On Wednesday, high-minded members of the City Council introduced a package of legislation calling attention to what they described as a lack of diversity in the city’s public schools.
The measures include a bill sponsored by Deputy Speaker Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn), that directs the Department of Education to report on the efforts and progress made in increasing diversity in city schools, including charter schools and special programs (i.e., specialized high schools).
Another measure directs the DOE to prioritize school diversity when developing admission practices, new schools, rezoning and strategies for improvement.
A third calls on the state to change the law requiring an entrance exam as the sole criterion for admission to the city’s specialized high schools.
An unrelated measure sponsored by fashion-forward Councilman Andy King (D-Bronx) would make school uniforms mandatory.
Oddly enough, Lander and his high-minded colleagues represent racially and ethnically drawn districts that reflect our city’s racially segregated neighborhoods (or more politically correct, “ethnic enclaves”). No one has suggested creating racially integrated council districts.
Women make up only 23 percent of the council, yet they’re 53 per cent of the city’s population.
Non-Hispanic whites are “overrepresented,” with a third of the city’s population and 49 percent of council seats. Asians are severely underrepresented, with only two members when city demographics would demand six.
I’ve yet to see any member of this progressive gang offer legislation to reverse these “unequal” outcomes. Apparently, diversity stops at the doors of City Hall and the edge of council districts.
Yet that’s far from the only hypocrisy here. Lander’s legislation is a Trojan horse: Its “pro-diversity” shell disguises an attack on charter schools and the “disproportionate” number of Asians attending the city’s elite specialized high schools.
His bill does the bidding of the UFT, which despises high-achieving charter schools (and their young black and Hispanic scholars).
Charters are overwhelmingly minority because the legislative mandate creating them required that they be placed in low-performing districts, which happen to be in racially segregated minority communities. There’s no secret racism at work here.
But there may be racism at work in the attack on the elite schools — anti-Asian racism.
While Mayor de Blasio, elected officials, the NAACP and others claim that the admission exam is biased against black and Hispanic students, the number of those students offered seats, while low, has held steady for a decade.
But since 2004, the number of white students has fallen by 40 percent at Stuyvesant and 22 percent at Brooklyn Tech.
The proposed admission criteria range from administering the exam in five languages and adding an essay to using portfolios, attendance, grade-point average and extracurricular activities.
Oddly, these changes (if implemented honestly) would favor non-Hispanic, white middle-school students over Asians, blacks and Hispanics. At the so-called “screened” schools that have adopted these criteria, Asian, black and Hispanic enrollments are lower.
The real way to address the challenges that black and Hispanic kids have on the entrance exam is to tackle the failure of the city’s middle schools, at so many of which not a single student can score above a 2 (out of 4) on state proficiency exams.
Most black alumni of the elite schools oppose destroying merit and support prioritizing improved instruction in math, science and English at predominantly black/Hispanic middle schools.
Let’s be clear: Council members representing segregated districts want racial quotas at specialized high schools and an end to successful charter schools.
Instead of addressing the academic crisis in our middle schools, they’d rather blame the entrance exam and punish Asian strivers for overachieving on it.
Our mayor and City Council should forget race-based solutions and focus on fiscal equity and academic solutions to fix our dismal middle schools.
New Yorkers who want merit, not race and class, rewarded in our school system must stand up to the progressive gang.