From the New York Times:
How the Few Black and Hispanic Students at Stuyvesant High School Feel
By Eliza Shapiro
March 22, 2019
I’ve decided upon a new policy, one that the New York Times should consider as well: when reposting excerpts from NYT articles about high school students, I’m only going to use the kids’ initials.
Sarai Pridgen had just gotten home from debate practice on Monday evening when she opened her laptop to find her Facebook feed flooded with stories about a staggering statistic: only seven black students had been admitted into Stuyvesant High School, out of 895 spots. The number was causing a wrenching citywide discussion about race and inequality in America’s largest school system.
SP said she felt sickened by the statistic — yet unsurprised. A 16-year-old sophomore, she is one of just 29 black students out of about 3,300 teenagers at Stuyvesant.
“I go to this school every day, I walk through the hallways of this school, and I don’t think I see a black person usually through my day,” said SP, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Uh … Park Slope isn’t exactly The Hood. It’s more like the state-of-the-art baby carriage capital of America.
“It’s frustrating to see that nobody wants to do anything, until it’s like, ‘Oh no, nobody got it in,’” said KS, 17, whose parents are from the Dominican Republic. “But it’s like, ‘well you didn’t try to make anyone come in, you didn’t do anything about it.’”
WL, 17, whose father is black and whose mother is Korean-American, said the numbers had made him feel both angry and committed to improving the school culture. …
Still, SP acknowledged that other students’ comments had occasionally made her question her place at the school.
“I’ve been told that the only reason I got into Stuyvesant is because I’m black, even though the test doesn’t even factor that in,” said Sarai, whose father is black and grew up in New York City and whose mother is from Spain. …
Here’s the 18th paragraph of the article and the first to mention the A word:
Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a controversial proposal to eliminate the admissions exam — the sole means of entry into the city’s eight so-called specialized high schools — and replace it with a system that offers seats to the top performers at every city middle school. The plan has little if any chance of passing in Albany because it has faced opposition from the schools’ alumni and Asian-American groups.
Asians, what do Asians have to do with White Privilege at Stuyvesant? Oh … the 19th paragraph finally explains:
Asians make up roughly 73 percent of Stuyvesant’s 3,300 students, while white students are about 20 percent of the school. Hispanic students make up another 3 percent, with black students just under 1 percent. The city school system is nearly 70 percent black and Hispanic with white and Asian students making up roughly another 15 percent each.
Huh … It’s almost as if Occam’s Razor suggests that, in terms of average smartness, Asians > whites > Hispanics > blacks.
But that couldn’t possibly be true because that’s a trope, a stereotype, cliche, and/or a myth. There are just too much facts and logic in favor of the Occam’s Razor explanation, so the conspiracy theory about White Supremacy has to be true instead. Why? Just because …
Some who defend the entrance exam say Asian-American students at the specialized schools simply worked harder than the black and Hispanic students who did not get in. They say they believed that the numbers, while bleak, reflected a fair system.
But the black and Hispanic teenagers interviewed said they considered themselves proof that there is no disparity of effort or talent — just an imbalance of opportunity.
VN, 18, a Stuyvesant graduate who is a freshman at Harvard, said she remembered when a fifth-grade teacher pulled her aside at her Catholic middle school in Queens Village and encouraged her to consider an elite public school.
Ms. VN, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, had never heard of Stuyvesant, but she bought a test preparation book and started taking practice exams. She thinks often of her classmates who didn’t have the same guidance.
“I had a lot of friends in my middle school who were just as smart as me, and who I know could be thriving at Stuyvesant if they had known it existed,” said Ms. VN, who was a standout on Stuyvesant’s track team.
She’s shattering stereotypes as a Nigerian distance runner.
Nah, just kidding, she’s triple jumper, pole vaulter, and on the two sprint relay teams. Earlier in her career they tried her at races up to 3000m, but not anymore.
It was much the same for HG, the daughter of Eritrean immigrants, who found out the test existed three months before taking it — by Googling phrases like “best New York City high schools.” …
ET, who is black and Puerto Rican and grew up in a housing project in Chelsea, remembered that his tutor gave him a steep discount, in part because he lived with a single mother who is disabled. …
When Ms. VN found out last April that she had been accepted into all eight of the Ivy League colleges, her first reaction was to keep the news quiet. She said she feared that her peers would make snide comments.
Ms. VN classmates had previously told her that she did not have to worry about her grades because, as a black girl, she was basically guaranteed entry into the college of her choice. …
But what do Asian kids at Stuyvesant know about America’s occluded system of racial preferences?
And from another article by Eliza Shapiro:
For example, there’s a smaller but still important battle brewing in Boston over the way kids get into Boston Latin, which is Boston’s equivalent of Stuyvesant. Currently, admission is largely determined by a student’s score on a test that was designed for private schools. But that system has left Boston Latin overwhelmingly white …
Actually, Boston Latin is less than half white:
White 46.8%
Asian 28.6%
Hispanic 12.5%
Black 7.5%
I guess in 2019 America, however, 46.8% white counts as “overwhelmingly white.”
