6 ms·

Why Asian-Americans feel powerless in New York’s elite high schools

98 points by allenleein 8y ago

guard0g 8y ago
First Stuy, then UofC goes test-optional, and now CMU eliminating demonstrated interest in their application process...the race to mediocrity.
- tylerhou 8y ago
  Why does CMU admit more mediocre candidates if they eliminate demonstrated interest? Visiting campus doesn't really say anything about how talented/hard working a candidate is -- all it does is signal that they have enough money and time to visit.
  - guard0g 8y ago
    Demonstrated interest isn't about visiting campus - it's about interviews, essays, standardized tests, maker portfolios, etc...
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    I agree. I did a single college tour and that was a school that doesn't take demonstrated interest into account (that I also had no chance to get into). I had only briefly visited the others because they were basically in my backyard.
  - desu_ 8y ago
    You are right that visiting the campus is a weak signal. However, the decision came with a plethora of other decisions, some probably fair, some more reminiscent of the Asians-have-bad-personalities trick à la Harvard. We're eliminating demonstrated interest as a consideration in our admission paradigm. We'll no longer encourage supplementary submission of materials, including resumes, research abstracts, writing samples, multimedia demonstrations of talents, and maker portfolios. https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/eliminating-demonstrated-interest https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/eliminating-demon...
- mrchicity 8y ago
  It was wrong decades ago when the Ivy League had a soft cap on the number of Jewish students admitted, and it's wrong now when schools effectively do the same for Asians. They can nudge-nudge-wink-wink "Holistic approach" all they like, but when the data show an Asian student needs 120 more SAT points to get in, it's hard to see anything other than racial bias or de facto quotas. I don't say this out of self-interest, I'm not Asian. If anything, these quotas help people from my background. I don't care. They are deeply unfair and antithetical to the American values of equal opportunity, fair competition, and not judging people on their race, gender, or creed. And the students being pushed out by these rules are not rich or privileged. The rich and privileged kids in New York are in private schools that cost more than a luxury car for a year's tuition. Many are children of first generation immigrants.
  - deleted 8y ago
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mindvirus 8y ago
I wonder how de Blasio's proposal would lead to different patterns of where people live in the city - it seems that to play this game (and it sounds like many parents are very motivated to), it makes sense to send your kids to an underperforming school.
- dmurray 8y ago
  Yes. I expect the author's mother would seek out school districts with the lowest test scores (perhaps the lowest population of Asian-Americans) and send her daughter there instead. So if what the policy makers really want is to equally distribute Asian immigrants among the city's middle schools, perhaps they've hit on the policy that will do that.
  - otoburb 8y ago
    >Yes. I expect the author's mother would seek out school districts with the lowest test scores (perhaps the lowest population of Asian-Americans) and send her daughter there instead. In that situation, the parents of a child who might be considered academically bright will need to contend with the additional burden of trying to motivate their child to be different (i.e. higher test scores) than the rest of their peers who, for various reasons, don't test as well. Peer pressure is a thing, and is sometimes seen by parents as a blessing if it gives their child an incentive to study.
camdenlock 8y ago
This is some bullshit. Trying to exert such rigid control over educational outcomes by favoring people based on their race? Talk about unfair discrimination. It’s 2018 (aka $CURRENT_YEAR), haven’t we grown beyond this fruitless social engineering wheel-spinning? In a sane world, this kind of legislation would be shot down with cogent arguments from smart and knowledgeable lawmakers. The only reason such ill-conceived ideas become law is because our republic is essentially a popularity contest, and people will apparently vote for a politician who, without thinking things through (or indeed thinking at all), will gladly push legislation rife with feel-good buzzwords and catchphrases of the moment. All that matters is getting (re-)elected, fairness and justice be damned. It’s no wonder these folks are marching. This is naked social control from ideologues. Fight against it!
- Fomite 8y ago
  The suggestion is that educational outcomes are already favoring people by race, just with a veneer laid over it, and we're revisiting the question as to whether or not that's working.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    I may be reading too much into your use of the word "favoring", but I think it's not safe to assume that any disparate outcome is the effect of favoring certain races. Certainly, educational outcomes differ by race but there are non-discriminatory factors that can play a large role, such as time dedicated towards academics [1]. In other words, I think it's worth asking whether it's the education system that's favoring certain groups, or if it's certain groups that are favoring academic achievement. I don't think it's right to use discriminatory policies to ensure equity of outcome if it's the latter. 1. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_35.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_35.asp
    - Fomite 8y ago
      I agree - all I'm saying is that claiming the old system doesn't favor people by race (in the way you're meaning, where it tilts the scales in particular direction) isn't trivially demonstrable. Higher Ed has been struggling with this for awhile. It's not clear that a major emphasis on test scores isn't just putting a quantitative spackle on a biased system, and then declaring the job done. Especially in a system with such a complicated background as public schooling.
zeth___ 8y ago
This is an very good example of why 'people of color' is red herring no one believes. Asians, both yellow and brown, are out performing whites. Blacks are under performing everyone and 'latinos' are doing either ok or pretty badly, depending on if you split them according to skin color. The issue in America has been and still is why are blacks doing so poorly? Dressing it up as anything else does no one any favors.
- ouid 8y ago
  you're not normalizing for enough, and you know it.
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    Maybe he does, but I don’t... what do you mean, “normalizing for enough?”
    - Fomite 8y ago
      "Brown" is not the only variable that might have influenced on success. "Asian" or "Hispanic" or "Black" are actually a basket of variables that exist at different levels that influence everything from health to educational attainment.
    - zeth___ 8y ago
      That's dogwhistle for 'you're racist'.
      - dang 8y ago
        If you continue to start and feed flamewars on Hacker News, we will ban you.
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  > The issue in America has been and still is why are blacks doing so poorly? If nothing else, enormous income differences? See the top graph here: https://www.financialsamurai.com/income-by-race-why-is-asian-income-so-high/ https://www.financialsamurai.com/income-by-race-why-is-asian... It's hard to educate yourself well if your family is poor, I hear.
deleted 8y ago
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mabbo 8y ago
Call me crazy, but what if you just funded all public schools sufficiently that the advantage of going to the "good" school was lessened? Is that too socialist?
- cm2012 8y ago
  The good high schools in this article aren't good because of funding. They're good because they only let in the top 1% of kids.
  - gedy 8y ago
    Public charter schools (at least around me) receive much less funding, and yet have better facilities, test scores, etc for this same reason.
- Reactionary_ 8y ago
  Because it has nothing to do with the funding and everything to do with who is a student there.
- deleted 8y ago
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- mrchicity 8y ago
  Good schools are mostly good because of their student bodies. At a basic level you need teachers who care, books and decent accommodations. If those basics aren't being met, then spending will help. And if those needs are met, it certainly helps to have really great, special teachers who push students a little further. But I believe if you took the kids from a selective school and swapped them with kids from a school with frequent violence and truancy, the kids from the selective school would still have far better life outcomes, and find ways to succeed despite run down classrooms, less inspiring teachers, and dated books. They would succeed if you put them in an 1800s one-room schoolhouse, or didn't even send them to school at all. They had to pass a high bar for intellectual ability and their parents care about education.
  - 8y ago
wb36 8y ago
Instead of debating the criteria for entrance into these elite schools, why not look at what makes them such great schools and replicate that elsewhere? Sure, in so far as being surrounded by top students who study all the time improves the environment, the current elite is likely to remain the elite and the admissions criteria should still be discussed. But if the gap between the quality of those schools and the others wasn't so vast, it would no longer feel like the difference between being guaranteed success in life vs. being doomed to failure.
- deleted 8y ago
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- desu_ 8y ago
