A DISGRACE AND A DISASTER – AT 12:41 P.M. ET:  You may think that this is a local story, a New York story.  It is not.  It is a national and international story, and critically important.

New York City has had, for decades, a group of schools generally called the "special" high schools.  They are schools of excellence.  Admission is by test.  There are no quotas.  They are world famous.  The High School of Music and Art, known as the "Fame" School.  The Bronx High School of Science.  Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive schools in the world. 

Over the years there have been attempts by resentful people and self-interested politicians to destroy the schools by lowering standards, so as to bring in students who can't make the cut.  Fortunately, parents and faculty have stood there, like the proverbial stone wall, to maintain these educational gems.

Now, New York's Marxist mayor, Bill de Blasio, a former Castroite, and his new, radical schools chief, are making a major new push to destroy those schools, on grounds that the student bodies do not "look" like New York.  In other words, too many Asians.  Too many kids who come from cultures that emphasize study and excellence.  From the New York Post: 

Mayor de Blasio on Saturday unveiled a plan to boost black and Latino enrollment at the city’s eight specialized high schools — and wants to scrap the ultra-competitive admissions test outright.

In an op-ed for education news site Chalkbeat, de Blasio announced that 20 percent of seats would be reserved for low-income applicants.

Fact:  A goodly number of the current students are low-income, and qualify for free lunches, but they just aren't members of the mayor's favorite groups.

Kids in the Department of Education’s “Discovery” program who score just below the admissions cut-off would be given one of those saved seats, according to the plan.

In addition, De Blasio said he will fight to eventually replace the current single-test system with a new set of admissions criteria based on middle-school class rank and state test scores.

What a racket.  Kids will be admitted based on "class rank" in schools where a lot of kids don't even show up.

“The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed – it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence,” de Blasio wrote.

It's worked brilliantly. 

De Blasio said his proposals – if fully realized – would eventually induce a massive demographic shift at the specialized high schools.

“With these reforms, we expect our premier public high schools to start looking like New York City,” he wrote. “Approximately 45 percent of students would be Latino or black.”

Under the current system, Asian kids predominate at the city’s top three high schools.

They make up 74 percent of the population at Stuyvesant HS, 66 percent at Bronx Science and 61 percent at Brooklyn Tech, according to the Department of Education. At the Queens HS for Science at York College, 82 percent of kids are Asian.

And I say, more power to them.  These kids come from immigrant families and from cultures that emphasize academic achievement.  They've worked their heads off, and without complaint.  And now the mayor will tell them that they're just not members of the right group.  That's justice?

Alumni have long argued that the current merit system guarantees academic rigor. But de Blasio undercut that notion in his op-ed.

“The new system we’re fighting for will raise the bar at the specialized high schools in every way,” he wrote. “The pool of talent is going to expand widely and rapidly. That’s going to up the level of competition.”

Yeah, right.  What we really need are affirmative-action engineers designing our bridges. 

There will be massive opposition to these unnecessary changes.  The mayor complained that most blacks and Latinos cannot afford the tutoring for the admission tests.  In fact, most of the Asian students can't afford it either.  If extra help is needed, make that a priority.  Give any kid who wants to compete the tutoring that is necessary.  That's where you begin.  Bring the kids up to the needed level, then demand that they perform.

This story is important because New York still has substantial influence in education.  The special schools are among the major reasons that the New York City school system, until the wreckage of the 1960s, was known as the gem of urban education in the United States.  The special schools survived the carnage and have retained their status.  If they are destroyed by political correctness, that will give license to other, similar schools in other areas to be destroyed as well.

June 3,  2018