City Council progressives are again seeking to curb Asian-American students’ access to the city’s most selective public high schools, advancing what critics call racial injustice in the name of racial equity.
Queens Democrat Nantasha Williams and Brooklyn Democrat Lincoln Restler follow the same rationale that critics say led state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa to weaken the value of a New York diploma: removing measures that reveal public schools’ deep failures to educate Black and Hispanic students.
The council members argue that the small number of Black and Hispanic students admitted to Stuyvesant High School, Bronx Science and other specialized schools represents a serious inequity. But critics say they do not confront the underlying cause: shortcomings in K-8 education that leave too few students prepared to excel on the race-blind Specialized High Schools Admissions Test.
Instead, critics contend, their approach would punish the students succeeding under the current system by imposing an admissions framework that excludes students from heavily Asian neighborhoods.
Williams and Restler wrote to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, urging additional admissions at the eight elite high schools that do not use the SHSAT and, ideally, the elimination of the test altogether.
(They also propose expanding enrollment by thousands of seats. Yet the state’s class-size law is expected to reduce enrollment at these schools unless the city expands the buildings to add classrooms.)
Their most immediate proposal targets students admitted through the summer Discovery prep program, where 62% of the current cohort is Asian. They would restrict Discovery eligibility to students from the city’s 15 lowest-income school districts — a move that would exclude 90% of low-income Asian students.
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Citywide poverty rates among Asian-American students are as high as, or higher than, those among Black and Latino students; Asian families, however, are more likely to live in economically diverse neighborhoods.
Critics argue that the Williams-Restler proposal deserves a more candid label: the Asian Exclusion Act.
The Asian Wave Alliance condemned the premise, saying it amounts to the belief “that racial diversity requires reducing opportunities for one minority group in order to increase opportunities for another.”
AWA co-founder Yiatin Chu rightly ripped this “attack on merit masquerading as ‘diversity.’ ”
Felicia Thomas-Williams of the state Board of Regents inadvertently exposed the racism here by arguing for the state’s new no-standards graduation pathways: “You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees.”
Unless she’s just being cynically dishonest, the implication is that Thomas-Williams thinks we shouldn’t assess black and Hispanic kids on literacy or numeracy because she doesn’t believe they can become proficient in reading or math: That’s outright bigotry.
Nantasha Williams and Lincoln Restler are every bit as bigoted, or perhaps just equally dishonest.