  The value of a good education lies in its signalling power too. There are plenty of good professors in non-elite schools, many undergrad classes are approachable enough that a self-motivated student could absorb a lot of content with little supervision, and a lot of schools make their material available through online platforms. All these are great for learning but replicating the signaling part is more difficult.
- whiddershins 8y ago
  Nyc is full of amazing public high schools, as I mentioned in another comment. Moreover you can apply to virtually any public high school in NYC and be admitted based on whatever criteria they set up, meaning you aren’t forced in that case to go to your zoned (regional) school. These articles misrepresent the situation. There are only three schools that use this test, and they often get the “I studied really hard but I was bad at homework and class participation” student. Luckily there is a mechanism (for now) to catch some of the potential of these students.
dilap 8y ago
Here's another, more critical take on the plan: https://quillette.com/2018/06/27/bill-de-blasios-plan-to-purge-asians-from-new-yorks-top-schools/ https://quillette.com/2018/06/27/bill-de-blasios-plan-to-pur... I think it's terrible. It's robbing poor kids of a rare opportunity to get a first-rate education, to make elites feel better about themselves. If you insist that the racial demographics of the schools match those of the city, a much better way to do it is to keep the admissions test, but simply take the top N% w/in each racial bucket, rather than globally. Otherwise, if you get rid of the test completely and pulling evenly from every school, you are guaranteed (1) you will not create an environment w/ the truly elite (2) you are replacing standardized tests, which are fair, with the whole teacher-grading-system, which is wildly inconsistent and generally a better measure of who behaves and who sucks up than who is academically worthy.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  the supreme court declared racial quotas illegal.
  - mrchicity 8y ago
    Yes, instead we have holistic approaches which schools refuse to document for proprietary competitive reasons, and that holistic process has the same outcome as a racial quota. Very odd case.
  - dilap 8y ago
    which is really quite unfortunate, since everyone still wants to essentially set quotas, but now you can't do it in a transparent and fair (or less unfair) way.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  > simply take the top N% w/in each racial bucket, rather than globally This would benefit wealthy Black/Latino kids, whose parents can afford test prep. If the goal is to have a more racially diverse student body, it accomplishes that goal. But if the goal is to help disadvantaged kids get ahead, then it's not useful.
blueprint 8y ago
Hey look it's my high school
ericdykstra 8y ago
The entire doctrine of Disparate Impact, and Affirmative Action which is borne from it, is one of the most illiberal policies in America. I really hope a constitutionalist Supreme Court can reverse this madness. On Affirmative Action in specific, here's a great interview from Sowell about the unintended consequences that arise from the awful policy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA
- deleted 8y ago
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- iosDrone 8y ago
  It will be ruled unconstitutional within two years. The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.
  - ericdykstra 8y ago
    I really hope so, as there is so much wrong with it. To begin with, the 80% rule creates an impossible standard of "diversity" that doesn't match the reality of how different groups of people have different tendencies and preferences. The impossible standard mixed with the conflicting doctrines of Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact mean that every major company has to settle diversity lawsuits for hundreds of millions or into the billions of dollars, no matter what their policy is.
  - otoburb 8y ago
    de Blasio already thought about this. The criteria has nothing to do with race, and is clearly about academic performance. The intended outcome and policy itself is driven internally by diversity, but the actual criteria doesn't (and probably cannot) mention race in any way, shape or form.
confiscate 8y ago
Test scores are race-blind and fair. Test instructors do not give more scores to a test because they see it was completed by an Asian test-taker. It's great that schools are looking for a better "mix" of ethnicities in the incoming class, but they should encourage the underrepresented ethnicities to do better, in tests or other race-blind admission standards. They should not put an admission "cap" based on the color of your skin
- swsieber 8y ago
  This. The end of the pipeline is not the correct place to change pipeline demographics, and in cases like this, is actually harmful.
  - squiggleblaz 8y ago
    But where is the right place to change pipeline demographics? The problem is that certain groups are intergenerationally poor. One mechanism that is available to us to fix that is education. So this isn't the end of the pipeline, it's just the start of the next pipe. Where do you propose we intervene? Should we give a cushy job to the parents of every disadvantaged minority person as soon as they're born? Maybe we should give an education to the parents of every disadvantaged minority person before they're even the apple in the eye of said parents?
    - confiscate 8y ago
      You intervene when the student is still learning the material, before the test. You do not intervene after the test. At that point the learning process for that material is already over. The student has already "missed out" on the learning opportunity. You would just be giving a good grade to someone who doesn't know the material. Yes we need to help folks who are intergenerationally poor. But, you do that by helping their kids learn better and meet the testing bar. You are not helping them by lowering the bar for them. Giving the kids better grades even if they don't know the material, would actually hurt them.
      - 8y ago
Reactionary_ 8y ago
1. I believe black and hispanic students could do just as well as asian students if their cultures were similar to that of the asian students. Let's not kid ourselves. The asian students doing well on these tests are born into cultures that value academic achievement more than the average black or hispanic family. There's nothing inherently different about the different groups aside from their cultures. Keep the tests, and encourage a culture of academic excellent to take root in different communities where it may not currently exist. 2. Let's stop being so obsessed with race. Racial quotas make people think more about race when our goal should be to make people think less about race and more about individuals apart from the color of their skin.
- deleted 8y ago
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- ralston 8y ago
  Ahhh, I will refuse to pay the troll toll :)
- dqpb 8y ago
  Best comment in this thread!
icelancer 8y ago
This is pretty standard and has been going on for decades. Asian-Americans are the last race you can openly commit racist policies against without dogwhistling. I don't know what it is, maybe it's because they are politically underreprsented or it's because they are underrepresented in popular culture in general, or their general attitude to be anti-political in nature, but it's just totally fine to withhold educational resources and outcomes for an entire race of people. It is particularly bad against Chinese-Americans, I've found. I remember dealing with it as a young child growing up in the Midwest as a Japanese-American whose grandparents were interned in California. I didn't come to "appreciate" the level of systemic, acceptable racism baked into society against Asian-Americans until much later in life. My feelings on it now are kind of whatever. It is what it is and I don't see it changing much. I sure don't see white activists taking up the Asian banner, though.
- dmurray 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can also "openly commit racist policies against" white people and get away with it.
- jsoc815 8y ago
  > This is pretty standard... I don't know what it is... Mostly the numbers. The "Asian" population in America is relatively small, and thus (perceived to be) easily managed. If one looks at demographic shifts, immigration policy, etc., over the course of the European expansion in to what is now America, the game should be pretty clear. Actually, Brazil is also a good example, if you look at their post-slavery immigration plan/policy.[2] Anyway, I'm linking to an old post of mine from the Harvard discussion.[1] I highly recommend checking out Prof. Frank Wu's comments in the referenced video. Also, it's worth noting that generally speaking, public schools are not considered to be elite. Elite schools are generally the exclusive ones where politicians, captains of industry, and the like send their kids to help them socialize with 'the right kind of people,' and maybe a smattering of common folk. I've been to those (as one of the common folk) and to elite public schools; the difference really is night and day. This whole thing is just more divide and conquer. It pains me to see people continue to fall for it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335887 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/is-neymar-black-brazil-and-the-painful-relativity-of-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/is-neymar-black-b...
confiscate 8y ago
If a student is not doing well in school, it makes no sense to just "give" that student a higher grade, for "equality" with the rest of the class. You need to help that student get better, so he/she can achieve the higher grade on his/her own. If a student can't do multiplication in a test, you don't just "give more points" to that student, for "equality" in the classroom. You need to teach that student to learn multiplication. You need to bring that student "up" and not everyone else "down".
