Eric Adams is no conservative’s idea of a good mayor. However, compared to other big city Democrat mayors, especially his predecessor, Adams is a breath of air.
For example, the New York mayor has decided that the city’s high schools will rely once again on merit to a considerable extent in deciding which students get into its top schools and programs. Middle schools will be allowed to do so.
According to the Washington Post, before the pandemic, about one-third of New York’s middle and high schools had admission requirements. The requirements were reasonable and facially neutral ones like good grades, high test scores, and solid attendance/behavior records.
However, Bill de Blasio replaced this system with one that relies heavily on luck of the draw. Approximately 60 percent of all students are eligible for a lottery to determine who will be admitted to the top schools. Not only can below average students attend top schools, their chance of being admitted is as good as those of the very best students in the city.
But the purpose of establishing elite public schools is to accommodate and challenge top students — to provide them with an education commensurate with their ability. Public schools owe this to top students, just as they owe “special education” to students who need it.
Public schools also owe it to society to make sure top students get a top education. America’s competitiveness in the world, and especially with Red China, depends to a considerable degree on this.
Fortunately, Mayor Adams has announced an end to the ridiculous selection system instituted by his predecessor. There will still be a lottery for admission to top city high schools, but those eligible for it will come from the top 15 percent of students, not the top 60 percent. Middle schools now will be allowed to use admissions criteria, but decisions about whether and how to use them will be made by individual school districts, of which there are 32.
Although this alteration represents a significant improvement, applause for Adams should be muted. For one thing, test scores will not be considered in determining which students make up the top 15 percent. Grades will be the determinant.
But test scores are an important component of merit in this context because they are good predictors of who will flourish in an accelerated academic environment, and who will not. Reliance solely on grades is problematic because an “A” from one school, or even from one teacher, might not be equal to an “A” from another. And grades can be fudged. Test scores are standardized and not subject to manipulation.
New York has discarded test scores only because members of certain racial and ethnic groups don’t score as well as members of others. Thus, identity is being allowed to override merit.
In addition, as noted, the extent to which top middle schools will use screens is left up to individual districts. Thus, it’s unclear whether merit really will be reintroduced at that level.
Even though Adams is only introducing “merit lite,” he is under fire for introducing merit at all. The criticism, as the Post puts it, is that the merit-based reform will “tend to favor the most privileged students who [are] likely to be White or Asian.”
But students won’t be favored because they are privileged, or because of their race. They will be favored because they are among the smartest and hardest working students in the city.
The anti-merit crowd might respond that white and Asian students tend to be high achievers because they are privileged — in other words, because their parents have more resources than the parents of black and Hispanic students. But the history of education in New York City belies claims that high achievement among students is economically determined, and thus that a merit-based selection system inherently favors the “privileged” offspring of the well-to-do.
For decades, merit strictly determined who was admitted not only to the city’s top high schools, but also its top free colleges. Generations of students from low-income households competed successfully for these slots, and used that education as the springboard to a much better life. Both my parents were among them.
These students were “privileged” only in the sense that their parents (or parent or some adult in the household) cared deeply about their education. (I say “only,” but if you think about it, this is by far the most important “privilege” a child can have.) And any parent, regardless of race, can bestow that privilege on his or her child.
If black and Hispanic achievement in school is lagging, the reason is cultural, not economic. And that’s why draining merit from the selection process isn’t just unfair, it’s perverse. It reinforces a culture of low achievement.
Black and Hispanic students with academic potential have far less incentive to excel if they can get into a top high school by being in the top 60 percent, as opposed to the 15. And their parents have less incentive to push them to excel in that scenario.
You may have seen seen reports and/or studies about how promising black students (and possibly Hispanics, as well) face peer pressure not to excel at school. If they resist that pressure, they are accused of “acting white.” Thus, black students with the potential to excel academically already have incentives not to do so. New York City schools should be counteracting these incentives, not adding to them.
The BLM left concurs, by the way, with the no-account teenagers who are exerting negative peer pressure on promising black students. BLM and the CRT movement peddle the same nonsense about studiousness being a white trait. “Whiteness” is defined, and derided, as consisting of a package of characteristics associated with success — hard work, objectivity, delayed gratification, punctuality.
Removing merit from the middle school and high school selection process can thus be viewed as the city thumbing its nose not just at merit, but at “whiteness.” And since Asians display at least as much “whiteness” as whites do, the city is thumbing its nose at them and their values, too.
To be fair, most who advocate casting merit aside say they are doing it not out of anti-whiteness, but rather (1) to promote diversity and (2) to open up top educational opportunities to blacks and Hispanics. I take them at their word.
But while they may not consciously be thumbing their noses at “whiteness” and the traits said to be encompassed by that term, they have all but ruled them out of the high school selection process. And by demanding less of these traits, they are ensuring that they will get less of them, especially from racial and ethnic groups whose members are under pressure not to display them.
To his credit, Mayor Adams has rejected this insanity. He deserves one cheer.