Why Politicians on the Left Can’t Fix What Ails Public Schools in New York City

New York leaders are right to be upset that only seven black kids got into one of the most prestigious public schools in the city, Stuyvesant High, out of 895 spots. Something indeed ought to be done.

Unfortunately, officials such as Mayor Bill de Blasio and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., emphasize equality of outcome rather than deal with the root causes of the problem. So, they are unlikely to fix anything but instead will make the problem worse.

Test results have been equally dispiriting across New York City’s seven other selective schools, from Bronx Science to Brooklyn Latin. They show a persistent achievement gap in education across racial and ethnic lines.

The only way to gain admission to these schools is to do well in the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), a rigorous test of student aptitude in math and English.

The charts below, provided by email by the New York City Department of Education, show the breakdown of eighth-graders who took the SHSAT this year and last, and those who got a first-round offer, broken down by racial and ethnic category.

One immediate observation—and something that needs to be repeated again and again—is that these categories are in many ways worthless.

“Asian” and “Latino” are panethnic umbrella groups that comprise countries of origin as varied as China, Korea, Cuba, Laos, Argentina, Mexico, and India—that is, places whose descendants in America have very different outcomes. The city’s Education Department does not seem to have such a breakdown.

Having said that, what jumps out is that “Asian” eighth-graders take the SHSAT in disproportionate numbers. They represent 15 percent of the New York City public school system population, according to the city’s numbers, and yet were 31 percent of the test-takers. Non-Hispanic white kids came next, 18 percent versus 15 percent of the population.

The numbers of “Latino” and black test-takers were smaller than their overall numbers. Around 24 percent of test-takers were “Latino,” around 15 percentage points lower than their overall number in public schools, whereas 20 percent of test-takers were black, six percentage points lower than their overall number.

From these city government numbers, we can extrapolate that the overwhelming majority, or 60 percent, of Hispanics were Puerto Rican or Dominican, another 23 percent Central American, and 14 percent Mexican, adding up to 95 percent. The other 5 percent “others” includes Cuban-Americans, Spaniards, and South Americans.

According to the Statistical Atlas, Chinese-Americans make up 48 percent of the city’s Asian population, far ahead of Indian-Americans at 19 percent and Korean-Americans at almost 8 percent. In other words, roughly three-quarters of this population is comprised of three groups with high cultural indicators.

The most troubling numbers come at the bottom of the city Education Department chart, marked “percentage of testers who received an offer, by ethnicity.”

There we see that 29 percent of the “Asian” kids who took the test got into the selective schools, as did 27 percent of whites; but for “Latinos,” it was 4.8 percent and for blacks, 3.5 percent. That’s a proxy for who did well on the test.

Progressives want to emphasize the line above on the chart, called the distribution of offers, which shows that more than half of the incoming class at the eight selective schools will be “Asian” and almost 29 percent white, while “Hispanics” will be 6.6 percent and black students 4 percent.

Sure enough, Ocasio-Cortez quickly tweeted this out:

As for de Blasio, he tried last year to scrap the SHSAT altogether, a proposal that went nowhere as other prominent New York leaders, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a liberal Democrat, distanced themselves from such a Stalinist approach.

Not that de Blasio is giving up. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, the mayor’s appointee, said in a prepared statement this week: “We’re also once again confronted by an unacceptable status quo at our specialized high schools. We need to eliminate the single test for specialized high school admissions now.”

That would accomplish only one thing, however—destroy the specialized school system that is not just the only bright spot in the city’s otherwise bleak school system, but one of the best in the country. It would do nothing to bring up the Latino and black kids.

The question then remains, how do we help these students?

We help them by really addressing what is holding them down, and sharing best practices. What makes people succeed? Well, many things: grit, perseverance, hard work, putting a premium on education, keeping families intact.

Reams of studies show that students with a mom and dad at home do best.

Those with the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are Asian-Americans. Asian-Americans also have by far the lowest divorce rate, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

And unsurprisingly, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Asian-American kids spend a lot more time doing homework than students in other categories.

None of this is to say that addressing these issues will be easy.

But leaders such as de Blasio and Ocasio-Cortez could be using their bully pulpits to make this case. One black politician who had the courage to do so—though not often enough—was Barack Obama. Several months before being elected president in 2008, he famously said of absent black fathers:

They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools; and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Obama paid a price for his bluntness, and was criticized by those who insist that failing grades are due to “institutionalized oppression.” But leadership requires courage.

And de Blasio, Ocasio-Cortez, and the others ought to support charter schools and other forms of school choice. Studies such as a recent one by Stanford University show strong “learning gains” by students in New York City charter schools compared with their peers in traditional public schools.