marris 8y ago
Yup. It's especially disheartening that most of the discussion centers around "privilege" and the supposed ease of coasting into one of these schools if parents pay for test prep. Anyone can get test prep books from the New York Public library and practice, practice, practice. The fact that so few members from some groups attend the school says far more about the importance of education in their homes than it does about lack of "endowment."
- guard0g 8y ago
  Sadly, there is little discussion of the importance of effort, hard work, persistence, and grit in the success of Asian American students...
akhilcacharya 8y ago
I don't agree with taking top N% as the only admittance criteria but the constant pearl clutching about this and the Harvard case really bothers me. The idea that this one school can make or break one's future is either absurd or terrifying, and I'm not sure which is actually true.
deleted 8y ago
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iosDrone 8y ago
I can't wait for affirmative action to become unconstitutional.
imbokodo 8y ago
There is a class if people who do not work, whose parents did not work, who themselves have parents who do not work. The type seen in the documentary "Born Rich". They get into the best universities as legacies. You never hear talk of this idle class ensconced in inherited privilege and luxury. However, a few decades after Americans were lynching those of African descent, blowing up their little girls while they're going to church, executing them for voter registration drives etc. - a few decades after that if an attempt is made to push blacks at Stuyvesant above the 1 in 45 mark, in a city where 1 in 4 are black - then, only then do we hear about the need for meritocracy and so on. From the mouth of a man who got a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father, with his son-in-law who, according to Daniel Golden, bought his way into Harvard. When am I going to see the articles about legacy admissions to the top colleges? I won't hold my breath. Luxury for the idle class at the top, the rat race (with some national oppression of Africans, Lakota etc. thrown in) for everyone else. No thanks, I'll keep my sickle sharpened for a higher target.
- mrchicity 8y ago
  Some rich heir being a shoe in at Harvard where he skips half his classes and takes a spot from someone with academic interests bothers me too. It's not fair. But I'm a bit less skeeved out by a school administrator judging someone as an individual, even if it's for a crappy reason like dad being a donor, than having them admit or deny someone just based on the color of their skin. Just as I would rather work for a boss who hired his buddy from the country club, but harbored no prejudice, than one who refused to hire blacks, Jews, Asians, etc. who met the job requirements.
cardplayer 8y ago
More than 50% of the global population lives in Asia and less than 5% live in North America. It makes complete sense that wealthy-to-middle class Asians would displace white students to a lesser degree and other communities of color to a higher degree in closely located Western countries with strong schools and favorable immigration policies. By 2050, would it be so strange that the majority of applicants and students of elite western schools would be Asian? Other communities will be forced to attend less prestigious institutions until Asian schools hold stronger apppeal with the wealthier citizens in their countries.
antoncohen 8y ago
San Francisco went through a similar thing. The best public high schools in SF (namely Lowell) per predominantly Chinese-American. The NAACP sued the school district (NAACP v. San Francisco Unified School District), resulting in race-based admissions in 1983 to reduce the number of Chinese-Americans at the best schools Then in 1994 Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District happened, and race-based admissions got thrown out. If you look at the racial demographics of public high schools in San Francisco it is pretty interesting. Of the 10 major schools only two of them have over 10% white students. Those are the only two that only admit students that meet special requirements. One is Lowell (academically the best) with 15.2% white, the other is SOTA (an arts school that requires auditions) with 41.3% white. Lowell is 56.7% Asian, while SOTA is 19.0% Asian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Franci... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Asawa_San_Francisco_School_of_the_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Asawa_San_Francisco_Schoo...
guard0g 8y ago
Around the country, there's a concerted effort to eliminate magnet schools for much the same rationale. Wealthy NY folks send their kids to private schools like Dalton, Trinity, Packer, etc... Why not make a system that seeks economic parity rather racial parity, and eliminate the moats around private schools?
- cardplayer 8y ago
  How about we just improve the quality of public school education with a large tax on weapon sales? Better schools and maybe fewer school shootings...maybe. America has never much cared for its children so yeah. shrugs
zBard 8y ago
It's interesting to see the HN responses in the GPA thread -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441601 when compared to this one, although both boil down to the measure of scholastic tests as a ingress criteria.
keepper 8y ago
So lets say you have a really big balancing scale[1].... And there's a chute that's been feeding twice as much sand to one side, for hundreds of years.... What do you do to balance it? a) Distribute sand equally to each side b) Distribute substantially more sand to one side c) Make like the imbalance did not happen and ignore it. If the answer is obvious to the above, then why is leveling the field for historically disenfranchised people an issue? I am referring to Black Americans and Native Americans. Nigerian Americans are some of the most successful immigrants[2]. Asian Immigrants, Hispanic Immigrants, Indian Immigrants, Eastern European immigrants, all tend to do decent well. What do they all have in common? They are immigrants! Immigrants that don't have the baggage of hundreds of years of oppression in their new country. They used to be disadvantaged in their own country. But coming to a new country does something... a new start. I should know, my parents where such immigrants. But Native Americans[3], and Native Blacks (as in not recently immigrated) continue to do the worst in the achievement scale. Maybe, just maybe... we start realizing that they both share the same initial crutch.. the scale was tipped way against them, until quite recently.[4] And yes, nitpick my points away, the underlying issue is still valid.. immigrants tend to do well in a new country, imbalances can't be corrected by neutrality going forward, and historically disenfranchised people tend to do bad in the country they are disenfranchised... see poor asians in asia or in india... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=balancing+scale [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-12/africa-is-sending-us-its-best-and-brightest [3] http://indianyouth.org/american-indian-life/poverty-cycle [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Ethnic_Placement_Act
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Yes, we should punish children for the sins of their fathers. Especially the immigrants, who had nothing to do with any of it.
  - keepper 8y ago
    What is the "punishment" you refer to? Removing an unfair advantage that is so innate, it's almost invisible to those that benefit it? PS: Not that I should be indulging your vague references... but actually, we do it quite often. Did Bernie Madoff's kids/wife get the spoils of his crime? Has not pretty much every war had a form of "reparations"?
whiddershins 8y ago
The elimination of standard testing as the only application criteria for New York schools such as Stuyvesant is a travesty. Opinion pieces on this topic consistently misrepresent the situation. Many, many, elite High schools in Nyc are applied to on the basis of a wide variety of criteria. Grades, essays, you name it. These schools have a wonderful mix of admissions processes which allows each of them to capture a portion of promising students that others may miss. There are exactly 3 High Schools that exclusively use one standardized test. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Even if these schools favor people who are “good at tests” that’s fine! The other amazing high schools can grab the students who are talented in other ways. Removing those three disadvantages people who might be highly motivated and/or intelligent but have trouble meeting other vague criteria. That’s terrible and discriminatory. It favors conformity in the best case, and quota filling in the worst.
httpz 8y ago
We can argue what is "fair" all we want but what policy makers really care about is votes not "fairness". "fairness" is a moving definition that is associated with the political climate. Not that we should completely give up on fairness and let political power decide everything but I feel a bit exhausted reading these arguments going in circles for years..
graycat 8y ago
