Posted on 03/24/2015 10:00:53 PM PDT by Cronos
..New York has nine specialised high schools, of which eight admit students using the city’s Specialist High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). The education they offer rivals that of private schools that charge $40,000 a year. The high schools are free. The most popular, Stuyvesant, sends roughly 25% of its graduates to the Ivy League or other top colleges. The school’s unofficial mantra is “Sleep, study, socialise: pick two.” It admits 4% of test-takers, pickier than Harvard.
New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio thinks the SHSAT favours parents who can afford tutors. He wants to “broaden” (ie, relax) the admissions criteria, to help poorer black and Hispanic families.
The SHSAT also faces a legal challenge. The NAACP, the country’s biggest civil-rights legal defence fund, joined others in 2012 to file a suit demanding changes in admissions procedures. New York City’s public schools, the suit claims, are among the most racially segregated in the country
... Asians make up more than 70% of pupils at Stuyvesant; blacks and Hispanics combined make up 3%, and falling. White pupils took 80% of places in 1970; now it is less than 25%.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Who cares if the Asian kids study more to qualify for the exam schools? (And if you think that’s the only reason they’re disproportionately represented, you’re kidding yourself.)
The point of the schools is to allow the most advanced students to study in more rigorous environments than general public school classrooms—which the exams are very effective in enabling.
Affirmative action admissions will undo that and require the exam schools to hold the top students back with watered down classes—which defeats the purpose of having exam schools to start with.
Stuy is the only specialized HS where Asians are the majority. My child attended what is the #2 Specialized HS, it was a mix of White, Whit Russian, Indian, Asian, Hispanic, and Black.
The problem with the Specialized test is that it is color blind. Once a student gets past the test, if they are not capable of learning and keeping up, they will soon wash out unless they dumb down the schools. I think I know what the mayors second move will be if he is successful.
They already do make some exceptions for minorities, it isn’t helping.
They can go ahead and memorize a whole new set of answers to a whole new set of entrance exams. Nobody is stopping them.
This is about 4 years old Tech is now behind Stuy, but they are close.
“MYFOXNY.COM - This is the first year that U.S. News and World Report has ranked science and math high schools. Some schools in New York City got some great news: They are among the best in the nation.
Staten Island Technical High School ranked No. 13.
The principal told Fox 5 that on Tuesday morning he didn’t even know the rankings were out yet; the custodian told him.
Teachers, students, and excited and happy to share what’s behind of their successful school.
You need to score well on a test to get into Staten Island Tech, and once you do, the chance of going to a four-year college is 100 percent. But that is not what put this school on a national best list. That would be their AP scores. There are 905 AP class seats for the 1,100-student school. If you look on the list hung in the hallway, you’ll see 90 percent of the kids get scores of 3 or higher.
Staten Island Teach beat out its peers in the rankings: Stuyvesant came in 18th, Brooklyn Tech was 50th, and Bronx Science was 51st.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott gave Staten Island Tech a big congrats.
Fox 5 found tons of kids staying after school to study for the AP tests or building their own robots.
Students study before school and at lunch. Parents are heavily involved. The PTA president said that collaboration helps.
The school placed an emphasis on the AP tests as it has grown over the past four years.
The demographics of this school: 90 percent are from Staten Island. Almost 75 percent are white, about 20 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black.”
If that “memorization” prepares them for calculus classes while other NYC students lack a basic grasp of arithmetic, why shouldn’t they be placed through testing into math classes together?
Do you really think it would be better for their parents to leave them to the lowest common denominator of inner-city educational attainment?
But it isn’t fair...
You have to bring down the best and the brightest so the less than the best and brightest don’t feel left out...
We are no longer about reaching our maximum potential.
Being “fair” is more important than actual achievement.
Unions paved the way...
...”Pass this article to every Asian-American you know. This is what voting Democrat gives to Asians — discrimination because they’re smart. Democrat — the party for the dumb.”...
One of the things which always happens when dictators try to take over is that they get rid of the most intelligent people because they know those people are most likely onto them. America is descending into darkness as fast as she can go. We come into this world with different abilities and you cannot cannot “redistribute” that. If a society refuses to recognize those tools and tries to force people into slots where they do not belong, that society will die. The times may be as evil as they have ever been. We will know when the genocide begins.
...”Basically, what they do in asia is spend 12 hours a day memorizing the answers to government tests and standardized tests. Americans better think long and hard before saying that this is a model system of education worth emulating.”...
Mr. Ethan, Americans would do much much better to do a little memorization, like, of the Constitution of the United States. I know several Asians and some of them are brilliant thinkers and problem solvers. They excel because they are intelligent and they have a work ethic in school. Their culture teaches them the importance of that. They take advantage of the strength of their youth to study and learn unlike American students who, for the most part, would rather play video games, listen to rap music, have sex and have babies while in high school. Asians will be abused by the current powers that be in this country because they are a minority. It is called racism and the Mayor of New York is trying to institutionalize it.
