So we can’t point to examples of actual anti-asian racism (there is more than one example) but you can change policy to discriminate against asians and in favor of hispanics without any evidence of anti-hispanic racism?
Fair enough. It’s pretty obvious why they didn’t consider the means tested preference in their options for TJHSST.
What do you think of @Babale’s argument that eligibility for free school lunches in NYC doesn’t mean a family is really poor, and they can still afford tutoring?
“My argument” is based on the numbers of students on free or reduced lunch at the school vs statewide which shows that the school is more prosperous overall.
Here are the actual numbers:
From here:
What other metric is he proposing. Eligibility for free lunch at the time (everyone is eligible now, see coronavirus) was 130% of poverty level and 185% for reduced lunch. ~$35,000 for free lunch for a family of 4 and ~ $50,000 for reduced lunch
I linked data showing that asians have the highest poverty rates in nyc. If he wants to disregard that data, I can’t stop him. Some people believe that poor asians have some sort of special privilege that makes their academic achievements less deserved so they don’t feel as bad taking stuff away from asians and give it to others in the name of social justice, I can’t stop them either.
If the SHSAT was a means test for parents, you would not think that asians outnumber whites 5::1 despite being the poorest demographic in the city.
If you are willing to make sacrifices, most people can afford test prep. I remember my dad sometimes putting cardboard in his shoes because there were holes in the soles of his shoes. I never had a birthday party or got a birthday present or christmas present as a child. There wasn’t always enough money to pay the bills.
But there was always enough money for my education. I won’t bore you with the details but my situation was not uncommon at stuyvesant. Stuy was by no means the poorest school in the city (my local high school had much more poverty) but it wasn’t anywhere close to be the richest one either. It isn’t some bastion of wealth or privilege.
Are you under the impression that asians are wealthier than blacks in NYC?
Replying here to leave the trolls’r’us to their kvetching.
It’s not a number at all AFAIK. They just let in the kids who do best on the test. And one of the proposals was a lottery, which will obviously do a worse job at finding the best students than almost any kind of assessment.
Besides, this is irrelevant to my point, which is that if you want to claim Asians are over-represented then you need to show that they have some kind of unfair advantage.
None of this points necessarily to racism for specific test scores requirements. There aren’t racist and non racist policies for test score numbers - it’s much more complicated. Maybe you prefer the old policy. But preferring the new policy is not necessarily racist.
And that’s pretty much all I’m saying. There are much larger issues at play here, but I think the new policy is slightly preferable to the old one, even though they’re both flawed in different ways.
The stated goal of the new policy is to replace merit-based selection with engineering numerical racial outcomes. It moves from treating people as individuals to treating them as components of a fungible mass defined solely by race. It is the essence of racism even before we get into the number of its backers whose public statements about Asian immigrants would make Denis Kearney blush.
Yeah there are. Playing ‘let’s tinker with the admissions policy’ until you get a result that benefits the group you happen to be part of is racist.
And supporting the racist policy makes it less likely they’ll adopt the non-racist one in future, because they’ll have achieved their goal of increasing URM students and making their diversity numbers look better.
If there was any chance of TJ’s rigorous program surviving the influx of unqualified students that the race war lottery will create, it went out the window yesterday when the school board’s lawyer argued that TJ is not a “gifted,” “magnet,” “Governor’s,” or “selective” school and the school board’s position is that they have no idea what those terms even mean. They are trying to get around the black-letter law in Virginia that says magnet schools must use an admissions test by saying TJ’s mission is no longer that of a magnet school. It is just another high school now; the goal of destroying excellence has been achieved. In two years no one will have any reason to care about the admissions criteria because there will be no point in going there as opposed to anywhere else.
The old policy is more racist than the new one - it overwhelmingly advantages Asian kids at the expense of black and brown kids. This one is slightly better, but still highly flawed. Still a long way to go.
It advantages “people who are qualified to attend TJ” over “people who are not” without concern for what the racial makeup of those groups are. Maybe Fairfax County should do a better job of educating “black and brown kids” from kindergarten through 8th grade so that they can pass the objective, race-blind admissions test instead of trying to cover up their failure by race-bombing the TJ program.
There’s no evidence that the current policy is biased in favour of Asian kids. Tests aren’t subject to unconcious bias like teacher assessments are, and the current admissions standards weren’t created by a majority-Asian school board trying to advantage their own race.
Also, many Asians are brown; that’s an odd distinction you’re drawing.
I’ve never said anything about bias in the tests. The quality of the test is irrelevant.
The old “racist” policy also overwhelmingly advantaged asian kids at the expense of white kids. Your definition of racism is weird.
The new policy will result in a whiter richer dumber student body. Your definition of social justice is weird.
So how was the old policy racist?
You are correct, I should have said are you under the impression that poverty rates are higher among blacks than asians.
I’d like to know this too.