Gee, all this terrible struggle over what can and can't get from some K-12 school. What a WASTE. Huge misunderstanding. Bronx High School of Science? How about instead Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton? How to do that? Well, big secret (don't tell anyone!): How do professors at research universities stay up to date so that they can do leading edge research? Do they take refresher courses at the Bronx High School of Science? Not likely! Do they take courses at all? Essentially no. So, what the professors do is just study the best materials and go to some seminars. In simple terms, students can do much the same starting with, say, high school ninth grade material and continuing on. If get very far in academics, then just MUST work and learn fully independently or nearly so, so might as well just start doing that ASAP, especially to get around all the terrible struggles of K-12. Bluntly, nearly no US K-12 teacher knows any material that is worth any student struggling over. So, get THROUGH the K-12 material and get on to college level material, ASAP. So, for a student who wants the best education in K-12 and later, first, get the basics, the prerequisites for college material, and then study the best college material. "The basics" are just high school math and science together with good skills reading and writing English. History, belle lettre literature, music, etc., maybe fun and nice but for academic success close to irrelevant. So, in K-12 years, ASAP get into fractions, exponents, compound interest, areas and volumes. Then do first year algebra, plane geometry, second year algebra, trigonometry, solid geometry. Do general science, chemistry, biology, physics. For the science, will do it all again and much more thoroughly again anyway, essentially several times more, so don't get all perfectionistic for the first pass. Then start on college material -- first up, calculus of one independent variable and then several independent variables, heavy on intuition, light on proofs. Watch the best Internet lectures -- IMHO, Khan Academy is NOT good enough. Use several of the best regarded texts; to find those, ask some college students, TAs, or profs or look at the Web sites of calculus courses at the best universities and see what texts they are using. Likely buy the texts used -- calculus hasn't much changed in decades, highly recommended old texts should be fine and cheap! Do the homework problems and check answers in the back of the book. Maybe wander onto a college campus or have a family friend who is a college prof and get the tests for the calculus course, take those, and beg a calculus TA or prof to grade the results. Continue with math and science the same way -- best materials, with some informal contact with a college. Once get to college junior level material, at some research universities, start attending public research seminars. Typically won't understand more than 10% of the material but WILL get lots of keywords that can motivate and direct studies. Maybe meet a prof or two who will volunteer to grade some homework, say, in math, physics, maybe let you have some copies of tests and grade your solutions. Also many graduate school departments publish their qualifying exams -- they are good and important sources of exercises. When have good reason to feel confident, take the SAT aptitude tests and the STEM field subject matter tests AND then the same for the GREs. Right, still in K-12 but taking the GRE to show that you are ready for graduate school. If really want to seal the deal, blow away the college admissions committees, publish some papers, a few should do, in good quality peer reviewed journals. Then apply to college, maybe using some of the contacts you got from attending the research seminars. So, a friendly prof might just contact the college admissions committee and ask that you be admitted with full scholarship. So, you enter as a college freshman but start on your Master's and maybe are a TA or research assistant for a prof. Look, for academics, the real goal is likely not very visible at the Bronx High School of Science or any K-12 place. The real goal is in three words, research, research, and research. For that, get into a good research university, do well learning the prerequisites, attend seminars to see what some of the current research topics are, work with good profs, and do publish some good research. If want some additional concentration on bio-medical and get an MD, fine. It's also possible to go for a law degree. Or can continue in main line STEM field academics and be a professor at a research university. Or, sure, can do what, say, A. Viterbi did and go for entrepreneurship and, then, get your name on an engineering school! Does independent study work? It certainly did for me: I got a Ph.D. in applied math and was a college prof. Starting with first year algebra, class time was mostly a waste of time, and I learned nearly all the material, especially the good material I learned well, from independent study. My preparation for the graduate school qualifying exams, my Ph.D. research, my other, published research -- all from essentially just independent study. That's what research professors do -- learn what they need to know and then do their research, both essentially independently. At least at one time, the math department at Princeton stated on their Web site that no courses were offered for preparation for the qualifying exams, that the courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, and that students were expected to prepare for the qualifying exams on their own. So, the Princeton math department regards independent study as essential. One of the best lessons I learned in math was in high school plane geometry: The teacher was the most offensive human I ever saw. So, in class, I just put my head down and slept. Then after school, I read the lesson material quickly and then looked at the exercises. I started with the last, most difficult ones and did them all until I got to the trivial ones. Then I turned to the back of the book for the more difficult supplementary exercises and did ALL of them, never let even one go. So, on the state test, I did well! I continued to learn math that way: E.g., I never took freshman calculus, instead, got a good text and taught myself, much as I learned high school plane geometry and for a course started on sophomore calculus and did well. E.g., as a senior, I got a famous, challenging text in topology and gave a prof a lecture a week, for each chapter, one lecture on the material and one more with solutions to the exercises. It's not just me: Bluntly, if go very far in academics, just MUST be good at independent study. So, might as well get started in high school material, and if do that then can f'get about all the struggles with Bronx High School of Science, Dalton School, etc. Again, the K-12 teachers don't know anything worth struggle. Want to struggle a little? Okay, on YouTube, watch the lectures on quantum mechanics from MIT. Or, for a mathematician giving an introduction to bio-medical research, watch the Eric Lander lectures -- on YouTube, from MIT. Bronx High School of Science? F'get about it. Again, get the good stuff from, say, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, etc. Done. Any questions?
otoburb 8y ago
The mayor, de Blasio, is trying to institute a similar system that was in place for NYC kindergarten admissions over a decade ago. Prior to 2007, gifted and talented classes were skewed towards white and asians and the admissions process was criticized for allowing "favoritism and discrimination"[1]. A standardized test was then implemented for 4 year olds going forward, but over subsequent years people realized that this resulted in even lower hispanic and black enrollment into the coveted G&T programs[2]. de Blasio is pushing for a more ethnically diverse mix across all schools. Based on the K G&T admissions changes made in 2007, he is fairly sure this change will achieve his objective. He firmly subscribes to the idea that while certain elite schools will be by definition diluted in terms of academic achievement and excellence, the overall NYC school system will benefit. He fervently believes that trying to increase the global median achievement at the expense of a lower academic peak achieved by a tiny minority of students is worth it (aka YCMAOWBE[3] or TANSTAAFL[4]). While I agree with the sentiment that one should try to fix the entire pipeline and not focus on the end product (too little too late), critics lambasting de Blasio's plan need to understand that he's simply making different trade-offs during his last term in office as mayor. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/nyregion/26gifted.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/nyregion/26gifted.html [2] https://hechingerreport.org/as-new-york-struggles-to-make-gifted-admissions-equitable-one-bronx-family-searches-for-a-way-in/ https://hechingerreport.org/as-new-york-struggles-to-make-gi... [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can%27t_make_an_omelette_without_breaking_eggs https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can%27t_make_an_omelette_... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as...
- imbokodo 8y ago
  The parents of "gifted" white 4 year olds trying to keep black kids out due to their "gifted" 4 year olds hard work and their grind and the meritocracy...I mean it sounds like a parody. "It's not due to racism or the to the manor born gift of idleness - these 'gifted' 4 year olds are high achievers"
  - otoburb 8y ago
    I'm having trouble understanding the sentiment of your comment, but it seems you are deriding the "gifted" label bestowed by the NYC Department of Education. I agree that the label is unfortunate. From what I understand so far, the "gifted" curriculum is comparable to other high-achieving schools without the need for a "gifted" designation outside of the city and across the country.
iosDrone 8y ago
Most Hacker News readers are liberal (judging by the comments). And it seems like most Hacker News readers are disgusted by this news. What every liberal person who read this article with disgust needs to realize is that THIS IS THE LIBERAL END-GAME AND THIS IS WHAT A MAJORITY OF LEFT-LEANING DECISION-MAKERS SUPPORT. They don't care about merit, or fairness, or making the most out of a scarce resource. All that they care about is enforced "equality," no matter how many people suffer as a consequence.

