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> Activists have gutted admissions at Thomas Jefferson high school in Fairfax, VA, arguably the top public high school in the US because it had a high percentage of Asians. Lowell High school admissions in SF, a top 100 high school, underwent the exact same thing because of its high percentage of Asians. Now NYC is doing the same thing. At Harvard, the admissions department openly discriminates against Asians by saying they lack "courage" or less "likeable". Imagine the outrage if this happened to Blacks, but because it happened to Asians it's considered okay because Asians are unAmerican.

Also notable is that California is finalizing a proposal to eliminate faster tracking in mathematics, arguing that it is a promotion of white nationalist ideology. Calculus may only be taken in the senior year under these proposals, and Algebra is to be de-emphasized as the primary math target of middle school.¹

I found it quite striking that in a long proposal focused on racial justice in math, there is plenty of mention of white nationalism but exactly zero mention of the word "Asian".

[1]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

I would have been diagnosed with ADD and medicated if I hadn't been put on a faster track. Luckily the teacher correctly observed to my parents that I was just bored. I don't know what would have happened to me in a system without that track. I probably would have been a much less happy child.

It went the other way for me. Got the ADD diagnosis and put me into classes with kids with downs syndrome and other profound disabilities. Let me tell you, that isn't great for your social life. I ended up leaving as soon as I was legally allowed and got a job.

This supposed ADD disappeared once I got into the real world and was given actual problems to solve. I think they did it mostly to keep their test scores up. I have no faith in the education system as a result.

>Math promotes white nationalism

Jesus they've completely lost their minds!

> 43% of NYC is white, but only 35% of spots taken by white kids.

The NYT deftly avoids mentioning this by stating it as

> Though about 70 percent of the roughly 1 million public school students in New York are Black and Latino, about 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes are white or Asian American.

So they are robbing 4000 Black and Latino kids of the opportunity to participate in a program specifically tailored for overachievers like them?

What is an overachiever? How much should a person achieve?

> Activists have no problems openly discriminating against Asians because whites, blacks and Latinos think of "Americans" as whites, blacks and Latinos. Asians are considered foreigners.

I don't think this is true. Asians are being punished because they're successful, and their existence bucks the narrative the blank-slate activists want to push.

Sure, as a group they're being punished, but it's not because anyone sees them as exceptionally foreign. It's just because the top has to be brought down in order to achieve equality of outcomes and the fanatics pushing these things don't care who they harm to achieve their goals.

>I don't think this is true. Asians are being punished because they're successful, and their existence bucks the narrative the blank-slate activists want to push.

No. Everyone is being punished, not just Asians.

Ditching G/T programs is going about this completely backwards, and hurts all students regardless of ethnicity or melanin content.

The problem is that schools in poor and minority neighborhoods suck.

Let's fix that problem and the rest will take care of itself.

Part of the problem is, as you mention, the schools. But the other, much harder part of the problem, is the homes. If your parents aren’t engaged in parenting and you come from poverty, you are at a disadvantage that in no way can be fixed by the time you spend at your school each day. You’re treading water at best.

If you want poor kids to do better, you have to improve their home life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/

>Part of the problem is, as you mention, the schools. But the other, much harder part of the problem, is the homes. If your parents aren’t engaged in parenting and you come from poverty, you are at a disadvantage that in no way can be fixed by the time you spend at your school each day. You’re treading water at best.

A fair point. Although I came to the conclusion when I was in school that while the impact of your home life is important, providing a positive initial experience with school and having high expectations for scholastic performance can do a lot to improve educational outcomes. Perhaps even enough impact to counteract the lack of parental involvement/motivation for education for some.

I think even more important than home is peer groups. Research I read about in The Nurture Assumption [0] convinced me that much more important than home life (home life being called "shared environment" I believe because in a twin study it's the thing most shared by two non-biologically related siblings) is peer environment. If your friends all think that learning isn't cool and tend to do drugs or whatever, children will follow in that path, and parenting affects that very little despite our intuitions.