The study said: “When the findings were examined by demographic subgroups, they showed stronger growth for minorities and students in poverty.”

Regrettably, the mayor has waged an ideological crusade against charter schools, as our friends at the Manhattan Institute demonstrated in a report last year. Under his administration, the number of approvals for space requests for these popular schools has plummeted by 60 percent.

Progressive politicians such as de Blasio and Ocasio-Cortez are the ones making the biggest noise about economic inequality and its racial component, yet are unable to do anything about what causes these problems.

Education is the all-important rung in the ladder of success in America. So long as the achievement gap persists, don’t expect inequality to go away.

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Admissions bribery? The real problem with higher education is far deeper than that

“Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.” —Angelo Codevilla, “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution,” 2010

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” —Hillary Clinton, 2016

“In the largest known college admissions scandal in U.S. history, federal prosecutors on Tuesday said a California company made about $25 million by charging parents to secure spots for their children in elite schools, including Georgetown, Stanford and Yale, by cheating the admissions process.” —Reuters, March 14, 2019

Two words in Reuters’ description of the Operation Varsity Blues criminal probe stand out: “known” and “scandal.” Americans have long known that virtually the entire college admissions process is a sham. There have always been positions reserved for children of previous graduates, those who shower their alma maters with generous donations, the athletically gifted who also generate millions of dollars in revenue, and a number of other less-qualified students whose racial or sexual orientation is trumpeted as a university’s commitment to “diversity.” What makes this current endeavor undertaken by CEOs, Hollywood stars, and Wall Street millionaires a scandal is the likelihood that these ruling-class mandarins are as upset with being singled out as they are with being caught.

After all, as columnist (and Yale graduate) Kyle Smith asserts, “Let’s not think of Felicity Huffman et al. as unusual. Everybody with the means to steer their kids into top-drawer colleges is thinking about how to game the system. This is because an elite-college degree isn’t an instrument or a tool; it doesn’t have to lead to anything. It’s a status symbol in itself. Yale is Louis Vuitton is Piaget is Mercedes.”

No, Mr. Smith, not everyone with means is trying to game the system. There are millions of decent Americans who play by the rules, and don’t succumb to the siren song of ill-gotten status symbols.

Moreover, the biggest takeaway from this exposé isn’t that ruling-class members have been revealed for the status-mongers they’ve always been. It’s that those who run America’s universities — universities teeming with grade inflation, worthless majors, and tuition costs that have skyrocketed to the point where student loan debt is now $1.56 trillion — have been exposed for who they truly are: morally bankrupt elitists, enabling a morally bankrupt, self-perpetuating elitist system.

“These institutions of higher learning have spent the last several decades promulgating complicated and specious theories about inherited guilt and privilege on the basis of immutable characteristics such as gender and ethnicity, all the while fueling themselves on the real privilege of wealth and celebrity,” writes columnist Ed Morrissey. “If that’s not a blatant corruption of their core mission to educate, then nothing can be called corrupt.”

Is education still their core mission? “Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges,” Codevilla explains. “And it is an open secret that ‘the best’ colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.”

Genuine education is about the dissemination of core principles vital to the understanding and preservation of our constitutional republic, the free and open exchange of competing ideas, and learning how, not what, to think.

Fitting in is all about kowtowing to the prevailing ideology. Since the 1970s, the number of college administrators has soared by 369%, and if Americans don’t quite understand the implications, a story about Harvard Business School is indicative: They’ve hired an Associate Director for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging “to improve the environment surrounding equity and inclusion at the school,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

Equity and inclusion? Ideological enforcement is more like it.

Besides, given that particular school’s record with Asian students, that position isn’t working as advertised.

Such contemptible nonsense is only part of the picture. In 2013, the Obama administration proposed a ratings system whereby colleges would be required to reveal student graduation rates, the level of debt they’ve accumulated and what they earn after graduating. The idea was aimed at finding out if colleges — some with costs exceeding $60,000 per year — were worth the money. “The college presidents were appalled,” The New York Times reported, citing a number of college officials who believed the effort was “uncharacteristically clueless,” “quite wrongheaded,” or “oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads.”

Many things are misleading. Transparency and accountability are not.

Columnist Heather Mac Donald also champions transparency, asserting that universities “should adopt a transparent, purely merit-based admissions system based on quantified tests of academic preparedness.”

Unfortunately, it may be little more than rearranging Titanic deck chairs.

That’s because the real problem is that while universities perpetuate an odious ruling class status quo utterly inimical to millions of Americans, those same Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe their children are doomed without a college degree, because college graduates earn more than those with a high-school education.