98 points by allenleein 8y ago

First Stuy, then UofC goes test-optional, and now CMU eliminating demonstrated interest in their application process...the race to mediocrity.

tylerhou 8y ago
Why does CMU admit more mediocre candidates if they eliminate demonstrated interest? Visiting campus doesn't really say anything about how talented/hard working a candidate is -- all it does is signal that they have enough money and time to visit.
- guard0g 8y ago
  Demonstrated interest isn't about visiting campus - it's about interviews, essays, standardized tests, maker portfolios, etc...
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  I agree. I did a single college tour and that was a school that doesn't take demonstrated interest into account (that I also had no chance to get into). I had only briefly visited the others because they were basically in my backyard.
- desu_ 8y ago
  You are right that visiting the campus is a weak signal. However, the decision came with a plethora of other decisions, some probably fair, some more reminiscent of the Asians-have-bad-personalities trick à la Harvard. We're eliminating demonstrated interest as a consideration in our admission paradigm. We'll no longer encourage supplementary submission of materials, including resumes, research abstracts, writing samples, multimedia demonstrations of talents, and maker portfolios. https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/eliminating-demonstrated-interest https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/eliminating-demon...
mrchicity 8y ago
It was wrong decades ago when the Ivy League had a soft cap on the number of Jewish students admitted, and it's wrong now when schools effectively do the same for Asians. They can nudge-nudge-wink-wink "Holistic approach" all they like, but when the data show an Asian student needs 120 more SAT points to get in, it's hard to see anything other than racial bias or de facto quotas. I don't say this out of self-interest, I'm not Asian. If anything, these quotas help people from my background. I don't care. They are deeply unfair and antithetical to the American values of equal opportunity, fair competition, and not judging people on their race, gender, or creed. And the students being pushed out by these rules are not rich or privileged. The rich and privileged kids in New York are in private schools that cost more than a luxury car for a year's tuition. Many are children of first generation immigrants.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

mindvirus 8y ago

I wonder how de Blasio's proposal would lead to different patterns of where people live in the city - it seems that to play this game (and it sounds like many parents are very motivated to), it makes sense to send your kids to an underperforming school.

dmurray 8y ago
Yes. I expect the author's mother would seek out school districts with the lowest test scores (perhaps the lowest population of Asian-Americans) and send her daughter there instead. So if what the policy makers really want is to equally distribute Asian immigrants among the city's middle schools, perhaps they've hit on the policy that will do that.
- otoburb 8y ago
  >Yes. I expect the author's mother would seek out school districts with the lowest test scores (perhaps the lowest population of Asian-Americans) and send her daughter there instead. In that situation, the parents of a child who might be considered academically bright will need to contend with the additional burden of trying to motivate their child to be different (i.e. higher test scores) than the rest of their peers who, for various reasons, don't test as well. Peer pressure is a thing, and is sometimes seen by parents as a blessing if it gives their child an incentive to study.

camdenlock 8y ago

This is some bullshit. Trying to exert such rigid control over educational outcomes by favoring people based on their race? Talk about unfair discrimination. It’s 2018 (aka $CURRENT_YEAR), haven’t we grown beyond this fruitless social engineering wheel-spinning? In a sane world, this kind of legislation would be shot down with cogent arguments from smart and knowledgeable lawmakers. The only reason such ill-conceived ideas become law is because our republic is essentially a popularity contest, and people will apparently vote for a politician who, without thinking things through (or indeed thinking at all), will gladly push legislation rife with feel-good buzzwords and catchphrases of the moment. All that matters is getting (re-)elected, fairness and justice be damned. It’s no wonder these folks are marching. This is naked social control from ideologues. Fight against it!

Fomite 8y ago
The suggestion is that educational outcomes are already favoring people by race, just with a veneer laid over it, and we're revisiting the question as to whether or not that's working.
- manfredo 8y ago
  I may be reading too much into your use of the word "favoring", but I think it's not safe to assume that any disparate outcome is the effect of favoring certain races. Certainly, educational outcomes differ by race but there are non-discriminatory factors that can play a large role, such as time dedicated towards academics [1]. In other words, I think it's worth asking whether it's the education system that's favoring certain groups, or if it's certain groups that are favoring academic achievement. I don't think it's right to use discriminatory policies to ensure equity of outcome if it's the latter. 1. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_35.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_35.asp
  - Fomite 8y ago
    I agree - all I'm saying is that claiming the old system doesn't favor people by race (in the way you're meaning, where it tilts the scales in particular direction) isn't trivially demonstrable. Higher Ed has been struggling with this for awhile. It's not clear that a major emphasis on test scores isn't just putting a quantitative spackle on a biased system, and then declaring the job done. Especially in a system with such a complicated background as public schooling.

zeth___ 8y ago

This is an very good example of why 'people of color' is red herring no one believes. Asians, both yellow and brown, are out performing whites. Blacks are under performing everyone and 'latinos' are doing either ok or pretty badly, depending on if you split them according to skin color. The issue in America has been and still is why are blacks doing so poorly? Dressing it up as anything else does no one any favors.

ouid 8y ago
you're not normalizing for enough, and you know it.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  Maybe he does, but I don’t... what do you mean, “normalizing for enough?”
  - Fomite 8y ago
    "Brown" is not the only variable that might have influenced on success. "Asian" or "Hispanic" or "Black" are actually a basket of variables that exist at different levels that influence everything from health to educational attainment.
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    That's dogwhistle for 'you're racist'.
    - dang 8y ago
      If you continue to start and feed flamewars on Hacker News, we will ban you.
justinpombrio 8y ago
> The issue in America has been and still is why are blacks doing so poorly? If nothing else, enormous income differences? See the top graph here: https://www.financialsamurai.com/income-by-race-why-is-asian-income-so-high/ https://www.financialsamurai.com/income-by-race-why-is-asian... It's hard to educate yourself well if your family is poor, I hear.

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mabbo 8y ago

Call me crazy, but what if you just funded all public schools sufficiently that the advantage of going to the "good" school was lessened? Is that too socialist?

cm2012 8y ago
The good high schools in this article aren't good because of funding. They're good because they only let in the top 1% of kids.
- gedy 8y ago
  Public charter schools (at least around me) receive much less funding, and yet have better facilities, test scores, etc for this same reason.
Reactionary_ 8y ago
Because it has nothing to do with the funding and everything to do with who is a student there.
deleted 8y ago
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mrchicity 8y ago
Good schools are mostly good because of their student bodies. At a basic level you need teachers who care, books and decent accommodations. If those basics aren't being met, then spending will help. And if those needs are met, it certainly helps to have really great, special teachers who push students a little further. But I believe if you took the kids from a selective school and swapped them with kids from a school with frequent violence and truancy, the kids from the selective school would still have far better life outcomes, and find ways to succeed despite run down classrooms, less inspiring teachers, and dated books. They would succeed if you put them in an 1800s one-room schoolhouse, or didn't even send them to school at all. They had to pass a high bar for intellectual ability and their parents care about education.
- 8y ago

wb36 8y ago

Instead of debating the criteria for entrance into these elite schools, why not look at what makes them such great schools and replicate that elsewhere? Sure, in so far as being surrounded by top students who study all the time improves the environment, the current elite is likely to remain the elite and the admissions criteria should still be discussed. But if the gap between the quality of those schools and the others wasn't so vast, it would no longer feel like the difference between being guaranteed success in life vs. being doomed to failure.

