to their number in the general population. Today is is zero or close to zero since what is counted as Black includes recent immigrants from the Caribbean and children of mixed marriages. Presumably the cause of this reduction in admissions is a larger influx of higher IQ Asians since 1980 (though at the same time there has been an outflow from the NYC public school system of high IQ Jews) and the deterioration of inner city black culture perhaps exacerbated by a deterioration in inner city education. The exam is essentially an IQ test so it is unlikely that test prep accomplishes much except perhaps at the margin. It is also unlikely that African Americans had more test prep in 1980 than today. Given the demographics of NYC and its public school system, where about 85% of the students are black or Hispanic, it seems unlikely that the specialized high schools can continue in their present form.
I am pro rigorous testing but given that only a fraction (a significant fraction of course) of Stuyvesant school students are National Merit scholars or finalists (i.e more then half of Stuyvesant students did not do well enough on easy basic PSAT test) and past cheating scandals at Stuyvesant statement “I know from my 21 years as an educator that far more students could thrive in our specialized high schools, if only given the chance,” is not far off, but not for a very good reason.
Why nobody is talking about federal Jewish American Heritage Month which is upon us?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_American_Heritage_Month
In all 15 years of it being a thing I have not ever received an Jewish American Heritage Month email from HR, PR or any Facebook virtue signaler.
I am not looking forward to another annoyance but it just unfair.
LSI: Fascinating! This raises so many questions. Why is there no Buddhist American Heritage Month? Can we celebrate the achievements of https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-donald-trump-administration ? If Donald Trump did not talk, post, or tweet (when that was still possible for him) about this, was that a dog whistle to his Jew-hating base?
Philip, great idea about establishing Buddhist American Heritage Month.
It definitely falls under “an interesting idea every three months” of this blog’s motto.
Thanks for pointing out https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-donald-trump-administration I am starting celebrating them and will virtue signal them whenever I can. However why do you perpetuate a lie about supposedly Donald Trump’s “Jew-hating base”? Was it intended as an irony? In several of Trump rallies attended by his base that I watched he spoke of his support of Israel and presented Ivanka and bot acts were met with mighty applause.
Surprisingly many people that I spoke to had no idea about facts and figures of Jews that affected America positively (they thought they were not Jews) but they knew about Jewish individuals that affected America not in the best way, so basically G. W. Bush’s idea is not that bad at the core but making it part of official ceremony probably killed it.