To Be Black at Stuyvesant High

New York Times ^ | February 25, 2012 | FERNANDA SANTOS

[reaganaut1]

...

When the bell rings and the school’s 3,295 students spill out of classrooms into the maze of hallways, escalators and stairs like ants in a farm, blacks stand out because they are so rare. Rudi was one of 64 black students four years ago when she entered Stuyvesant, long considered New York City’s flagship public school. She is now one of 40.

Asians, on the other hand, make up 72.5 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body (they are 13.7 percent of the city’s overall public school population), a staggering increase from 1970, when they were 6 percent of Stuyvesant students, according to state enrollment statistics. Back then, white students made up 79 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment; this year, they are 24 percent, and 14.9 percent systemwide.

Hispanic students are 40.3 percent of the system. Currently, they make up 2.4 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment, while blacks, who make up 32 percent of the city’s public school students, are 1.2 percent.

New York City has eight specialized high schools whose admission is based entirely on the results of an entrance exam, a meritocratic system that does not consider race or ethnicity.

...

No one claims that the disparity is caused by overt discrimination. But in a school that is devised to attract the best of the best, parents and educators alike find the demographics troubling. It has become a question of perception as to who belongs.

...

Many Stuyvesant students start preparing for the exam months, even years, in advance. There are after-school, weekend and summer classes run by large companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review, as well as by neighborhood outfits like Aim Academy, in the predominantly Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens, and the Khan’s Tutorial branch in nearby Jackson Heights, home to thousands of families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

[reaganaut1]

The Bell Curve strikes again.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Admission is merit based at eight schools? What in the world is wrong with NYC allowing that to happen? What an atrocity. Just look at what happened to the racial makeup os Stuyvesant High.

[hinckley buzzard]

Blacks are so busy hating on Whitey that they are too obtuse to see that Asians and Hispanics are eating their lunch.

Just illustrates how hatred is self-destructive in the end.

[6SJ7]

Asians, on the other hand, make up 72.5 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body...

Might be due in part to the fact that most Asian families take the education of the children as Job One.

[nascarnation]

Asians and Hispanics are eating their lunch. Really? From where I sit they are getting more "free lunch" than ever.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

Those Asian students aren't playing fair! Why should they be admitted just because they work harder than other students? < /moonbattery>

[GeronL]

Does “asian” also include Muslims?

[BobL]

What’s more interesting to me is the black numbers. They climbed from 1970 t 1975, during the period when Affirmative Action meant non-discrimination. Then they plummeted even with the quotas from 1975 on. Also, enlarging of the welfare state and further disintegration of the black family didn’t help either. What does that mean? We Ain’t Getting Nowhere with liberal policies, we’re going backwards now.

[EEGator]

Not Asian in the British sense, but what Americans consider Asians.

[FoxInSocks]

And 59 percent of students are boys, and 41 percent are girls.

Year-to-date attendance is 97.8 percent. 97 to 99 percent of the students graduate, and the dropout rate is consistently less than 0.5 percent.

What are the important numbers here? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question . . .

[bkopto]

It’s all explained here, in statistical, data-driven, nonPC terms:

http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/

[SharpRightTurn]

“parents and educators alike find the demographics troubling”

Then go to your encounter group and emote for awhile. That oughta do it for you.

[warsaw44]

Years ago I worked for a company in Boston and one of my duties was to make bank deposits each day. This required me to board the local mass transit trolly that ran from my office to downtown Boston.

Much further up the track was Boston College High school. At the time the deposits were ready each day, the school's children would be getting out and going home. The trolleys would be filled with these high school students.

These trains / trolleys are fairly large and each one would be segregated by the students themselves. In one end of the train the black students would be screaming, yelling, running around, making out on the verge of intercourse and rarely did anyone of them have a backpack or carry a book.

In the front of the train were the Asian students. All of them reading, studying, each one with a backpack crammed full with books. Sometimes you would see one or two of them quietly speaking to each other, books open.

I would see this every day, week after week.

---

One of the main stations the train ran through was Coley Station. many of the black students got off at this stop and quite often I was fights, sometimes huge fights. I remember an MBTA officer ( also black ) telling me “ Every day...every damned day they do this ...”

Is there any other segment in our society that frowns on education?

[Krankor]

Her mother, Annmarie Miller, a nursing assistant at a hospital in the Bronx, recalled a cousin’s reaction when she mentioned Rudi’s pick: “You have to be Chinese or Indian to get in there.” A co-worker, also black, “said the exam is built to exclude blacks because it’s heavy on math, and black people can’t do math,” Mrs. Miller said.

It's amazing the author even put this in the article. This goes to show how racist and prejudiced some blacks are. I wonder how many of the Asian students are actually Chinese. And it's frightening even blacks think blacks are too stupid to do well in math.

[LdSentinal]

When I went to Stuyvesant back in the 90's, Asians were a little over 50% of the student population. Now, 72.5%? Geez.

I don't know how I got in - I just got lucky on the admissions test.

[Clock King]

The Culture Curve. There is no Bell Curve.

