Liberal Goes After Poor Asian Residents

GBFan

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Liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his progressive allies often accuse conservatives of waging a war on women and love to gin up the "income inequality" and "class warfare" rhetoric.
But they want to wage war on poor and working-class New Yorkers, many of whom happen to be of Asian descent, by radically changing the admissions criteria for the state's prestigious high schools to benefit wealthy liberals. Asians "have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in New York."

In the summer edition of City Journal, Dennis Saffron, an appellate lawyer who was a candidate for city council in Queens, lays out the case against de Blasio's anti-meritocracy education reforms in an article titled, "The Plot Against Merit: Seeking racial balance, liberal advocates want to water down admissions standards at New York’s elite high schools."

De Blasio wants to deemphasize merit and test scores in admissions to some of the state's most prominent specialized high schools, which Saffron concludes will benefit "affluent white students who didn’t study hard enough to perform really well on the test but seem more 'well-rounded' than those who did."

"As always, the losers in this top-bottom squeeze will be the lower middle and working classes," he observes.

Saffron notes that "New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel Laureates—more than most countries." But concerned about the lack of Latinos and blacks at those schools, the NAACP and liberal politicians like "New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria." Saffron notes that though the socialist de Blasio argues that "relying solely on the test creates a 'rich-get-richer' dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation," the "reality is just the opposite."

Saffron tells the story of an Asian immigration named Ting Shi, who "arrived in New York from China when he was seven years of ago, speaking no English":

For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”

"It’s not affluent whites, but rather the city’s burgeoning population of Asian-American immigrants—a group that, despite its successes, remains disproportionately poor and working-class—whose children have aced the exam in overwhelming numbers," Saffron notes. In other words, kids like Ting are hurt and left behind while privileged kids like de Blasio's son will ironically get ahead the more "holistic" the admissions policy is. The "holistic" policy "would be much more likely to benefit children of the city’s professional elite than African-American and Latino applicants—while penalizing lower-middle-class Asian-American kids like Ting."
 
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