deleted 8y ago
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desu_ 8y ago
The value of a good education lies in its signalling power too. There are plenty of good professors in non-elite schools, many undergrad classes are approachable enough that a self-motivated student could absorb a lot of content with little supervision, and a lot of schools make their material available through online platforms. All these are great for learning but replicating the signaling part is more difficult.
whiddershins 8y ago
Nyc is full of amazing public high schools, as I mentioned in another comment. Moreover you can apply to virtually any public high school in NYC and be admitted based on whatever criteria they set up, meaning you aren’t forced in that case to go to your zoned (regional) school. These articles misrepresent the situation. There are only three schools that use this test, and they often get the “I studied really hard but I was bad at homework and class participation” student. Luckily there is a mechanism (for now) to catch some of the potential of these students.

dilap 8y ago

Here's another, more critical take on the plan: https://quillette.com/2018/06/27/bill-de-blasios-plan-to-purge-asians-from-new-yorks-top-schools/ https://quillette.com/2018/06/27/bill-de-blasios-plan-to-pur... I think it's terrible. It's robbing poor kids of a rare opportunity to get a first-rate education, to make elites feel better about themselves. If you insist that the racial demographics of the schools match those of the city, a much better way to do it is to keep the admissions test, but simply take the top N% w/in each racial bucket, rather than globally. Otherwise, if you get rid of the test completely and pulling evenly from every school, you are guaranteed (1) you will not create an environment w/ the truly elite (2) you are replacing standardized tests, which are fair, with the whole teacher-grading-system, which is wildly inconsistent and generally a better measure of who behaves and who sucks up than who is academically worthy.

throwaway2048 8y ago
the supreme court declared racial quotas illegal.
- mrchicity 8y ago
  Yes, instead we have holistic approaches which schools refuse to document for proprietary competitive reasons, and that holistic process has the same outcome as a racial quota. Very odd case.
- dilap 8y ago
  which is really quite unfortunate, since everyone still wants to essentially set quotas, but now you can't do it in a transparent and fair (or less unfair) way.
gnicholas 8y ago
> simply take the top N% w/in each racial bucket, rather than globally This would benefit wealthy Black/Latino kids, whose parents can afford test prep. If the goal is to have a more racially diverse student body, it accomplishes that goal. But if the goal is to help disadvantaged kids get ahead, then it's not useful.

blueprint 8y ago

Hey look it's my high school

ericdykstra 8y ago

The entire doctrine of Disparate Impact, and Affirmative Action which is borne from it, is one of the most illiberal policies in America. I really hope a constitutionalist Supreme Court can reverse this madness. On Affirmative Action in specific, here's a great interview from Sowell about the unintended consequences that arise from the awful policy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA

deleted 8y ago
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iosDrone 8y ago
It will be ruled unconstitutional within two years. The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.
- ericdykstra 8y ago
  I really hope so, as there is so much wrong with it. To begin with, the 80% rule creates an impossible standard of "diversity" that doesn't match the reality of how different groups of people have different tendencies and preferences. The impossible standard mixed with the conflicting doctrines of Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact mean that every major company has to settle diversity lawsuits for hundreds of millions or into the billions of dollars, no matter what their policy is.
- otoburb 8y ago
  de Blasio already thought about this. The criteria has nothing to do with race, and is clearly about academic performance. The intended outcome and policy itself is driven internally by diversity, but the actual criteria doesn't (and probably cannot) mention race in any way, shape or form.

confiscate 8y ago

Test scores are race-blind and fair. Test instructors do not give more scores to a test because they see it was completed by an Asian test-taker. It's great that schools are looking for a better "mix" of ethnicities in the incoming class, but they should encourage the underrepresented ethnicities to do better, in tests or other race-blind admission standards. They should not put an admission "cap" based on the color of your skin

swsieber 8y ago
This. The end of the pipeline is not the correct place to change pipeline demographics, and in cases like this, is actually harmful.
- squiggleblaz 8y ago
  But where is the right place to change pipeline demographics? The problem is that certain groups are intergenerationally poor. One mechanism that is available to us to fix that is education. So this isn't the end of the pipeline, it's just the start of the next pipe. Where do you propose we intervene? Should we give a cushy job to the parents of every disadvantaged minority person as soon as they're born? Maybe we should give an education to the parents of every disadvantaged minority person before they're even the apple in the eye of said parents?
  - confiscate 8y ago
    You intervene when the student is still learning the material, before the test. You do not intervene after the test. At that point the learning process for that material is already over. The student has already "missed out" on the learning opportunity. You would just be giving a good grade to someone who doesn't know the material. Yes we need to help folks who are intergenerationally poor. But, you do that by helping their kids learn better and meet the testing bar. You are not helping them by lowering the bar for them. Giving the kids better grades even if they don't know the material, would actually hurt them.
    - 8y ago

Reactionary_ 8y ago

1. I believe black and hispanic students could do just as well as asian students if their cultures were similar to that of the asian students. Let's not kid ourselves. The asian students doing well on these tests are born into cultures that value academic achievement more than the average black or hispanic family. There's nothing inherently different about the different groups aside from their cultures. Keep the tests, and encourage a culture of academic excellent to take root in different communities where it may not currently exist. 2. Let's stop being so obsessed with race. Racial quotas make people think more about race when our goal should be to make people think less about race and more about individuals apart from the color of their skin.

deleted 8y ago
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ralston 8y ago
Ahhh, I will refuse to pay the troll toll :)
dqpb 8y ago
Best comment in this thread!

icelancer 8y ago

This is pretty standard and has been going on for decades. Asian-Americans are the last race you can openly commit racist policies against without dogwhistling. I don't know what it is, maybe it's because they are politically underreprsented or it's because they are underrepresented in popular culture in general, or their general attitude to be anti-political in nature, but it's just totally fine to withhold educational resources and outcomes for an entire race of people. It is particularly bad against Chinese-Americans, I've found. I remember dealing with it as a young child growing up in the Midwest as a Japanese-American whose grandparents were interned in California. I didn't come to "appreciate" the level of systemic, acceptable racism baked into society against Asian-Americans until much later in life. My feelings on it now are kind of whatever. It is what it is and I don't see it changing much. I sure don't see white activists taking up the Asian banner, though.

dmurray 8y ago
I'm pretty sure you can also "openly commit racist policies against" white people and get away with it.
jsoc815 8y ago
> This is pretty standard... I don't know what it is... Mostly the numbers. The "Asian" population in America is relatively small, and thus (perceived to be) easily managed. If one looks at demographic shifts, immigration policy, etc., over the course of the European expansion in to what is now America, the game should be pretty clear. Actually, Brazil is also a good example, if you look at their post-slavery immigration plan/policy.[2] Anyway, I'm linking to an old post of mine from the Harvard discussion.[1] I highly recommend checking out Prof. Frank Wu's comments in the referenced video. Also, it's worth noting that generally speaking, public schools are not considered to be elite. Elite schools are generally the exclusive ones where politicians, captains of industry, and the like send their kids to help them socialize with 'the right kind of people,' and maybe a smattering of common folk. I've been to those (as one of the common folk) and to elite public schools; the difference really is night and day. This whole thing is just more divide and conquer. It pains me to see people continue to fall for it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335887 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/is-neymar-black-brazil-and-the-painful-relativity-of-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/is-neymar-black-b...

confiscate 8y ago

If a student is not doing well in school, it makes no sense to just "give" that student a higher grade, for "equality" with the rest of the class. You need to help that student get better, so he/she can achieve the higher grade on his/her own. If a student can't do multiplication in a test, you don't just "give more points" to that student, for "equality" in the classroom. You need to teach that student to learn multiplication. You need to bring that student "up" and not everyone else "down".

