Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist.

It gives a diverse group of working-class kids a fairer shot, which shouldn’t be controversial.

Ms. Pham is a scholar of Asian-American studies whose child attends New York City public schools.

Image
Stuyvesant High School is one of eight New York public high schools that use a standardized test to determine admission.Credit...Yeong Ung Yang for The New York Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York has introduced a plan to change the way students will be chosen for eight of the city’s elite specialized high schools. Under his proposal, 20 percent of seats at the schools would be reserved for students from under-resourced middle schools who score just below the cutoff score on a standardized test, which is now the sole criterion for entry.

Eventually, his goal is to eliminate the exam, called the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. Instead, top students from all of the approximately 600 middle schools in the city would be admitted to the elite high schools. This would make the student bodies of these schools — among them storied institutions such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science — more closely resemble the city’s wider public school population in terms of race and class.

This is not just a good thing. It’s the right thing.

Unfortunately, some Asian-American parents in New York are protesting this proposal, arguing that it is anti-Asian because it would decrease the number of Asian children in elite schools. They are on the wrong side of this educational fight.

The mayor’s plan isn’t anti-Asian, it’s anti-racist. It would give working-class parents — including Asian-Americans — who can’t afford and shouldn’t have to find ways to afford expensive test prep programs a fairer chance that their child will be admitted into what’s known as a specialized high school. True, taking a test prep course doesn’t guarantee admission to such a school, but it does offer clear benefits and is widely understood to be essential to test-takers.

Nor is the plan a form of affirmative action. Affirmative-action admission policies — like those in place at some universities — require that race be one part of a host of measures considered. Mr. de Blasio’s plan doesn’t stipulate any racial criterion for admission, much less racial quotas (which the Supreme Court outlawed in 1978). The plan will simply give kids from a wider variety of backgrounds access to a public resource: an excellent public high school education. This is a public resource, something all New York City families contribute to with their taxes. Only about 5 percent of all New York City high school students are enrolled in a specialized high school and last year half of these kids came from just 21 middle schools.

That means that only five percent of kids are getting access to a valuable public resource. Frankly, Mr. de Blasio’s plan doesn’t fix this problem of inequality. Under his plan, even though the elite high schools would get a bigger range of students, the number of children getting access to this public resource will remain about the same — minuscule.

This is what critics of the plan should be outraged about. All kids deserve a top-rate education in schools with qualified teachers and ample support staff and a wealth of curriculum materials and supplies. All of our schools should be elite schools.

To be against Mr. de Blasio’s proposal is to be against a very limited attempt at giving more kids access to a limited resource. His plan doesn’t add more seats. It just allows more kids a shot at one of those seats — kids whose families can’t afford years of test prep classes and tutors, who live in under-resourced districts, and yet who still manage to excel in their own schools.

City Councilman Peter Koo has said, “The test is the most unbiased way to get into a school.” He’s wrong. Researchers have long found evidence that test scores can underestimate the abilities of minority students who are confronted with negative stereotypes about their own ethnic group. Beyond that, for school admissions to be truly unbiased, all students would need to have equal access to elementary schools and middle schools that receive equal shares of property taxes and state and federal aid and have the same cultural, educational and social resources.

That kind of equality doesn’t exist, in large part because of the anti-Black racism that has been a defining feature of this country since its inception. This deep-seated and well-documented force, which fuels employment discrimination and keeps neighborhoods and schools segregated, has not kept Asian-Americans from getting access to public resources to the same extent that it has African-Americans. Asian-Americans benefit from slightly fairer (though still not entirely fair) treatment in housing, in elementary and middle school education, in the workplace, at the bank, and in law enforcement interactions, providing more stability for their children. These are fundamental factors for student success. This is reflected in the fact that Asian-Americans who live near better schools demonstrate higher levels of achievement than Asian-Americans who don’t.

Standardized tests aren’t race- and class-neutral, as Mr. Koo believes. The myth that the entrance exam identifies the most-deserving students for these top schools denies all the inequalities in resources, treatment and service based on race, gender, class, sexuality, ability and so on that present varying barriers to success for different individuals.

Sadly, rather than fighting a system that undermines the principle that everyone has an equal right to public resources (while enriching the test prep industry), too many Asians have chosen to preserve the status quo by buying into racism against blacks and the white supremacist system built on it.

In other words, Asian-American critics of Mr. de Blasio’s plan are arguing to preserve a racist system in which whites, not Asians, are on top. They may gain short-term goals (a seat at a prestigious school) but they lose the long game of acquiring more seats for everyone: middle- class and working-class black, Latinos, American Indians, whites — and yes, other Asian-Americans, especially those from Southeast Asia, whose educational achievement, income and employment rates are significantly below their East and South Asian American counterparts while their incarceration rates are higher. To gain more seats, Asian-Americans must build cross-racial, intra-racial and cross-class solidarities with other groups.

The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is an instrument for the uneven distribution of a public resource. It perpetuates and legitimizes the already uneven distribution of other public resources and services. Getting rid of it means that more kids will have a bit more access to the best of what this city has to offer.

Opposing the mayor’s plan isn’t the right fight. The right fight is for the improvement of all of our public schools.


Minh-Ha T. Pham is an associate professor at Pratt Institute.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT