Posted on 07/20/2014 4:45:54 AM PDT by BlueStateRightist
In 2004, 7-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents — a cook and a factory worker — and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side.
Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.”
When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the laundromat — an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
NYC public schools are notoriously lousy in many ways. Teachers pass anyone and everyone, rampant crime, bad behavior, and no accountability or discipline whatsoever. Unless one lives on the Upper East Side, students do not get the attention they should from teachers and the administration, and the emphasis on learning is much less as compared to these eight elite schools. The elite schools emphasize academics. They do not stress sports or clubs. Students who go there are almost guaranteed to get accepted to MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc. It is a great way for students of modest means to excel. As a student, you are surrounded by other kids who want to learn. These schools even have dress codes, enforce attendance rules, and have PhDs teaching the classes. The atmosphere is equivalent to that of an affluent, suburban school district where the school and home environment are in sync. NYC public schools are just not like that.
Back in the 1970s, as a parochial/private school student, we were often harassed by the “public school kids” who acted like feral animals. It was common to see those kids ripping up and throwing their text books out of the school bus windows, picking fights with the uniform-wearing kids, and getting into trouble with the police. Fast forward to today, and things are far worse than I ever saw. Now these same feral animals just shoot people. Back then, guns were harder to come by. Brass knuckles and switchblades were the rave.
“I find it especially intriguing that there has apparently been zero conservative objection to the considerable Asian displacement of whites in these schools.”
I’m not sure that I follow that. As far as I know, Asians and whites are held to the same (high) standards. It’s not the fault of Asians if white parents are more interested in having their kids play football than study.
Agree 100%.
The most highly motivated and intelligent students get into these schools, then we say their attending the schools created their success. Just as we say attending Harvard makes a person successful.
What needs to be done to determine the actual facts would be to randomly split an entering class into these schools (or Harvard) and remove half of them. Then see how much effect school attendance has on their later lives.
Can’t do it, of course, for legal, practical and ethical reasons. But would be quite interesting.
What I suspect is that Harvard takes a large crop of people who would have been very successful in life no matter what, and then takes credit for that success.
Personally, I was never able to attend college, mostly for family reasons. Started in work quite literally in what is generally considered one of the dread dead-end jobs, janitorial.
Worked my way up and out, and am now widely recognized as a national leader in my field. Have been accepted as an expert witness in state and federal courts. People universally assume a college degree and probably graduate degree although I’ve never tried to hide my lack of formal education. When people I work with find out, they are surprised but don’t care, since by then I’ve already demonstrated my competence by the work I do.
Had I gotten the chance to go to Harvard, people would say my success was because I went there.
That was my point, no doubt inadequately expressed.
The general liberal POV is that conservative desire to use merit is simply a way of keeping “those people” out of the schools.
But conservatives haven’t, to my knowledge, objected to white students being displaced by Asian students. Remarkably, it’s the liberals who are objecting to whites being displaced by a minority group!
Note: I don’t think it’s at all remarkable. But it would create major cognitive dissonance for liberals if they were able to comprehend it.
You’re right about top colleges succeeding largely because they can attract top students. That is their social and sorting value.
But at the high school level, these exam schools are the only way young scholars can receive a rigorous education. Taking away the objective, merit-based screening for admission would require the classes to be watered down just as they are in the rest of the NYC public school system.
On the K-12 level schools take credit for the hard work of the parents and children in the home and then blame the parents for failure.
I understand your point, but that's just not true. As many homeschooled kids demonstrate quite conclusively.
Yup.
Outstanding post. This is the distilled essence of leftism.
I hear you...it is funny how that works.
True—but that’s not what I was referring to. Many of these kids have dirt-poor, uneducated immigrant parents who don’t speak English. Homeschooling is not a practical option for them.
Is there a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is getting worse, rather than better, these days?
Agreed. What possibly is the conservative argument against meritorious Asian students taking seats at the most rigorous public schools?
By Asians, they mean Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, and others with a strong work ethic and high intelligence.
Those people are not going to become part of a victim group, so the left treats them like dirt.
Homeschooling for me was not an option for all those reasons, except the English factor. Still I got into and graduated from a “Big Ten” school, partly because of the fine, merit based high school my parents moved near.
Congrats—to you and your parents.
If I might ask, what is the one with a Master’s in math doing now?
Home schooling is a great option for much of the country, but really not for these kids from poor immigrant families, many of which are working crazy hours in low-wage jobs and businesses to support their kids in crowded conditions.
One rational way may be, instead of quotas, to expand the programs (very expensive, I realize) where the ones who “just missed” could get in. This happened to me. Our Physics instructor expanded his class to accept myself and a female student into a his very highly competitive senior physics class. I credit this and some of the college science classes I attended with my success as a technical writer.
Unbelievable.
Everyone is okay with foreigners bringing their freakazoid Sunday to Sunday study grind system to the United States. No childhood. No trick or treating. No football. No prom. Hey, that’s how they want to live. Land of the free and all.
What you don’t consider is that they are IMPOSING A FOREIGN WAY OF LIFE ON AMERICANS. If you want your kid to attend a school YOUR taxes built and paid for, you don’t get to opt out of the brutal new regimen.
American kids — your kids — have no chance to get a slot in an American school because sane parents don’t want their kids to live the brutal, miserable lives the Chinese schooling system demands.
There is something very wrong with this picture. And we’re afraid to say so because we don’t want to be called raaaaaaaaacist.
“Oh, it’s just competition.” No, it isn’t. It’s gaming the system. It’s exactly like athletes who take steroids to get ANY edge. Automatons who never learned to ride a bike aren’t “smarter” than a girl who spends precious study time on the cheerleading squad. Why is she being punished for living an American life in her own country?
Actually, there are a few areas that 20-30 years ago were sh!tholes and have been gentrified as the yuppies have been driven out of Manhattan because the island is way too costly to live in. Fort Greene and the area near the Navy Yard come to mind. I grew up in the Bronx. There are absolutely no neighborhoods there that have gotten better. It is a destroyed borough and will never recover. So sad because my neighborhood was a nice place to live in at one point. Never needed a car. All your needs were within walking distance. Rents were decent. And living in a pre-war art deco apartment building with a sunken living room and 12’ ceilings and oak parquet floors with walnut inlays was the bomb.
Manhattan is and always will be what it is. But if Mayor Comrade gets his way, Park Avenue better watch out because he’ll put Section 8 housing wherever he can.
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