marris 8y ago

Yup. It's especially disheartening that most of the discussion centers around "privilege" and the supposed ease of coasting into one of these schools if parents pay for test prep. Anyone can get test prep books from the New York Public library and practice, practice, practice. The fact that so few members from some groups attend the school says far more about the importance of education in their homes than it does about lack of "endowment."

guard0g 8y ago
Sadly, there is little discussion of the importance of effort, hard work, persistence, and grit in the success of Asian American students...

akhilcacharya 8y ago

I don't agree with taking top N% as the only admittance criteria but the constant pearl clutching about this and the Harvard case really bothers me. The idea that this one school can make or break one's future is either absurd or terrifying, and I'm not sure which is actually true.

deleted 8y ago

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iosDrone 8y ago

I can't wait for affirmative action to become unconstitutional.

imbokodo 8y ago

There is a class if people who do not work, whose parents did not work, who themselves have parents who do not work. The type seen in the documentary "Born Rich". They get into the best universities as legacies. You never hear talk of this idle class ensconced in inherited privilege and luxury. However, a few decades after Americans were lynching those of African descent, blowing up their little girls while they're going to church, executing them for voter registration drives etc. - a few decades after that if an attempt is made to push blacks at Stuyvesant above the 1 in 45 mark, in a city where 1 in 4 are black - then, only then do we hear about the need for meritocracy and so on. From the mouth of a man who got a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father, with his son-in-law who, according to Daniel Golden, bought his way into Harvard. When am I going to see the articles about legacy admissions to the top colleges? I won't hold my breath. Luxury for the idle class at the top, the rat race (with some national oppression of Africans, Lakota etc. thrown in) for everyone else. No thanks, I'll keep my sickle sharpened for a higher target.

mrchicity 8y ago
Some rich heir being a shoe in at Harvard where he skips half his classes and takes a spot from someone with academic interests bothers me too. It's not fair. But I'm a bit less skeeved out by a school administrator judging someone as an individual, even if it's for a crappy reason like dad being a donor, than having them admit or deny someone just based on the color of their skin. Just as I would rather work for a boss who hired his buddy from the country club, but harbored no prejudice, than one who refused to hire blacks, Jews, Asians, etc. who met the job requirements.

cardplayer 8y ago

More than 50% of the global population lives in Asia and less than 5% live in North America. It makes complete sense that wealthy-to-middle class Asians would displace white students to a lesser degree and other communities of color to a higher degree in closely located Western countries with strong schools and favorable immigration policies. By 2050, would it be so strange that the majority of applicants and students of elite western schools would be Asian? Other communities will be forced to attend less prestigious institutions until Asian schools hold stronger apppeal with the wealthier citizens in their countries.

antoncohen 8y ago

San Francisco went through a similar thing. The best public high schools in SF (namely Lowell) per predominantly Chinese-American. The NAACP sued the school district (NAACP v. San Francisco Unified School District), resulting in race-based admissions in 1983 to reduce the number of Chinese-Americans at the best schools Then in 1994 Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District happened, and race-based admissions got thrown out. If you look at the racial demographics of public high schools in San Francisco it is pretty interesting. Of the 10 major schools only two of them have over 10% white students. Those are the only two that only admit students that meet special requirements. One is Lowell (academically the best) with 15.2% white, the other is SOTA (an arts school that requires auditions) with 41.3% white. Lowell is 56.7% Asian, while SOTA is 19.0% Asian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Franci... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Asawa_San_Francisco_School_of_the_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Asawa_San_Francisco_Schoo...

guard0g 8y ago

Around the country, there's a concerted effort to eliminate magnet schools for much the same rationale. Wealthy NY folks send their kids to private schools like Dalton, Trinity, Packer, etc... Why not make a system that seeks economic parity rather racial parity, and eliminate the moats around private schools?

cardplayer 8y ago
How about we just improve the quality of public school education with a large tax on weapon sales? Better schools and maybe fewer school shootings...maybe. America has never much cared for its children so yeah. shrugs

zBard 8y ago

It's interesting to see the HN responses in the GPA thread -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441601 when compared to this one, although both boil down to the measure of scholastic tests as a ingress criteria.

keepper 8y ago

So lets say you have a really big balancing scale[1].... And there's a chute that's been feeding twice as much sand to one side, for hundreds of years.... What do you do to balance it? a) Distribute sand equally to each side b) Distribute substantially more sand to one side c) Make like the imbalance did not happen and ignore it. If the answer is obvious to the above, then why is leveling the field for historically disenfranchised people an issue? I am referring to Black Americans and Native Americans. Nigerian Americans are some of the most successful immigrants[2]. Asian Immigrants, Hispanic Immigrants, Indian Immigrants, Eastern European immigrants, all tend to do decent well. What do they all have in common? They are immigrants! Immigrants that don't have the baggage of hundreds of years of oppression in their new country. They used to be disadvantaged in their own country. But coming to a new country does something... a new start. I should know, my parents where such immigrants. But Native Americans[3], and Native Blacks (as in not recently immigrated) continue to do the worst in the achievement scale. Maybe, just maybe... we start realizing that they both share the same initial crutch.. the scale was tipped way against them, until quite recently.[4] And yes, nitpick my points away, the underlying issue is still valid.. immigrants tend to do well in a new country, imbalances can't be corrected by neutrality going forward, and historically disenfranchised people tend to do bad in the country they are disenfranchised... see poor asians in asia or in india... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=balancing+scale [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-12/africa-is-sending-us-its-best-and-brightest [3] http://indianyouth.org/american-indian-life/poverty-cycle [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Ethnic_Placement_Act

zeth___ 8y ago
Yes, we should punish children for the sins of their fathers. Especially the immigrants, who had nothing to do with any of it.
- keepper 8y ago
  What is the "punishment" you refer to? Removing an unfair advantage that is so innate, it's almost invisible to those that benefit it? PS: Not that I should be indulging your vague references... but actually, we do it quite often. Did Bernie Madoff's kids/wife get the spoils of his crime? Has not pretty much every war had a form of "reparations"?

whiddershins 8y ago

The elimination of standard testing as the only application criteria for New York schools such as Stuyvesant is a travesty. Opinion pieces on this topic consistently misrepresent the situation. Many, many, elite High schools in Nyc are applied to on the basis of a wide variety of criteria. Grades, essays, you name it. These schools have a wonderful mix of admissions processes which allows each of them to capture a portion of promising students that others may miss. There are exactly 3 High Schools that exclusively use one standardized test. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Even if these schools favor people who are “good at tests” that’s fine! The other amazing high schools can grab the students who are talented in other ways. Removing those three disadvantages people who might be highly motivated and/or intelligent but have trouble meeting other vague criteria. That’s terrible and discriminatory. It favors conformity in the best case, and quota filling in the worst.

httpz 8y ago

We can argue what is "fair" all we want but what policy makers really care about is votes not "fairness". "fairness" is a moving definition that is associated with the political climate. Not that we should completely give up on fairness and let political power decide everything but I feel a bit exhausted reading these arguments going in circles for years..