How to solve the peer group problem? As far as I know it's extremely difficult, even more than reforming home life. You can split up peer groups and distribute their members into peer groups with different mindsets and they will generally conform, but the ratio has to be quite steep towards the peer group you're integrating into. I don't know what the number but I would guess something like 15 to 1. There's definitely not enough middle and upper class classrooms to go around to house all kids from more troubled areas under my stated assumptions. But perhaps the process could be incremental?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption

> Everyone is being punished, not just Asians.

No, everyone is being helped, not just Blacks and Hispanics. Even most White and Asian students who would benefit from accelerated study in one or more areas are excluded by NYC’s current program.

> Ditching G/T programs is going about this completely backwards

No, its not.

Ditching accelerated student-specific programs would be, but this plan vastly expands such programs, putting them in every kindergarten classroom, available to every student, rather than less than 10% of schools, available based on all-or-nothing test to four year olds.

> and hurts all students regardless of ethnicity or melanin content

How does making student-specific accelerated content with teachers trained in delivering it in every kindergarten classroom, and added experienced teachers in disadvantaged communities, rather than accelerated material made available to a small minority hurt everyone?

> The problem is that schools in poor and minority neighborhoods suck.

> Let's fix that problem

That’s...exactly the idea.

You know nothing about teaching and education if you think this is going to help. It's going to hurt even more. The reason why you group children with similar learning abilities together is so that they can progress together. If you stick advanced kids with less advanced kids, both sets of kids will suffer because the advanced kids will be extremely bored and the less advanced kids will get discouraged because the advanced kids are so much better than them. It goes against the fundamentals of education.

> You know nothing about teaching and education

That is incorrect.

> The reason why you group children with similar learning abilities together is so that they can progress together.

Yes, that's the thinking that justified tracking. Among the problems with segregated G&T programs, however, is that G&T-identified and non-G&T students are not, within each group, “of similar learning abilities”; Both have wide variation within groups, and individuals very often aren’t in the same relative position within their group in different specific subject areas.

As much as tracking would make (simple, binary) varying ability fit into the industrial assembly-line model of education, it doesn't work well with real people in the real world (it works very slightly better than the industrial assembly-line model without tracking, and when that was the norm, it was an improvement.)

But what works significantly better (though it takes more work) is to provide baseline curriculum with supplementation to individuals (in small groups of similar ability in the subject, where possible) based on ability. Which is what this proposes training all (initially) kindergarten teachers in, and hiring additional teachers in particular areas of need, in place of a high-stakes tracking exam for four-year olds. Its what has proven better than binary tracking in many places. (And it is, incidentally, what decided my family’s choice of schools for my son, who is now in kindergarten.)

It’s not the 1980s any more. Education has moved forward. Whether NYC will execute this well is, of course, up in the air. But that what it has identified is what has been widely used and proven better than binary tracking already, for the students that would be tracked into G&T, for the students that would not, for racial and socioeconomic class equity, and in basically every other conceivable manner is not up in the air.

>It’s not the 1980s any more. Education has moved forward. Whether NYC will execute this well is, of course, up in the air. But that what it has identified is what has been widely used and proven better than binary tracking already, for the students that would be tracked into G&T, for the students that would not, for racial and socioeconomic class equity, and in basically every other conceivable manner is not up in the air.

I'm replying here to your reply ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806171 ) to my comment.

You make a bunch of really good points. I haven't been in the NYC public schools in nearly 40 years and the elementary schools in nearly 50, so I was unaware that the G&T programs weren't actually housed and run within each school.

In fact, when I was in elementary school (1971-1978), the gifted and talented programs were just getting started, and were housed within neighborhood schools[0] as a separate track.

After reading your (and a bunch of other) comments, I realized (as you already knew) that G&T programs had been moved to completely separate schools. Which is a terrible implementation of G&T.

But even back then, only a small number of city schools had those programs at all (they certainly didn't at mine -- PS 84 and JHS 117).