[blam]

"Blacks are so busy hating on Whitey that they are too obtuse to see that Asians and Hispanics are eating their lunch. "

Many White youts around here are so busy imitating Black urban culture (rough/vulgar/tough/stupid) that they're missing the boat too.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Not Asian in the British sense, but what Americans consider Asians.

The last sentence in the excerpt above indicates that students from South Asia are also part of this.

[zigmeisterxiv]

I graduated from Stuy in 1970, and perusing my yearbook can report that 48 of 638 (7.5%) fellow grads were black. The school was 99+% male at that point.

Back in the day I never heard of any prep courses offered for the test and most of us probably went in cold and winged it.

I was lucky that my house was 3 blocks away so I never had to endure a ridiculous subway commute like so many of my peers.

As postscript to this article is the continued success we enjoy in the yearly Intel Science Talent Search, a nationwide competition that we routinely dominate. Pardon me while I crow ...

2012 Intel Talent Search Semi-Finalists: 13/300 = 4.3%
2012 Intel Talent Search Finalists 2/40 = 5.0%

For comparison the entire state of California had 10 finalists, 34 states had no finalists and no other high school had more than 1.

Yowsuh! Just par for the course baby ...

Go Peglegs!!!

zig

PS - Go Giants!

[Bob]

And it's frightening even blacks think blacks are too stupid to do well in math.

Well, perhaps the academic inabilities themselves are self-inflicted. Many of the black students certainly don't want their friends to see them "acting white" by doing well in school.

[Boogieman]

Cry me a river. I attended a high school where I, as a white student was in the minority, and nobody ever seemed concerned about our plight, even though it was one of our city’s “flagship schools”. I’m also pretty comfortable speculating that, nowadays, it is a lot harder being a white kid in a sea of black kids than it is being a black kid in a sea of white kids.

[reaganaut1]

It’s all explained here, in statistical, data-driven, nonPC terms: http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/

Yes, I like that site.

[EEGator]

As in the ‘stans and India?

[EEGator]

Sorry, just read it. That’s what I get for jumping to conclusions.

[Jack Hammer]

“New York City has eight specialized high schools whose admission is based entirely on the results of an entrance exam, a meritocratic system that does not consider race or ethnicity.”

The race pimps will find a way to f*** that up.

[PeteB570]

South Asia is mostly India and Pakistan.

So I would assume since it’s a public school and not one run by the local Mosque where the Muslims would go - most of the kids would be Dot Indians - not Feather Indians :-).

[ken5050]

I graduated from Bx Science in 1964..there were THREE male blacks in the school..and ALL were on the basketball team..

I played varsity for three years..and gawd..we were awful..back then we were in Bx Manhattan Division 1, along with Clinton, Taft, Morris, among others...I think my three year record was 11-46...

[ken5050]

Suggest, if you have the time, to read the comments..over 130..on the Times website..very interesting, especially if one considers the what the Times’ target audience is assumed to be...one can deduce that conservatives CAN find a receptive audience in liberal areas..

[Mrs.Liberty]

re: the comments-—Someone named Trishalish claims the decline in the number of black adn latino students is Bush’s fault..

[Right Wing Assault]

Another teacher and I from the midwest visited Stuyvesant about 12 years ago to see their science facilities and courses offered. (We couldn't find the place since it is about 10-stories high, and in our opinion couldn't possibly be a high schoool. Inside, there was an escalator. It also had a view of the Statue of Liberty from some windows.)

Here it is in the foreground, complete with pedestrian bridge. And escalators.

When we came to the school and saw the kids going in, we wondered how the school could excel based on the nasty looking kids going in. They looked like the dregs of teenage society. We were almost afraid to go in.

After being greeted by numerous smiling, polite students who were not yelling, screaming, running around, using obscenities, and who were happy to talk to us and help us, we were puzzled. We later asked a teacher why the kids dressed like gang members. The reply was, "If they look out of place in the city, they get beat up, so they have to blend in to survive."

[Rooivalk]

Don’t be fooled into thinking that Asians are super brains. All they do is practice how to take tests and APPEAR smart. When the chips are down they are just mindless clogs in the machine

[21twelve]

“When the chips are down they are just mindless clogs in the machine.”

I worked for awhile at a mine in Indonesia, and the managers said the same thing. “Almost seems like they have all the books memorized, but don’t know jack on how to use it to solve real-world problems.”

One of the Indonesian managers (mining engineer) came out to look at a rig his guys had been using. It was blowing steam out the radiator cap. I was about 30 feet away watching the hilarity as his guys didn’t know what to do, went to get their boss, etc.

Well the boss comes out and walks straight to the open hood of the truck and starts to raise his bare hand towards the radiator cap! I yelled out “Bahia” and he stopped. (One of a few words I knew - “Danger”). Then pantomined that the steam would be hot. (A mining engineer!!??)

[Right Wing Assault]

All they do is practice how to take tests and APPEAR smart.

Yeah, right. "Practicing" for entrance exams and SATs requires some initial information and ability to build upon. No amount of test prep classes will get an average or below average student into Stuyvesant or any other great school unless they get in by affirmative action.

