More than 100 protesters descended on City Hall on Friday to blast Mayor de Blasio’s proposed overhaul of the city’s specialized-high-schools’ admission policies.
De Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza want to abolish the single-test admissions structure to spur diversification, noting the chronic lack of black and Latino kids at the competitive schools.
Carranza has asserted that multiple measures, including overall grades and state-test results, should be considered for admissions and that a lone exam can’t adequately evaluate talent and potential.
Both he and the mayor argue that students who can’t afford admissions-test prep classes are unfairly elbowed out of realistic contention.
But the protesters — most of them Asian — said the proposed changes would penalize kids and parents who have been preparing for the past several years for the admissions-exam-only system.
Asian kids — many of them low-income first-generation students from places like China and Bangladesh — dominate the elite institutions.
“Getting rid of the [entrance-exam system] is an easy way out for politicians instead of improving middle schools across the board,” said Caroline Magoc, 15, a sophomore at one of the “elite eight,” Stuyvesant HS, and vice president of her school’s Democratic Club.
She argued that de Blasio is willing to implement a policy that mistreats Asians because of their limited political potency.
“We are not elitists,” she said. “We want everyone who can get into these schools to work hard and get in and put in the effort.”
State Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn), who was at the rally, also accused de Blasio of taking from one community and giving to another for political gain.
“Stop pitting our diverse communities against each other,” he said. “It’s plain wrong.”
Golden said the city’s middle schools should be yielding better results, especially given New York’s sky-high education spending.
“No other state in the country — no other place in the world — do we spend that type of money,” he said. “And we’re looking to dumb down education?”
Another protester, Don Lee, said high-achieving Asians should not pay the price for the city Department of Education’s shortcomings.
“We are not saying these kids are not smart enough,” he said of black and Latino applicants. “We’re saying the DOE has failed them.”