I was just a kid, so I don't know what justifications were made for moving all G&T programs out of the neighborhood schools.

There should be G&T (or some tracked analog) in every city school, something to which you alluded.

tl;dr: You were absolutely correct. My comments were based on an understanding that was decades out of date.

[0] https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/metro-learning/spoils...

You are exactly the type of person who is pushing out the best kids into private school. Private schools in California are getting record numbers of enrollment after how horribly public schools handled the pandemic, and after how it wants to gut programs in the name of "equity". Your kind will reap what they sow, because it will create a 2 class system where anyone who can afford private school will go there, leaving essentially the economically most disadvantaged in public school. And along with the students, people will fight to cut money to public schools as well, since many will be paying for private schools.

Kids that are advanced need to be with other advanced kids. Not all kids are equal in ability. Using weasel words to push an agenda of "equity" that hurts the best and brightest is what will kill public education and push moderate Democrats such as myself to voting for Republicans who want vouchers to gut the public education system.

The real thing about the asians is:

There is a whole narrative that people are equal and have same capabilities.

Anyone can be a sport start if trains enough or a super scientist if study enough.

Then looking at statistics it is not true.

The same people with cognitive dissonance claim that because social factors, etc. Usually whites get a better treatment thus because and only because of that they have better representation in certain areas (only certain).

Then a lot of money is poured in programs to fix that. Because the narrative says all people are equal.

The opposing narrative says that IQ is genetic and it reflects on career that needs IQ so it really does not matter it will always reflect that.

The two narratives are fighting: social-economics vs genetics and if its a fair fight.

Came the asians.

Poor, non-english skills, living in bad neighborhoods.

They start getting advanced classes more than white. They advance more.

Then looking at statistics we can see Asians have higher IQ and looking on Advanced programs we have Asian as the largest, Whites as second and others as third.

Bang one narrative suffers a blow. Then they start changing rules. "Asians are White". "We need to make it more equal" meaning removing asians from programs.

While these boths narrative fight we as whole suffer.

As I want the best players on Soccer I want the best players on Medical field or Math.

I really don't care if the whole Math department is Asian. I care about the results to the society.

It's not I.Q., it's culture. Asians have a significant cultural focus on education. But then again so do a number of Black African minorities like the Igbo, Ashanti and Yoruba. So even "race" is a complete red herring.

Culture, 100% is the reason. But I feel the real problem here is how we CANNOT talk about the negative effects of culture. Growing up black/Mexican I was made fun of by blacks and Mexicans for being smart, acting white etc. and I know I'm not the only one who experienced this.

Intelligence was not valued in black culture when I was growing up and I'd argue is still not.

I've heard this before about black culture (hadn't about Mexican culture though) and it's quite sad.

I could be way off the mark here, but to me it seems like the reason for this is that if one has been blaming external factors for all of their failings, it doesn't feel good to see someone with the exact same limitations pushing ahead. It hurts the excuse that one has been making to oneself about what the reasons for not being successful are.

But as embarrassing as it might feel to have others surpass oneself, dragging others down is never a good way to handle it. Fixing that really requires a culture shift and I'm not sure that any amount of changes from the outside can have a notable impact (if anything, pushing too hard for change from the outside can make people stick harder to their ways of thinking).

Asians are not genetically more intelligent than other races. If this were the case, Asia would be more of a powerhouse than just the "factory workers of the world". Only a small amount of innovation is coming out of Asia compared to the US.

Asians in the US are more motivated to study, it's the culture. It doesn't take a lot of dedication to studying to get a major advantage over those that don't study as hard.

to play devils advocate, humans have been the most intelligent species for a long time, but haven't always been the dominant one.

further, we shouldn't assume the "most intelligent" rise to the top in terms of hegemony and leadership ex. Trump and our world governments in general.

