In 2004, 7-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost 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 Citys 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 citys free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the laundromat an immigrant familys 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.
The plot against merit
New Yorks 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.
For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam.
But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil-rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly speaker.
And new Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.
The rich fallacy
Asians in New York are overwhelmingly first- and second-generation; some three-quarters of the students at Stuyvesant are immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Theyre hardly affluent, notwithstanding de Blasios implication that families who get their kids into the specialized schools are rich.
True, Asians nationally have the highest median income of any racial group, including whites and in New York City, their median household income ranks second to that of whites and well ahead of blacks and Hispanics.
But Asians also have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in New York, with 29 percent living below the poverty level, compared with 26 percent of Hispanics, 23 percent of blacks and 14 percent of whites. Poor Asians lag far behind whites and are barely ahead of blacks and Latinos.
Thus, the income spectrum among Asians in New York ranges from a surprisingly large number in poverty, through a hardworking lower middle class, and on to a more affluent upper middle class.
It might seem reasonable to assume as de Blasio and others apparently do that the Asian kids at the specialized schools come largely from families at the top of this pyramid. But this isnt the case.
Half the students at the specialized high schools qualify for free or subsidized school lunches, including 47 percent at Stuyvesant and 48 percent at Bronx Science figures that have increased correspondingly with Asians rising numbers at these schools. Based upon these figures, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science (as well as four of the other six specialized schools) are eligible for federal Title I funding, given to schools with large numbers of low-income students.
Think about that: Two public high schools that, along with half their students, are officially classified as poor by the federal government rival the most exclusive prep schools in the world.
The poor students get into such schools through hard work and sacrifice both their own and that of their parents. The students typically attend local tutoring programs, which proliferate in Asian neighborhoods, starting the summer after sixth grade and for several days a week, including weekends, during the school year prior to the test. The costs are burdensome for poor and working families, but its a matter of priorities.
A liberal nightmare
All this once would have been the stuff of liberal dreams: A racial minority group historically victimized by discrimination begins coming to America in greater numbers because of an immigration reform sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Though many in the group remain in poverty, they take advantage of free public schools established by progressive New York City governments. By dint of their own hard work, they earn admission in increasing numbers to merit-based schools that offer smart working-class kids the kind of education once available only at Andover or Choate.
To modern progressive elites, though, the story is intolerable, starting with the hard work. These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success.
While the advancement of Asian students has come overwhelmingly at the expense of more affluent whites, it has also had an undeniable impact on black and Latino students, whose foothold at these schools, small to begin with, has all but vanished.
Alarm at this development has triggered a new wave of assaults upon the entrance exam now known as the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) and the law that mandates its use.
In September 2012, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a complaint with the US Department of Education, which dispenses federal educational funding to the city, charging that use of the SHSAT as the sole basis for admission violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination by federal aid recipients.
The complaint does not allege that the exam intentionally discriminates against black and Hispanic students. Instead, citing statistics regarding declining black and Latino enrollment and SHSAT pass rates, the LDF bases its argument entirely on the theory of disparate impact that is, that discrimination should be inferred merely from racial differences in test scores.
In the complaint and in a subsequent report released last fall to coincide with de Blasios election, the LDF argues for replacement of the SHSAT with a holistic admissions process one that would consider multiple measures of academic potential, both quantitative and qualitative, including not only grades but also such subjective indicators as interviews, recommendations, portfolio assessments, proven leadership skills and commitment to community service.
Other factors could include applicants backgrounds and experiences and the demographic profile of their schools and neighborhoods. To the extent that a test would be allowed at all, it would merely supplement these other criteria. The LDF also called for guaranteed admission for valedictorians and salutatorians, and perhaps other top students, at each public middle school program a proposal that sounds modest but would actually require a set-aside of at least 1,000 of the 3,800 seats in each class.
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