Not Fixing Our Educational Issues

For John, BLUF:  I don't think I would look to either Representative Ocasio-Cortez or Mayor De Blasio for informed, innovative and effective solutions to any societal problems.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Ocasio-Cortez Joins De Blasio In Call To Punish Asian Students

Here is the sub-headline:

Progressives want to lower the standards of admission at New York's top public high schools in the name of diversity. And they don't care how many Asian students it harms.

From The Federalist, by Mr David Marcus, 20 March 2019.

Yes, this is from a year ago, but I just saw it reposted at InstaPundit, and thought that given the continuing trends in New York City Public School’s, it was worth reposting here.

Here is the lede plus one:

The battle over the admissions standards at New York City’s elite public high schools has heated up again.  After having failed to change the standards last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio is back at it, this time with some backup from celebrity freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  As usual, their impassioned pleas about the lack of black and Hispanic students completely ignores that it is Asian, not white, students who would bear the brunt of the proposed changes.

At issue is the fact that these hyper-competitive high schools consider only a test score in deciding admissions.  This meritocracy has created some of the best high schools in the world.  They would have you believe that wealthy white parents game the system by hiring expensive tutors, but while they might, it’s not working.  In fact, wealthy white kids are not dominating this process at all.

This was based on a Tweet from NY Democratic US Representative Alexandra Occasio-Cortez:

68% of all NYC public school students are Black or Latino.

To only have 7 Black students accepted into Stuyvesant (a *public* high school) tells us that this is a system failure.

Education inequity is a major factor in the racial wealth gap. This is what injustice looks like.

The Writer then provides a little extra information:

Her math is correct, but what she fails to mention is that while Asian students make up only 15 percent of all students in New York, they are a whopping 74 percent of students at Stuyvesant, the school she references.  She claims this is inequity and represents a racial wealth gap.  But exactly what systems does she believe that New York City has in place that can explain the extraordinary achievements of Asian students?  Are Asians getting better schools?  More resources?  In what way are Asians the beneficiaries of a racial wealth gap?

Don’t expect answers any time soon.  This is a question Democrats and their allies in the news media have no answer for, and can barely even bring themselves to mention.  The pebble in their shoe is that despite obvious racism that exists and has always existed towards Asian Americans, they succeed anyway, by almost every metric.

Miss Occasio-Cortez May have the arithmetic right, but her math is bad. & Specificallt, she has trouble with word problems  She can't find where information is missing, or she makes large, glittering assumptions that obscure other minority students.  And, like some European, she misses the fact that some are late bloomers, taking until High School, or even College, to hit their educational stride.

We are not going to fix educational problems in New York City, or the United States, with simple solutions.  The problem is too complex for easy bromides to promise quick solutions.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff