[.......]New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel laureates — more than most countries.
For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam.
But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil-rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly speaker.
And new Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation. As Ting’s story illustrates, however, the reality is just the opposite. It’s not affluent whites, but rather the city’s burgeoning population of Asian-American immigrants — a group that, despite its successes, remains disproportionately poor and working-class — whose children have Aced the exam in overwhelming numbers.
And, ironically, the more “holistic” and subjective admissions criteria that de Blasio and the NAACP favor would be much more likely to benefit children of the city’s professional elite than African-American and Latino applicants — while penalizing lower-middle-class Asian-American kids like Ting. The result would not be a specialized high school student body that “looks like New York,” but rather one that looks more like Bill de Blasio’s upscale Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn.
There is no dispute that black and Latino enrollment at the specialized schools, while always low, has steadily declined since the 1970s. Blacks constituted 13% of the student body at Stuyvesant in 1979, 5% in 1994 and just 1% the last few years, while Hispanics dropped from a high of 4% to 2% today. Similarly, at Bronx Science, black enrollment has fallen from 12% in 1994 to 3% currently and Hispanic enrollment has leveled off, from about 10% to 6%. The figures are even more striking at the less selective Brooklyn Tech, where blacks made up 37% of the student body in 1994 but only 8% today, while Hispanic numbers plunged from about 15% to 8%.
These declining minority numbers have not been matched by a corresponding increase in whites, however. In fact, white enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech has plummeted as well, dropping from 79%, 81% and 77%, respectively, in 1971 to just 22%, 23% and 20% today.
Rather, it is New York City’s fastest-growing racial minority group, Asian-Americans, who have come to dominate these schools.Asians, while always a presence in New York, didn’t begin arriving in the city in large numbers until immigration restrictions were lifted with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Since then, their proportion of the city’s population has increased from less than 1% to about 13%, and their share of the specialized school population has skyrocketed. Asian students constituted 6% of the enrollment at Stuyvesant in 1970 and 50% in 1994; they make up an incredible 73% of the student body this year. The story is similar at Bronx Science, where the Asian population has Exploded from 5% in 1970 to 41% in 1994 to 62% today, and at Brooklyn Tech, where their presence increased from 6% to 33% to 61%.
The ‘rich’ fallacy
Asians in New York are overwhelmingly first- and second-generation; some 3/4 of the students at Stuyvesant are immigrants or the children of immigrants. They’re hardly affluent, notwithstanding de Blasio’s implication that families who get their kids into the specialized schools are “rich.” True, Asians nationally have the highest median income of any racial group, including whites — and in New York City, their median household income ranks second to that of whites and well ahead of blacks and Hispanics. But Asians also have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in New York, with 29% living below the poverty level, compared with 26% of Hispanics, 23% of blacks and 14% of whites.
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A liberal nightmare
All this once would have been the stuff of liberal dreams: A racial minority group historically victimized by discrimination begins coming to America in greater numbers because of an immigration reform....
To modern “progressive” elites, though, the story is intolerable, starting with the hard work. These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success.
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