Isn’t it the case that (before NYC public schools started giving free lunch to all students) nearly three quarters of NYC public school students were in the free or reduced price lunch category? If so, that suggests that there has been flight of non-F/RP-lunch students to private schools or some such. (The SHSAT schools had lower percentages of F/RP lunch students, but still around half.)
@ucbalumnus I don’t know what the % was for F/RP lunch. I think, though, I’m not certain, that F/RP students have been recruited by private schools. If you look at profile of a lot of the elite prep schools in NYC, they all seem to have (% wise) equal or higher number of Hispanic and African-American students as the SHSAT. That’s just me spit balling, I don’t have all the numbers.
As I posted before, the SHSAT schools vary.
Brooklyn Tech 59 percent free/reduced price lunch, 61 percent Asian, 5937 students.
Stuyvesant 42 percent free/reduced price lunch, 71 percent Asian, 3316 students.
Bronx Science 42 percent free/reduced price lunch, 65 percent Asian, 3010 students.
The remaining five schools that use the SHSAT test for admission are much smaller.
So there is a diversity score. Are the parameters transparent to the public? Such as this census tract needs this score, or this is the results of admissions for 2019 by census tract? Or is it carefully hidden (just as colleges carefully hide their admissions stats by race)?
@CTTC. Not hidden at all. Based on your address you are in Zone 1-4. Different number of “ points” needed for different zone in order to get in. The points you have is based on a test score and grades. It also used to be based on attendance until that set up a public health crisis in the city during a flu epidemic. Kids would drag them selves to school and spread disease just to keep their perfect attendance up
There are a million small tweaks to the system that could make it work in NY; distribution via the top students in each middle school would probably be best, but you could also do pure geography rather than income zones. Take the top X% from each ZIP code.
The point is to have factors beyond the test score to locate the talent throughout the city. Lots of colleges and private schools do it, as well as public magnets in many cities. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel here.
I am for pure meritocracy, but I actually don’t mind a systematic preference for racial diversity in proportion to race population in ALL aspects of jobs including NBA, colleges, acting, politics. Education is just one of few areas in which Asian-Americans are well represented over the percentage of their population, but there are many other important areas where they are under-represented.
I really don’t like the concept of admitting kids based on zip codes or top x percent from all schools etc. I think it is a feel good band-aid, rather than addressing the real issue of disparities in educational opportunities within the city. IMO, by the time the kids get to the 8th grade, opportunities for some kids are permanently gone. And for other kids it’s a struggle on an uneven playing field.
You either have a merit based system or you don’t. Adjusting for zip codes, school, race, and other factors is straightforward discrimination. The headline should properly read “New York’s elite public schools have gained Asian students”.
Of course, if opportunity to gain merit and/or score highly on measures of merit is affected by undesired discrimination, then a system based on such merit could bake in whatever undesired discrimination is affecting the opportunity to gain merit and/or score highly on measures of merit.
I used to contrast my son with one of his classmates. They had adjacent high class ranks, less than 1/100th of a GPA point apart, at a very strong, competitive school. They had very similar test scores – my son’s were a little higher (and his GPA a little lower).
If you looked around our city and near suburbs, you probably could have found at least 40-50 kids demographically similar to my son with similar class ranks at strong schools and similar test scores. There was a girl in his class who ranked just above both boys (and happened to be the other boy’s girlfriend) who qualified; she and my son were both Yale legacies, too. My son’s ex-girlfriend at another school was more impressive than either of them. There were kids like them at every good school in the region. All of them were great kids, very smart, very hard working, very successful. And none of them had done anything more than live up to their families’ expectations for them, and follow a clear track laid down by their parents, siblings, cousins, etc.
The friend, by contrast, was without doubt the top performing Hispanic kid in that year’s cohort in the region. He was going to be the first person in his family to attend any college. Everything he had done since middle school had been forging a path no one in his family and no one in his neighborhood had ever taken, and he had faced down a fair amount of pressure not to be so academic. His efforts in a family contracting business were important to the family’s economic welfare, and he spent a lot of time working there. His father was undocumented, which limited to a very significant extent how willing the father was to stand out. (Ultimately, the kid had to walk away from admission to MIT because his father would not fill out financial aid forms. Another college gave him aid without the father’s signature.)
You could not tell anyone who knew them that their “merit” was the same because their grades and test scores were the same. The friend had been accomplishing extraordinary things in the context of his community and his background since he was 10 years old. My son was (and is) a great guy, but nothing he had done was extraordinary. He was one of a pack of kids who were great, smart kids, and essentially fungible. They were all entitled to great educations and great opportunities, and they got them. But the friend was head and shoulders above them in the merit department.
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In NYC in particular, those poor Asian students go to school alongside black and Hispanic students. They have the same opportunities as everyone else. Would you want your child denied a place for some political objective? These kids become the leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, and physicians who might make a difference for thousands or millions of people.
It’s unconscionable that a public school system paid for with public money servicing a local community discriminates against its own residents. This directly violates both the NY and US constitutions and is illegal, but that never stopped NY politicos before.
Asian parents should be legitimately angry with the entire national admissions process.
In NYC exams schools and colleges alike.
It’s sad and a shame to have students on this very site, wondering if they should hide or disavow their heritage to help get into a school they are qualified to attend.
It’s sad and shocking to any fair minded person, who doesn’t think a school will be too Asian.
