Notwithstanding its ill-chosen headline (“How It Feels to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School”), this New York Times article provides a fascinating portrait of Brooklyn Technical High School. The portrait bears on the so-called “pipeline problem”—relatively low numbers of highly qualified black and Latino students—that induces universities like Harvard to resort to the unlawful practice of massive racial preferences and discrimination against Asian students that the Supreme Court will review in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Brooklyn Tech is a “test-screened” public high school that, like several other such schools, has become controversial because of its disproportionately high enrollment of Asian students (as compared with the overall population of New York City’s public schools) and its disproportionately low enrollment of black and Latino students. Critics blame supposedly biased testing, but the article suggests that an earlier progressive assault on gifted programs in grade schools might deserve much of the blame:
[T]he dwindling number of Black and Latino students at these high schools is a great concern and a mystery. Bill de Blasio, when he was mayor of New York, suggested the heart of the problem lay with a biased entrance exam.
That does not reckon with history. Decades ago, when crime and socioeconomic conditions were far graver than they are today, Black and Latino teenagers passed the examination in great numbers. In 1981, nearly two-thirds of Brooklyn Tech’s students were Black and Latino, and that percentage hovered at 50 percent for another decade….
To understand this decline involves a trek back through decades of policy choices, as city officials, pushed by an anti-tracking movement, rolled back accelerated and honors programs and tried to reform gifted programs, particularly in nonwhite districts.
Black alumni of Brooklyn Tech argue that this progressive-minded movement handicapped precisely those Black and Latino students most likely to pass the test. Some poor, majority Black and Latino districts now lack a single gifted and talented program….
Jumaane Williams, who is Black and resides on the political left — where support is infrequently heard for the specialized exam — is the New York City public advocate. He describes himself as a public school baby, from kindergarten to his master’s, and he is insistent that he couldn’t have achieved any of it without Brooklyn Tech.
“The most clear failure has been establishing an accessible pipeline” for Black and Latino students, he wrote in The Daily News. “In the past, gifted-and-talented programs in middle schools have been a reliable pathway.”
The article also refutes assumptions that “Asian students” benefit from a background of privilege:
Fully 63 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s students are classified as economically disadvantaged. Census data shows that Asians have the lowest median income in the city and that a majority speak a language other than English at home.
Indeed, the label “Asian” is itself a dubious aggregate category, as it “encompasses disparate ethnicities, cultures, languages, and skin colors.”