Yet where do the proverbial lines cross? Higher earnings require specific majors and often more advanced degrees — which feed the massive student debt load that seriously impedes graduates’ ability to own homes and start a business and/or family. Non-graduates? Approximately 40% of students do not graduate within six years — and have the debt without the higher wages to mitigate it.

In the meantime, colleges can raise costs with impunity, because all student-loan defaults are ultimately borne by taxpayers. Thus, the contemptible status quo perseveres. One in which ordinary American are viewed by the self-professed “best and brightest” as “retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained,” as Codevilla puts it.

In 2016, “unconstrained,” “deplorable” Americans elected a non-politician to the Oval Office. The elitist backlash has been tremendous, led by the very same ruling class as desperate to preserve their political status quo as the educational one that perpetuates it.

And why not? The Left has always sought power by any means necessary. But the American Right enabled them when they unconditionally surrendered America’s entire education system to the leftist/elitist agenda. And now, 50 years later, legions of socialist/Marxist foot soldiers produced by that surrender sense their Liberty-crushing “moment” is at hand.

Fix colleges? Better to render them as irrelevant as possible. Compete against them with wholly accountable institutions for millions of students who prefer developing skill sets to polishing social justice warrior résumés. Less expensive institutions, unburdened by the administrative dead weight colleges have embraced.

A heavy lift? Undoubtedly. But the status quo of ongoing cultural degradation, crushing debt, and contempt for national sovereignty that defines the elitist agenda — along with the cultivated polarization used to maintain it — is unsustainable.

Education is the ultimate battleground for the nation’s soul. And it’s time the American Right deprived the leftist-dominated elitist class of their ideological fiefdoms, disguised as institutions of higher learning.

The nation’s survival depends on it.

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Cambridge University withdraws visiting fellowship of Jordan Peterson

Cambridge University has rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to controversial academic Jordan Peterson, who refuses to refer to transgender people by their chosen pronouns, after outcry from faculty and students.

The Canadian psychologist, who has hundreds of thousands of fans, styles himself as the "professor against political correctness", and has argued for enforced monogamy, and pushed the view that men are victims of gender discrimination.

He has also said that the idea of white privilege is a “Marxist lie.”

The professor first came to fame in 2016 because he opposed an anti-discrimination bill that meant he had to use the preferred pronouns of his students and colleagues. He said that the law infringed on his free speech, refusing to use any other pronoun than "he" or "she".

Students protested across the university's campus and caused a media storm in Canada and the US.

He was due to take part in a two month academic fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity, planning to run around ten public lectures on the Bible, which would be a continuation of his work at the University of Toronto.

Academics and the student union publicly protested his appointment, with lecturer Priyamvada Gopal sarcastically tweeting: " Jordan Peterson to be my colleague later this year? So EXCITED. So much to learn, so much wisdom to glean. Well done, Cambridge, no better way to signal our commitment to diversity and decolonization."

PhD student Lieske Huits tweeted: "Enraged and disappointed with @Cambridge_Uni that Jordan Peterson has been given a visiting fellowship. Such hatemongering shouldn't be given a place at our University."

Another student,  Neha Malhotra, agreed, writing: "@Cambridge_Uni by hiring Jordan Peterson, you are giving a platform to anti-trans speech. Instead of making this campus safe(r) for trans folks & those that fall under your so-called “diversity” mission, you are actively supporting their oppression. So shameful."

Hours later, the university U-turned, writing in a statement: "We can confirm that Jordan Peterson requested a visiting fellowship, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a further review." 

Cambridge Student Union said in a statement to student paper Varsity: “We are relieved to hear that Jordan Peterson's request for a visiting fellowship to Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity has been rescinded following further review. It is a political act to associate the University with an academic's work through offers which legitimise figures such as Peterson.

“His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the University, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the University.”

Jordan Peterson has responded, writing on his website: "Now the Divinity school has decided that signaling their solidarity with the diversity-inclusivity-equity mob trumps that opportunity–or so I presume. You see, I don’t yet know, because (and this is particularly appalling) I was not formally notified of this decision by any representative of the Divinity school.

"I heard about the rescinded offer through the grapevine, via a colleague and friend, and gathered what I could about the reasons from social media and press coverage.

"I think the Faculty of Divinity made a serious error of judgement in rescinding their offer to me (and I’m speaking about those unnamed persons who made that specific decision). I think they handled publicising the rescindment in a manner that could hardly have been more narcissistic, self-congratulatory and devious.

"I believe that the parties in question don’t give a damn about the perilous decline of Christianity, and I presume in any case that they regard that faith, in their propaganda-addled souls, as the ultimate manifestation of the oppressive Western patriarchy, despite their hypothetical allegiance to their own discipline."

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