So what does "they do in asia" have to do with test scores here? Your argument makes it seem as if parents here ship their children off to some Chinese sweat shop to memorize all day long.
If on the other hand, the majority of Asian children here get together, individually or collectively, and study - memorize as you say - what privileged advantage are they being given over a black or Hispanic child? Certainly nothing here is stopping them from doing the same thing except their parents (or lack thereof), their culture and their peers.
I suspect that if DeBlasio were to change the test to gauge intellect and thought process more than knowledge of facts (your rote memorization theorem) , the black and Hispanic children would do all the more worse. In the end, he'd have to change the tests to reflect the innate abilities of the preferred groups, and without rote memorization (of culturalist dogma) they wouldn't stand a chance.
In the end, it will boil down to an enforced preference/quota system (while not actually calling it that) for blacks and Hispanics.
I kind of have a dog in this fight as I live in Asia and my kids go to school there.
It’s funny but if I lived in the West I would want my kids to go to a traditional old-style school (the sort of Catholic schooling I got), with the desks in neat rows facing the teacher, who was an old-fashioned educator trained to impart knowledge and not be a government propagandist. School uniforms would be essential as would a good deal of rote learning the basics (times tables, spelling etc).
However as I live in Asia and see the kids turned into zombies without any social life, being picked up from school to go straight to extra-curricular English lessons, piano lessons, science cramming etc I don’t want that sort of education for two reasons.
One, I reject such a soul-less life for kids, they do need a bit of goofing off time, if not the pressure cooker will blow in their later teens and it won’t be pretty.
But more importantly is that I can’t see the advantage in it if everyone is doing it, they are all turning out super qualified kids to do what? Get a job as an accountant in a computer assembly plant in some industrial town in the provinces? How many rocket scientist or professor of molecular biology jobs are going to be waiting for all these kids at the end of the production line?
Instead against all my original plans my kids to to a local US-franchise school that goes very much against my original gut instinct. It’s a very child-centred education where kids are taught to be expressive, questioning (up to a point) and to find their own talents. It seems to be the sort of place that turns out more creative, artistic types and whilst there may be a surplus of such people in California or New York, in Asia those types are thin on the ground.
I also feel my kids seem to be a lot more relaxed and self-confident than the almost autistic types being turned out by the rote-learning educational factories. Given that much of the ordinary tasks today can already be done by computer program and this is likely to continue I can’t help think my kids will have an advantage. After all who earns more money, the technical people who make TVs and DVD players or the creative types who make the content for those devices?
Maybe I am wrong, only time will tell.
So he thinks that the SHSAT favors parents who can afford tutors. He really has no evidence. If no evidence, what credentials does DeBozo have to make such a claim? Is he a mathematician, physicist or engineer who would have a sense of what it takes to excel in these subjects?
Then you have the NAACP complaining that these schools are the most segregated. Are any of these persons making this claim scientists, engineers, or mathematicians? No, they are "community organizer" who flap their gums all day with "race talk".
I've heard this all before, and never has DeBozo, the NAACP, or their ilk ever go to the 3% of the black and hispanic students who are in these schools and ask "what did it take for you to be accepted to Stuyvesant?" Why not? I bet we all know why they haven't asked this basic question -- it won't fit their narrative.
Ah, yes, the chinese value education, while the americans, who are lazy and stupid, do not. As proof of this, we see that China is brimming with fantastic schools. After all, their culture values education. And we also see hordes of chinese-americans applying to get in to these fantastic chinese Harvards.
Oh, wait, we don't.
And how much did Edison steal from Tesla?
There are two things going on here. DeBlasio assumes discriminaton, because he is a Communist . When it is more cultural nature of taking multiple choice tests. The tsts could be changed to accomodate a persons ability to think without going ‘affirmitave’ and letting in the less qualified.
“The education system exists to place people into worker bee slots in small and big businesses.” - Zhang Fei. Wrong! The modern American education exists to place people in the welfare line. Many people resent success. “You have to bring down the best and the brightest so the less than the best and brightest don’t feel left out…” These students have studied for the test, but do they know how to put a condom on a cucumber. It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. We can party till we puke but great powers are not based on partygoers. When the Chinese are running the show we will regret our “progressive” educational flapdoodle.
I'm glad you wrote this. This is exactly how it is in asia, and many westerners do not understand what is going on, so they have no problem with this soul-destroying foreign system taking root in America.
You can find asian students who study piano or violin for endless hours, and yet if you ask them who is Liszt or Paganini, you will get a blank stare. Never heard of them.
One, I reject such a soul-less life for kids
Well said.
???? Those who study and apply themselves will do well on the exams. I would hazard that changing the exams will result in very similar results.
Assuming that the Asians had a leg up because of the exams that already exist is more an example of the kind of thinking that makes a level playing field unfair...
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