Tribalism: The Liberal Assault on Merit

[PoliticalChic]

1. NYC has a handful of specialized high schools, for which children are tested, and selected on the basis of merit.

Not skin color, not immigration status, not language spoken....merit. Test score.

it is the raison d'être of specialized high schools.




Not according to Liberals.


2. No longer are teachers "teachers;" today, they are apparatchiks of the education commissariat. This is the editorial from the newspaper of the NYC teacher's union:
"Seven. That’s how many African-American students are among the 895 students who have been offered admission next fall to Stuyvesant HS, one of the city’s most prestigious specialized high schools.

It’s an astonishing number, given that black students make up 26 percent of the 1.1 million students in New York City public schools. Among students who identify as Hispanic, 33 were invited to join Stuyvesant’s class of 2023, even though Hispanic students make up 40 percent of public school enrollment.


3. Complicit in those figures is another number: One. One multiple-choice test called the SHSAT determines who is admitted to Stuyvesant and the city’s seven other specialized high schools.

In the five years since the UFT’s Specialized High School Task Force recommended overhauling the admission policy, these schools have become even less diverse.

The UFT task force also advocated revising the admissions test...
It will take political will, since these schools have impassioned constituencies who wish to maintain the status quo.

The specialized high schools enroll only a few thousand new students each year, but they are symptomatic of a larger issue: New York City has the most segregated high schools in the country, not just by race but by academic achievement."
Stuy High and beyond





Why not hold out this educational 'plum' to those who have worked hardest, and whose achievements benefit this city and this nation?

Where is the sense in mandating benefits on political benefit to the Democrats.

 

[miketx]

Liberals are why we have so many lazy incompetent workers today. At the prison nothing was merit based, and there were no bonuses given for excelling at your job. They had an employee of the month award board and it was always covered with pictures of the laziest least competent employees. It was an embarrassment. Every once in a while I would get recommended for it and I always refused it. It was a pathetic joke.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Liberals are why we have so many lazy incompetent workers today. At the prison nothing was merit based, and there were no bonuses given for excelling at you job. They had an employee of the month award board and it was always covered with pictures of the laziest least competent employees. It was an embarrassment. Every once in a while I would get recommended for it and I always refused it. It was a pathetic joke.

Can you imagine, the insult of blacks by other blacks that a superior student is "acting white."


Happened to McWhorter:

 

[PoliticalChic]

4. "The Plot Against Merit....Seeking racial balance, liberal advocates want to water down admissions standards at New York’s elite high schools.


In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English... he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.”


5. [Ting bought] prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam....prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”



6. New York’s specialized high schools including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel Laureates—more than most countries. For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal, and logical reasoning skills.


7. ...troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced.The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support...[and] new New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria.

The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.
The Plot Against Merit



As Ting’s story illustrates, however, the reality is just the opposite.


Rule #6 Only Liberals have rights.

 

[PoliticalChic]

8. "The poor students get into such schools through hard work and sacrifice—both their own and that of their parents.
The students typically attend local tutoring programs, which proliferate in Asian neighborhoods, starting the summer after sixth grade and for several days a week, including weekends, during the school year prior to the test.

The costs are burdensome for poor and working families, but it’s a matter of priorities.


9. .... in an NPR story last year: “Even the lowest-paid immigrants scrape up enough money for tutoring, because those high schools are seen as the ticket to a better life” for their children. Thus, one immigrant family featured in the NPR story had spent $5,000 per year, of the parents’ combined $26,000 income as garment workers, to send their three sons to tutoring.

Their oldest boy, now a student at Stuyvesant, said of his mother, who did not speak English and, like her husband, did not finish high school in China:
“Basically, she just worked every day . . . and saved up the money.”
The Plot Against Merit by Dennis Saffran, City Journal Summer 2014





“Basically, she just worked every day . . . and saved up the money.”

My heart breaks for these people.
These are the recipients for whom every cent of aid is worthwhile.






10. The obverse.... these are the results of Liberal welfare policy:

"As more folks in a poor neighborhood languish with little or no work, entire local culture begins to change: daily work is no longer the expected social norm. Extended periods of hanging around the neighborhood, neither working nor going to school becoming more and more socially acceptable.

Since productive activity not making any economic sense because of the work disincentives of the welfare plantation, other kinds of activities proliferate: drug and alcohol abuse, crime, recreational sex, illegitimacy, and family breakup are the new social norms, as does the culture of violence."
Peter Ferrara, “America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,” chapter five.



Liberalism: the great destroyer