New York mayor Bill de Blasio is out to prove my theory of the Not So Great Reset right. As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine on 11/18/20:
At this point, I’m less worried that there is a carefully calculated master plan than that our elites are just making things up as they go along based on the latest Woke bad ideas.
For decades, I’ve been pointing out the various hypocrisies of the ruling elite: For example, graduates of prestige colleges contend that the worst thing imaginable is pointing out that the races differ in intelligence, but their alma maters use admissions tests on which, indeed, the races score differently on average. Likewise, urban elites in New York City rely upon the massive NYPD to keep them safe from criminals.
But hypocrisy is a good thing when you are in charge of important functions but nominally subscribe to a ridiculous ideology. It’s better than trying to live up to your anti-empirical assertions.
Since Memorial Day, though, it’s almost as if the ruling class has been out to prove me wrong by doing all the self-destructive things I’ve pointed out they didn’t do in the past: the Not So Great Reset. In our brave new post-hypocritical America in the Year Zero AGF (After George Floyd), black criminals don’t have to be arrested if they don’t feel like it and dumb kids can go to UCLA just like smart kids.
But I think what is really going on is this:
Elites never actually admitted to themselves that they were hypocritical. Instead, they just didn’t think about it. Inertia, not hypocrisy, ruled. Requiring the SAT to get into Berkeley was just the way things were. Locking up vastly more black criminals than Asian criminals was merely something that happened, year after year.
I suspect here’s the obscure connection between the coronavirus and The Establishment deciding to blow up America in the name of the Racial Reckoning as they drifted from inanity to insanity:
The pandemic required a certain amount of temporary rearrangement of old ways of doing things. For instance, administering the SAT and ACT was canceled during the spring lockdown. So colleges adjusted by making application tests optional.
As a one-year expedient, that wouldn’t have been too destructive.
But this need to improvise new rules empowered the current year’s ignorant, science-denialist ideas about “racial justice.” No longer could the people running American colleges just kick the can down the road on college testing’s race gaps because now they had to make some changes. And they wound up making extremely destructive permanent alterations, with many colleges junking a testing system that had evolved intelligently during the Depression and Cold War when Americans needed to make smart choices.
A judge now has banned students applying to the University of California from even choosing on their own to send in their test scores.
With our current Narrative about white evilness dominating our thinking, Americans less and less can do rational minor maintenance on our inherited institutions.
From the New York Times today:
New York City Will Change Many Selective Schools to Address Segregation
The pandemic prompted the mayor’s most significant action yet on integration: a major shift in how hundreds of schools admit students.
By Eliza Shapiro
Dec. 18, 2020Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Friday major changes to the way hundreds of New York City’s selective middle and high schools admit their students, a move intended to address long-simmering concerns that admissions policies have discriminated against Black and Latino students and exacerbated segregation in the country’s largest school district.
New York is more reliant on high-stakes admissions requirements than any other district in the country, and the mayor has for years faced mounting pressure to take more forceful action to desegregate the city’s racially and socioeconomically divided public schools. Black and Latino students are significantly underrepresented in selective middle and high schools, though they represent nearly 70 percent of the district’s 1.1 million students.
But it was the pandemic that finally prompted Mr. de Blasio, now in his seventh year in office, to implement some of the most sweeping school integration measures in New York City’s recent history. The alterations, however, will not affect admissions at the city’s most elite selective high schools, like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science.
When schools shuttered in the spring, grading systems and standardized tests used by the city to admit students to its selective schools were altered or paused. That has made it next to impossible for most selective schools to sort students by academic performance as they have in previous years.
Still, changes forged in a crisis are now set to outlast the pandemic.
“By the time I leave the mayoralty, I think we will have put the city on a very different course, certainly vis-à-vis screened schools,” Mr. de Blasio said in a news conference on Friday. “This is clearly a beginning.”
The new policies, which will go into effect for this year’s round of admissions, will affect how about 400 of the city’s 1,800 schools admit students.
Mr. de Blasio and his successor will no doubt face demands to integrate many more city high schools, particularly screened schools, which are among the most racially unrepresentative in the system. But the integration of specialized and screened high schools has long been considered a third-rail in the district, and changes made there would no doubt be highly contentious.
Middle schools will see the most significant policy revisions. The city will eliminate all admissions screening for the schools for at least one year, the mayor said. About 200 middle schools — 40 percent of the total — use metrics like grades, attendance and test scores to determine which students should be admitted. Now those schools will use a random lottery to admit students.
In doing this, Mr. de Blasio is essentially piloting an experiment that, if deemed successful, could permanently end the city’s academically selective middle schools, which tend to be much whiter than the district overall.
The time frame for a final decision on whether to get rid of middle school screening for good — which will come shortly before Mr. de Blasio leaves office on New Year’s Day in 2022 — instantly created a quandary for the phalanx of candidates vying to replace him.
The candidates are likely to be pressed on whether they would resume what has been a particularly contentious practice: measuring the academic achievements of fourth graders to determine if they can attend a selective middle school.
City officials said that because of the pandemic, there simply was not enough data to assess how rising middle school students were performing this year.
After schools were closed in March, the state’s standardized English and math exams were canceled, and the mayor scrapped attendance records as a measure of achievement. Students in younger grades switched from a letter-grade system to one that indicated if they passed a class or needed to repeat it.
In 2018, one local district, Brooklyn’s District 15, switched to a lottery admissions system. That closely watched effort, heralded as one of the most substantial desegregation measures in years, will now be extended across the city.
The admissions process for selective schools typically takes place in the fall, but was delayed this year because of the pandemic. Families can start applying to middle schools under the new system in early January until the week of Feb. 8.
In another major shift announced by Mr. de Blasio, New York will also eliminate a policy that allowed some high schools to give students who live nearby first dibs at spots — even though all seats are supposed to be available to all students, regardless of where they reside.