[LdSentinal]

There are escalators on every floor. It sucked when they broke down during the school day.

And we had also had window views of the Twin Towers, just three blocks south of the high school.

[Robwin]

Ok, as I understand it whites make up 24% of this school’s student population. I assume “whites” includes Jews, a great many of whom live in NYC and who at least used to set great store by education, much as the Asians do today. So I must ask that given whites are outnumbered 3:1, has there been a major cultural shift among Jews in NYC of late?

[Right Wing Assault]

When we were looking for a place to park, we found a crappy looking lot for city cars. It looked as if most of them were out for the day already, so we parked there and got away with it.

I remember being in traffic right next to the twin towers and commenting to the other guy with me that a few years ago they tried to blow the place up with a bomb in a van. I said, if we had been there then, it would have been really wild.

Little did I imagine that if we had been at that same place for 911, we would have had debris falling on us.

One other thing, the kids going into Stuyvesant didn’t look too bad. We also visited the Bronx School of Science that day. THOSE were the kids that looked scary. But they were very nice kids, too.

[James C. Bennett]

According to US government forms and employment records, Indians technically fall under the ‘Asian’ category because of geography.

[EEGator]

You are correct,I was wrong. Mea culpa.

[James C. Bennett]

Dig into the comments on the NYT article, and you find this gem, LOL!

LauraCalifornia

FLAG

“I am a white mother to a black child. The everyday racism of her grammar school is utterly shocking. The teachers are unconscious about their years of bias — they call on white boys most, then Asian girls and boys, then white girls, then brown kids — boys before girls. This has been the pattern since kindergarten. Almost all of the kids of color are sent to “resource room,” where they are given candy and video games while the rest of the class works on math. (Some boys from India escape this fate). There is one African-American teacher (a woman)

in a school with 600 kids. The “selection” for academic excellence begins early. It is a scandal.”

[denydenydeny]

“parents and educators alike find the demographics troubling"

Note the language. They're not troubled by, say, the pathologies that create the complete contempt that so many African American and Hispanic families have for learning, but simply by "the demographics."

This is how policies which randomly dumps black faces into such environments regardless of qualifications, are born: To make liberals feel better about themselves, here expressed as "be less troubled."

[darrellmaurina]

28 posted on Saturday, February 25, 2012 5:27:56 PM by ken5050: “Suggest, if you have the time, to read the comments..over 130..on the Times website..very interesting, especially if one considers the what the Times’ target audience is assumed to be...one can deduce that conservatives CAN find a receptive audience in liberal areas.”

As a right-wing conservative Christian white guy in the news media married to a right-wing conservative Christian asian woman who is a psychologist, guess which one of us has fewer problems with our colleagues, despite the fact that both of us work in very liberal professions? Sometimes it just takes someone who isn't a white male to do the talking for a liberal to pay attention.

Never assume that liberals can't be reached with logic, or that liberal areas don't have concerns about the cultural collapse around us.

If America is going to be rescued, it's going to be the Hispanic and Asian populations that will do it. I'm cautiously optimistic that may happen.

[POWERSBOOTHEFAN]

Bedford-Stuyvesant is a pretty bad area,isn’t it?

[zigmeisterxiv]

Nothing to do with Bed-Stuy, which is in Brooklyn.

Peter Stuyvesant was the last Dutch Governor of New York, so the name is common throughout the city.

Stuyvesant High School is in Manhattan ... originally on 15th St. and 1st Ave when I went there, now on Chambers St near the WTC.

- z

[POWERSBOOTHEFAN]

I’ve never been to NYC so I was under the assumption the school was in Bed-Stuy.

From what I understand, Peter Stuyvesant wasn’t such a great guy.

[wiggen]

I went there in 1970. So did Axelrod. Holder had just graduated and Dick Morris a few years prior. Axelrod was an ass back then too. Smart though,very smart.

[wiggen]

^5 alum

[wiggen]

This thread is dragging us out. Class of 72 here.

[Reeses]

"I am a white mother to a black child."

Maybe she should have said black looking. Statistically children get their brains from their mother, their ambition from their father. That explains Barky. Half-blacks with a white mother do better academically than half-blacks with a white father. I'm surprised affirmative action programs don't consider that. Half-blacks with a white mother don't actually need special treatment. They simply game the system.

[patriciaruth]

Statistically children get their brains from their mother,

Genetically that doesn't seem to make sense. Perhaps it is really because a white mother is doing the child rearing, nurturing, and not a black mother?

If that sounds racist, I'm sorry; but I am simply curious as a scientist about 1) if this is really true and 2) what the cause really is.

[Reeses]

Perhaps it is really because a white mother is doing the child rearing, nurturing, and not a black mother?

About 50% of intelligence is environmental, however most of the genetic component of higher brain function comes from the mother. Nature uses female brains as the genetic baseline, and males for experiments. That's why female intelligence in general forms a narrow bell curve, while male intelligence has a wide bell curve with more men at both ends of the spectrum. Here are some articles:

Imprinted Genes Suggest your Cortex may derive from your Mother

Thank Dad for Drive - but Thank Mom for Brains...