What’s does the even mean in a culture like ours, based on what you bring to the table and not based on birthright. This should ring true most especially for those who rightfully fight for equality issues at every turn.
Others being concerned that adcoms will look at their very name and perhaps discriminate against them, even if they don’t check off the box as Asian.
If there is a preference in admissions based social engineering, which makes sense in the big picture — it should include American citizens of Asian heritage too.
Why don’t Asian American families receive the same preference as other ses disadvantaged and historically oppressed citizens?
The cheap labor used to build the railroads, interment camps, menial labor, fleeing war torn regions, communist refugees, Pol Pot, Vietnam, and historically living on substance level business ownership in cities across the country.
I don’t recall any level of national complaints or sense of entitlement from the broader Asian community. My personal view is they just kind of fight to get ahead with quiet determination.
Culturally it seems that Asian American communities have decided to study and work their way into opportunities.
No group should be discriminated and penalized for this fact.
It should be a clarion call for other communities across the spectrum - including privileged white families - to pick up their game and compete.
I am not Asian. I believe in a color blind meritocracy with a boost available to those who have had the greatest obstacles to overcome to succeed.
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Zip code where they live, or where they go to school? Kids in NYC go to school all over the place. I think the “solution” already exists. There are several high schools that are purely test-based. There used to be just three. More were added several years ago. Now there are, I think, eight. So that was one solution. Another was the addition of high schools for which admission is based on transcripts, portfolios, and/or interviews. Students can choose which admission method suits them. There’s ZERO reason a student must go to, say, Stuyvesant over Beacon or Eleanor Roosevelt. Just as we say about colleges here, there are MANY excellent high schools in the city.
Probably because most people look at race/ethnicity rather than less visible characteristics that are the ones that actually matter (SES, parental education, etc.). Since the Asian population the US is heavy with recent immigrants with high educational attainment (through PhD student and skilled worker visas), that causes many people to see all Asian people as highly educated and not disadvantaged, even though that is not true for all. Note that this stereotyping effect does not occur with black people from highly educated recent immigrants from Africa, due to the highly educated immigrants being small in number compared to the overall black population.
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@brantly, the problem is that there are not enough good high schools. You don’t just apply to Beacon or Bard and it’s a sure thing–they have admission rates rivaling the Ivies.
There are something like 500 different entities one can apply to. Some are free-standing high schools, usually small (400-700 students) and sharing a building with other small schools, and some are programs within larger schools. The quality of these schools varies A LOT.
It is a truly byzantine system. and many students wind up in a specialized school because they did well enough on the test to get into one of the big three, especially Brooklyn Tech with 6000 (!) students, because the “regular” school selected for them was not as good a choice. The remaining test-in schools are much smaller, with 500-1000 students.
This.
As I said in the other thread, better outreach to the Asian community would help some of those students find options that are a better fit than the SHSAT schools - which are many. Among other things, I’ve always thought some of the drama surrounding this issue had to do with poor communication and marketing by the DOE.
The system is wretched, as oldmom4896 indicated, but there are a LOT of wonderful choices throughout the boroughs, and as I’ve said repeatedly, the SHSAT schools are amazing, but they are not the best options for many/most high-achieving students.
Posts #52 @privatebanker and #54 @ucbalumnus call out the crux of the problem, and that is when politicians use race as the basis of preferences in anything. DeBlasio and Caranza’s motivation to change the metrics of admissions has very little to do with improving the quality of education in NYC generally or the test schools specifically. It has everything to do with the power of identity politics and the embarrassing nature of how NYC public schools have failed for a large group of students who need better education the most to pull them out of poverty. They want to cover up the failure by setting up a system that guaranties their desired cosmetic political outcome.
Who loses, poor Asian families. We can have a serious debate on the merits of a test only placement system for these elite public schools, but the fact is the rules and the tests are the same for everyone. A poor Asian family has no better resources than a poor black, Hispanic or white family to do test prep. The difference is family and individual priorities. Community awareness may also be a factor, but that stems from collective family and cultural priorities.
Post #50 @JHS is right on point as well. The only thing I would add to that is I would feel the same if the friend were white, Asian or any other race if they had the same challenges.
I, too, would “feel the same if the friend were, white, Asian, or any other race if they had the same challenges.” But race/ethnicity is far from completely irrelevant to those challenges. If the boy I was talking about in #50 had been Asian, say Han Chinese or Vietnamese, his family could well have been just as poor (although note I didn’t say his family was poor – they were working class, but entrepreneurial and reasonably successful, just not a lot of accumulated capital yet), his father might even have been undocumented, too, but it’s very unlikely that he would have older siblings who had grown up here who had not gone to college, or that no other child in his block had gone to college, or participated in a science fair, whatever . . .
Anyway, the kid in their class who had the best admissions season was the Japanese immigrant from an affluent family ranked just below them. He had the same grades as they did, minus a basis point, and also similar test scores. He had almost no traditional ECs, in part because he spent many hours per week at a Japanese school. His “merit” resided principally in the fact that everyone – peers and faculty – thought he was the smartest and most original kid in the class. He got into Harvard and Stanford, the only two schools to which he applied.
Actually, bachelor’s degree attainment among Vietnamese Americans is below the average of all Americans.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/08/key-facts-about-asian-americans/ (“Selected Characteristics” tab)