“Boston Overhauls Admissions to Exclusive Exam Schools” (New York Times, July 15):
After five and a half hours of emotional discussion on Wednesday night, the Boston School Committee voted unanimously to overhaul admissions to the city’s three selective exam schools, opening the way for far greater representation of Black and Latino students.
The new admissions system will still weigh test results and grades, but, following a model pioneered in Chicago, it will also introduce ways to select applicants who come from poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Under the new system, the applicant pool will be divided into eight groups based on the socioeconomic conditions of their neighborhoods. The admissions team will consider applicants within each group, admitting the top students in each tier in roughly equal numbers.
The Groupthink aspect is interesting. The high quality schools had been operating for 100+ years in a particular way. Not a single committee member thought that continuing with the proven system made sense!
What kind of high-scoring young learner is this new policy designed to exclude?
Asian American students were 29.3 percent of Boston Latin School’s enrollment in 2020, despite making up 9 percent of students in the school’s district.
On the one hand, this might seem odd. Leaders who bravely place #StopAsianHate signs on their lawns and/or bravely tweet using the #StopAsianHate tag are trying to exclude Asians from elite schools. But perhaps there is no inconsistency. Suppose that the sign-gooder believes that the reason Asians are hated is because Asians are more successful than comparatively stupid and lazy white people. In that case, it would make sense for him/her/zir/them to place obstacles in Asians’ paths so that they can’t succeed as much. If Asians can’t get into the elite schools they won’t provoke as much envy and therefore the mission of #StopAsianHate will have been accomplished.
Related:
- Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard excludes Asians with the blessing of the Federal court system)
Hey Philip,
Do you still get email at philg@mit.edu? I sent you something on Thursday and just wanted to make sure you received it.
Thanks,
Aron
I do, but we departed for Oshkosh on Thursday morning. Stopped in Niagara Falls and we’re now in Cleveland for the weekend (natural history museum, art museum, botanical garden, Stan Hywet mansion and gardens, the national park(!), and maybe Rock & Roll hall of fame). Email me after August 4 (though we’ll be in the thick of the Florida move by then).
Probably. The victimhood monopoly can only grow its business by increasing the supply of victims.
The idea that rich people won’t game this system is remarkably naïve. Rooms can be rented in low-income neighborhoods, even entire houses, income can be shielded from scrutiny in various ways, kids can even be adopted away on paper.
Why rent a room for a small change of getting in when you can just go to private school?
To get elected as a Democrat after useless in the real world woke indoctrination from Harvard.
“Suppose that the sign-gooder believes that the reason Asians are hated is because Asians are more successful than comparatively stupid and lazy white people.”
White people or…errr…ummm…never mind.
Some of my best friends are white supremacists!
As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, Stuyvesant in NYC in 1980 was about 10% black, close to their proportion in the population. Stuy is now around 0% black — the few students categorized as black are typically from mixed marriages or recent arrivals from the Caribbean. Pure merit based admissions to elite public high schools are obviously on the way out — note what happened recently at Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. When the far left takes over Albany in 2022, Stuy will be the next to go since a negligible number of black and Hispanic students in a public high school is not politically sustainable where those students represent about 65% of the public school population. https://council.nyc.gov/data/school-diversity-in-nyc/
It’s like Worcester. On the TV today, the big Hate Week controversy this week is the scandalous fact that 70% of the public school students in Worcester are black but only 30% of the teachers and administrators are black. So they want to fire more white teachers and hire more black ones.
These are the Anti-Merit “New Establishment” people. Aided and abetted by The Nation and Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law.
The Asians who punch above their weight class on a 3-1 basis because they work hard, study hard, have intact families who push their kids hard, work like crazy and are high achievers have all had the rug pulled out from under them by the Big Brains at Harvard and elsewhere. Now they have to atone for their success! It’s truly the Yellow Man’s Burden!
“Chris Hayes is a gift to this republic. The brilliance he shows us each week on MSNBC has now been complemented by this extraordinary book. Beautifully written, and powerfully argued, it will force you to rethink everything you take for granted about ‘merit.’ And it will show us a way to a more perfect nation.” –Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School and author of Republic, Lost
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
https://bookshop.org/books/twilight-of-the-elites-america-after-meritocracy/9780307720467
The old Soviet saying went like that: “A nail which sticks out gets hammered in.” This was said to underscore that under socialism those who dare to raise above drab mediocrity will get suppressed.
US is approaching the full socialist mibdset. Socialism will follow, complete with gray despair which is day to day existence for most and labor camps for those who as much as hint at resisting.
Socialists have no place in a decent society, period. They need to be exterminated before they get to their customary business of murder by millions. Too bad that Americans are too naive about the true intentions of the kumbaya-singing cultists.
averros: Are you sure that what the U.S. is doing can fairly be called “socialism”? In the Soviet Union, for example, everyone was supposed to work. The programs that we might call “socialism” here enable people to sit at home and not work for multiple generations (e.g., as public housing entitlements are handed down). If you add up alimony plaintiffs, child support plaintiffs, stay-at-home spouses, people who “are not on welfare” (just living in a free “means-tested” apartment, subscribing to Medicaid, shopping with EBT/SNAP, and chatting on an Obamaphone), and SSDI, the U.S. might be the most idle society in the history of humanity.
(Remember that a “stay-at-home parent” in the old days wouldn’t have had a dishwasher, washing machine, microwave, refrigerator, or any of the rest of the labor-saving machines that even the poorest Americans have access to.)
Philip, American socialism is different from Soviet, Soviet union was run by communists who could not build a prosperous society that was supposed to be called communist and thus they settled on socialism. In former USSR too women could be stay at home moms of one, child alimony was harsh comparing to small salary income that men could earn and divorce law was heavily bent against husbands. Family was held together by tribalism and repressed religiosity and faltered and Soviet version of socialism. But system of advanced school existed; however it too had ethic and background quotas even if somewhat muted. But in colleges both official and hidden admission quotes were all the rage. Some of the quotes were hidden in a sense that they were not making soviet papers and TV news; however they were distributed to college admission commissions and discussed in district communist councils by communist functionaries beyond the closed doors but often overheard. Since it was impossible to hide the effect of quotes they were blamed on “nationalists”. As soon as communist government died off and real nationalists took over the admissions quotes from colleges disappeared.
I say this is ingenious way to return to the days of olde. The more things change the more they stay the same.
“The new admissions system will still weigh test results and grades, but, following a model pioneered in Chicago, it will also introduce ways to select applicants who come from poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Under the new system, the applicant pool will be divided into eight groups based on the socioeconomic conditions of their neighborhoods. The admissions team will consider applicants within each group, admitting the top students in each tier in roughly equal numbers.”
So the schools will admit same # of students from top 1% on economic scale as the same # of students from bottom 30%? I would like to see those 8 groups
And what’s the point of doing this? To make sure the disadvantaged will excel and thus go back to his/her community to help and further improve it? If so, that’s a wishful dream that won’t work and never worked.
Show me a prominent person or leader of any color you want who came from a poor neighborhood or disadvantage family, who made it up the ranks and is now getting his/her hands dirty and working and living with the disadvantaged to help them elevate in life. Chances are the list is very tiny.
Obama? Nope. Harris? Nope. Sharpton? Nope. The list goes on and on and on.
They all started at the bottom and made it to the top. Good for them. They are all ready to march, rally and give you hollow speeches (and get paid for it) on behalf of the disadvantaged. How many of them is on the ground, day-in-day-out getting their hand dirty, living and working with the disadvantaged to show them the light? None. They are all at their exclusive clubs and parties 99.2% of the time.