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The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race. Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents

The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race. Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.

tdb7893 10y ago
The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  The Asian:Black ratio at Stuyvesant is 2743:21. Say you bring in all the black kids from the lower-tier Bronx High School of Science (72), Staten Island Technical (13), Brooklyn Technical (390), Queens High School for the Sciences (25), High School for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at City College (41). Now you've got 562 black kids at Stuyvesant. Still too low. Bring in the rest of the non-science-oriented specialized schools (High School of American Studies at Lehman College (14), Brooklyn Latin School (105)). Now you're at 681. Still too low. (Note that Laguardia's admissions are by audition, not examination, so I omitted that. Still 2:1 Asian:Black.) Now you're pulling kids out of regular high schools. Are they going to be able to keep up with the other Stuyvesant kids? Should we slow down others' education so lower performing students can keep up? How does this help these lower performing students? Note that these are individual people we are talking about who are getting thrown into classes that are difficult for them. You could create programs designed to help underprivileged students that are close to the cutoff, to help them get admitted. NYC created that, but, you know, it helps asian kids too. Another problem with doing corrections for population ratio is that NYC attracts top professionals, highly intelligent people that are having children. Even if you believe all races are geneticulturally identically distributed globally, or in the country, you can see that the high income professionals are mostly non-black, and their kids are going to monopolize Stuyvesant seats. The high IQ black/Latino kids that aren't getting into Stuyvesant are the ones whose parents never moved to NYC in the first place.
  - bante 10y ago
    Not entirely sure what your point is. The best solution is of course to provide African American communities with good schools from the beginning. Like many other ethnic groups Asian Americans have been free to implement their own communities, largely based on family ties, because they weren't brought to the US in chains.
- whack 10y ago
  > "if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there" That's an extremely strong statement to make. The proportion of Asians in professional soccer is substantially lower than the population distribution. Are you claiming that the main reason for this is selection discrimination?
  - tdb7893 10y ago
    No, that wasn't my intended claim. I'm not saying that the problem is just racial discrimination I'm saying that often how people are selected for colleges and jobs biases towards certain groups. Colleges want volunteering, lots of AP tests, and a high ACT for example and while anyone can do well at those some people, often through little fault of their own, have a much harder or easier time getting those things. If you select on those you are selecting not only for intelligence (which makes sense) but also how affluent their parents were and how much their community valued education (neither of which they would have control over). I'm not saying that everyone is racist, just that ignoring all the implicit biases seems illogical to me.

tdb7893 10y ago

The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it

SamReidHughes 10y ago
The Asian:Black ratio at Stuyvesant is 2743:21. Say you bring in all the black kids from the lower-tier Bronx High School of Science (72), Staten Island Technical (13), Brooklyn Technical (390), Queens High School for the Sciences (25), High School for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at City College (41). Now you've got 562 black kids at Stuyvesant. Still too low. Bring in the rest of the non-science-oriented specialized schools (High School of American Studies at Lehman College (14), Brooklyn Latin School (105)). Now you're at 681. Still too low. (Note that Laguardia's admissions are by audition, not examination, so I omitted that. Still 2:1 Asian:Black.) Now you're pulling kids out of regular high schools. Are they going to be able to keep up with the other Stuyvesant kids? Should we slow down others' education so lower performing students can keep up? How does this help these lower performing students? Note that these are individual people we are talking about who are getting thrown into classes that are difficult for them. You could create programs designed to help underprivileged students that are close to the cutoff, to help them get admitted. NYC created that, but, you know, it helps asian kids too. Another problem with doing corrections for population ratio is that NYC attracts top professionals, highly intelligent people that are having children. Even if you believe all races are geneticulturally identically distributed globally, or in the country, you can see that the high income professionals are mostly non-black, and their kids are going to monopolize Stuyvesant seats. The high IQ black/Latino kids that aren't getting into Stuyvesant are the ones whose parents never moved to NYC in the first place.
- bante 10y ago
  Not entirely sure what your point is. The best solution is of course to provide African American communities with good schools from the beginning. Like many other ethnic groups Asian Americans have been free to implement their own communities, largely based on family ties, because they weren't brought to the US in chains.
whack 10y ago
> "if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there" That's an extremely strong statement to make. The proportion of Asians in professional soccer is substantially lower than the population distribution. Are you claiming that the main reason for this is selection discrimination?
- tdb7893 10y ago
  No, that wasn't my intended claim. I'm not saying that the problem is just racial discrimination I'm saying that often how people are selected for colleges and jobs biases towards certain groups. Colleges want volunteering, lots of AP tests, and a high ACT for example and while anyone can do well at those some people, often through little fault of their own, have a much harder or easier time getting those things. If you select on those you are selecting not only for intelligence (which makes sense) but also how affluent their parents were and how much their community valued education (neither of which they would have control over). I'm not saying that everyone is racist, just that ignoring all the implicit biases seems illogical to me.