An Elite NYC Public School Admitted 777 Students. Only 3 Were Black

4 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by apparent
(nytimes.com)

9 Comments

apparent

8 hours ago

> About 80 percent of the seats went to Asian and white students.

It seems very strange to lump these two demographics together. Presumably Asians make up a smaller chunk of the school-age population than whites. By reporting them in the aggregate, we don't know if they're both represented/over-represented at the same rate, or whether (as I suspect is true) white students are somewhat overrepresented and Asian students are greatly over-represented.

But revealing this would undermine the narrative that admissions are somehow racist, and benefit white (and to a lesser extent white-adjacent) students. In reality, the students with the highest academic performance are Asian, which would not be the case if the system were designed to benefit white students.

leephillips

7 hours ago

I noticed the same lumping, and came to the same conclusion. When reading the NYT, keep in mind that the agenda comes first, and the way information is imparted serves that agenda. And, at times, if the facts can't be massaged to serve the agenda, the paper resorts to outright lying: http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA

apparent

7 hours ago

Later in the article, he provides this stat:

> About 19 percent of all public school students are Asian, but they received 57 percent of the offers for the specialized schools for the fall. The rates were higher at some schools, including 69 percent at Stuyvesant and 78 percent at Queens High School for the Sciences at York College.

If Asians are 3-4x overrepresented then they are the most over-represented group. It is telling that he does not provide comparable stats for any other group, though at least I give him credit for not aggregating Asian and white students everywhere in the article.

leereeves

7 hours ago

> [Asians] received 57 percent of the offers for the specialized schools for the fall

Does that imply that whites received less than 44% of the offers, and does that make whites underrepresented?

apparent

5 hours ago

Not necessarily because whites are only around 15% of the NYC public school population. But it means they are not as over-represented as Asian students, since there are also some Hispanic students who are admitted, which caps how high the white percentage could be.

not_your_vase

8 hours ago

    The sole criterion for admission is a 114-question, three-hour exam known as...
1. [Screw NYT for disabling text selection, and I had to type this in] Edit: probably that was my bad.

2. This sounds like a very important sentence, and begs at least 2 questions: "is the selection really racist as implied by the title", and the other one is "why is the result like that"? IMO the answer to the first question (based on the article at least) is no. I have no answer for the second.

apparent

8 hours ago

How did the NYT disable text selection for you? I just copied/pasted from my browser (Brave), as I always have.

not_your_vase

8 hours ago

hmm.. well... haha, you might be right. I think have some overly aggressive ublock filters. If I disable ublock, then I get the equivalent of hell on this link.

I take back my complaint about text selection.

matchbok3

8 hours ago

This is really all that needs to be said about this.

>Yiatin Chu, a public school parent and the co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, a group that has supported gifted and talented programs, said that the entrance exam was a “race-blind, income-blind test.”

Ms. Chu attended Bronx Science and her daughter will be a sophomore next school year at Stuyvesant. She said the exam was a fair measurement that should remain.

“These schools are rigorous and demanding, and students who go to these schools should be well-prepared to take that on,” Ms. Chu said. “Why are we minimizing the effort that is put in for something that is important to them?”