graycat 8y ago

Gee, all this terrible struggle over what can and can't get from some K-12 school. What a WASTE. Huge misunderstanding. Bronx High School of Science? How about instead Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton? How to do that? Well, big secret (don't tell anyone!): How do professors at research universities stay up to date so that they can do leading edge research? Do they take refresher courses at the Bronx High School of Science? Not likely! Do they take courses at all? Essentially no. So, what the professors do is just study the best materials and go to some seminars. In simple terms, students can do much the same starting with, say, high school ninth grade material and continuing on. If get very far in academics, then just MUST work and learn fully independently or nearly so, so might as well just start doing that ASAP, especially to get around all the terrible struggles of K-12. Bluntly, nearly no US K-12 teacher knows any material that is worth any student struggling over. So, get THROUGH the K-12 material and get on to college level material, ASAP. So, for a student who wants the best education in K-12 and later, first, get the basics, the prerequisites for college material, and then study the best college material. "The basics" are just high school math and science together with good skills reading and writing English. History, belle lettre literature, music, etc., maybe fun and nice but for academic success close to irrelevant. So, in K-12 years, ASAP get into fractions, exponents, compound interest, areas and volumes. Then do first year algebra, plane geometry, second year algebra, trigonometry, solid geometry. Do general science, chemistry, biology, physics. For the science, will do it all again and much more thoroughly again anyway, essentially several times more, so don't get all perfectionistic for the first pass. Then start on college material -- first up, calculus of one independent variable and then several independent variables, heavy on intuition, light on proofs. Watch the best Internet lectures -- IMHO, Khan Academy is NOT good enough. Use several of the best regarded texts; to find those, ask some college students, TAs, or profs or look at the Web sites of calculus courses at the best universities and see what texts they are using. Likely buy the texts used -- calculus hasn't much changed in decades, highly recommended old texts should be fine and cheap! Do the homework problems and check answers in the back of the book. Maybe wander onto a college campus or have a family friend who is a college prof and get the tests for the calculus course, take those, and beg a calculus TA or prof to grade the results. Continue with math and science the same way -- best materials, with some informal contact with a college. Once get to college junior level material, at some research universities, start attending public research seminars. Typically won't understand more than 10% of the material but WILL get lots of keywords that can motivate and direct studies. Maybe meet a prof or two who will volunteer to grade some homework, say, in math, physics, maybe let you have some copies of tests and grade your solutions. Also many graduate school departments publish their qualifying exams -- they are good and important sources of exercises. When have good reason to feel confident, take the SAT aptitude tests and the STEM field subject matter tests AND then the same for the GREs. Right, still in K-12 but taking the GRE to show that you are ready for graduate school. If really want to seal the deal, blow away the college admissions committees, publish some papers, a few should do, in good quality peer reviewed journals. Then apply to college, maybe using some of the contacts you got from attending the research seminars. So, a friendly prof might just contact the college admissions committee and ask that you be admitted with full scholarship. So, you enter as a college freshman but start on your Master's and maybe are a TA or research assistant for a prof. Look, for academics, the real goal is likely not very visible at the Bronx High School of Science or any K-12 place. The real goal is in three words, research, research, and research. For that, get into a good research university, do well learning the prerequisites, attend seminars to see what some of the current research topics are, work with good profs, and do publish some good research. If want some additional concentration on bio-medical and get an MD, fine. It's also possible to go for a law degree. Or can continue in main line STEM field academics and be a professor at a research university. Or, sure, can do what, say, A. Viterbi did and go for entrepreneurship and, then, get your name on an engineering school! Does independent study work? It certainly did for me: I got a Ph.D. in applied math and was a college prof. Starting with first year algebra, class time was mostly a waste of time, and I learned nearly all the material, especially the good material I learned well, from independent study. My preparation for the graduate school qualifying exams, my Ph.D. research, my other, published research -- all from essentially just independent study. That's what research professors do -- learn what they need to know and then do their research, both essentially independently. At least at one time, the math department at Princeton stated on their Web site that no courses were offered for preparation for the qualifying exams, that the courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, and that students were expected to prepare for the qualifying exams on their own. So, the Princeton math department regards independent study as essential. One of the best lessons I learned in math was in high school plane geometry: The teacher was the most offensive human I ever saw. So, in class, I just put my head down and slept. Then after school, I read the lesson material quickly and then looked at the exercises. I started with the last, most difficult ones and did them all until I got to the trivial ones. Then I turned to the back of the book for the more difficult supplementary exercises and did ALL of them, never let even one go. So, on the state test, I did well! I continued to learn math that way: E.g., I never took freshman calculus, instead, got a good text and taught myself, much as I learned high school plane geometry and for a course started on sophomore calculus and did well. E.g., as a senior, I got a famous, challenging text in topology and gave a prof a lecture a week, for each chapter, one lecture on the material and one more with solutions to the exercises. It's not just me: Bluntly, if go very far in academics, just MUST be good at independent study. So, might as well get started in high school material, and if do that then can f'get about all the struggles with Bronx High School of Science, Dalton School, etc. Again, the K-12 teachers don't know anything worth struggle. Want to struggle a little? Okay, on YouTube, watch the lectures on quantum mechanics from MIT. Or, for a mathematician giving an introduction to bio-medical research, watch the Eric Lander lectures -- on YouTube, from MIT. Bronx High School of Science? F'get about it. Again, get the good stuff from, say, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, etc. Done. Any questions?

otoburb 8y ago

The mayor, de Blasio, is trying to institute a similar system that was in place for NYC kindergarten admissions over a decade ago. Prior to 2007, gifted and talented classes were skewed towards white and asians and the admissions process was criticized for allowing "favoritism and discrimination"[1]. A standardized test was then implemented for 4 year olds going forward, but over subsequent years people realized that this resulted in even lower hispanic and black enrollment into the coveted G&T programs[2]. de Blasio is pushing for a more ethnically diverse mix across all schools. Based on the K G&T admissions changes made in 2007, he is fairly sure this change will achieve his objective. He firmly subscribes to the idea that while certain elite schools will be by definition diluted in terms of academic achievement and excellence, the overall NYC school system will benefit. He fervently believes that trying to increase the global median achievement at the expense of a lower academic peak achieved by a tiny minority of students is worth it (aka YCMAOWBE[3] or TANSTAAFL[4]). While I agree with the sentiment that one should try to fix the entire pipeline and not focus on the end product (too little too late), critics lambasting de Blasio's plan need to understand that he's simply making different trade-offs during his last term in office as mayor. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/nyregion/26gifted.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/nyregion/26gifted.html [2] https://hechingerreport.org/as-new-york-struggles-to-make-gifted-admissions-equitable-one-bronx-family-searches-for-a-way-in/ https://hechingerreport.org/as-new-york-struggles-to-make-gi... [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can%27t_make_an_omelette_without_breaking_eggs https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can%27t_make_an_omelette_... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as...

imbokodo 8y ago
The parents of "gifted" white 4 year olds trying to keep black kids out due to their "gifted" 4 year olds hard work and their grind and the meritocracy...I mean it sounds like a parody. "It's not due to racism or the to the manor born gift of idleness - these 'gifted' 4 year olds are high achievers"
- otoburb 8y ago
  I'm having trouble understanding the sentiment of your comment, but it seems you are deriding the "gifted" label bestowed by the NYC Department of Education. I agree that the label is unfortunate. From what I understand so far, the "gifted" curriculum is comparable to other high-achieving schools without the need for a "gifted" designation outside of the city and across the country.

iosDrone 8y ago

Most Hacker News readers are liberal (judging by the comments). And it seems like most Hacker News readers are disgusted by this news. What every liberal person who read this article with disgust needs to realize is that THIS IS THE LIBERAL END-GAME AND THIS IS WHAT A MAJORITY OF LEFT-LEANING DECISION-MAKERS SUPPORT. They don't care about merit, or fairness, or making the most out of a scarce resource. All that they care about is enforced "equality," no matter how many people suffer as a consequence.