>Only a small amount of innovation is coming out of Asia compared to the US

This is a meaningless claim, and also the fact that you are hardly exposed to the innovation that Asia brings to the table, only US. (Note what website you are writing this on)

China used to be the first world power and economy a few hundred years ago. And they are slowly but surely reclaiming that title.

100 years ago China was barely a country, ripped apart by opium, politics and various countries that occupied China. It took Dr. Sun Yat Sen and subsequently Chiang Kai Shek and then Mao to get China back on its feet and now is a global power because of its 2 billion people.

But you can't compare the innovation of China to the US... for the time being. Admittedly the inflection point is coming soon if the US doesn't get it's head out of its ass.

China and Taiwan are in Asia. Between the two of them there is at least as much if not more tech know-how (soft & hard) in many areas (e.g. face recognition, semiconductors) compared to all others continents combined.

Another inconvenient truth is that there is a great example of an integrated G&T school student body in East Harlem whose racial profile [1] closely matches the racial distribution of applicants for the G&T kindergarden test[2].

Two problems arise when trying to raise the profile of the school:

1) This is one of the only good examples of integration, but nobody seems to be interested in learning how to replicate this model high performance and integration across the rest of NYC's schools.

2) Draws unwelcome attention to the pipeline problem whereby some ethnic groups are underrepresented compared to the city's ethnic makeup when applying for the test.

[1] https://www.publicschoolreview.com/tag-young-scholars-profil... (scroll down to "All Ethnic Groups")

[2] https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_f14e1d13df45444c883bbf... (page 26)

One of the first openly racist interactions I ever witnessed in the US was a white guy hurling slurs at a Vietnamese friend of mine. Asians are definitely in a strange predicament here.

It's almost like you can be racist to anyone.

> in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin.

Do you have evidence for this? Asians are by far the richest minority in the US so I was surprised by this statement.

> Activists have no problems openly discriminating against Asians because whites, blacks and Latinos think of "Americans" as whites, blacks and Latinos. Asians are considered foreigners. So when a prestigious program is dominated by Asians, something must obviously wrong, right?

Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/?forum-post=resear...

This links to https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/opportunity/pdf/20_poverty_measu... as the original source. On page 28 of this file, you get to the actual statistics. While Asian poverty is certainly high, it is about the same as other minorities, and has been decreasing since 2014.

No, the report says that Asians poverty is underreported in the data.

EDIT: I think that the report shows that Hispanics in 2020 have a higher percentage of poverty than Asians, but it seems like a lot of the articles showing Asians had the highest poverty rates came from before 2017.

It looks like in the last 5 years prior to 2020, Asians had improved the poverty rates.

Regardless even in 2020, Asian poverty in NYC was 22%, Black poverty was 19%, Hispanic poverty was 24% and White poverty was 13%.

I don't know enough about the situation to speak any further on it, I was just as curious about your statement " in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin." as silicon2401 was.

It's a dire situation for sure, but I think using "large margin" is disingenuous.

It depends on what Asians we are talking about. I bet if you correlate income to gifted access, you’d get a lot of Indians and Chinese in those programs, and many fewer Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Indonesians (doubly so if we break out Chinese ethnicities from those countries).

In Seattle, Asians dominate both the high end and the low end (south Seattle has a lot of poorer southeast Asian immigrants, north Seattle has more East and richer south Asian immigrants). It all depends on NYC’s racial mix over the broad term Asian.

> Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

This is the natural result of equality of outcomes, which is achieved by dragging down the top to meet those who can't excel. That is not at all what most people mean by equality, and is frankly a perversion of the word.

They confuse the word equality with equity of outcome

>Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

Except the problem isn't with the gifted/talented programs in NYC. And it isn't with the SHSAT[0] either.

The problem is that public elementary and middle schools in majority black/hispanic neighborhoods have measurably much worse educational results.

What's more, those schools don't even consider preparing their students for G/T programs or the specialized high schools.

There are many reasons for this and fixing it is hard. As such, instead of giving minority students a better education, some activists are calling for (and succeeding) removal of gifted/talented programs and getting rid of the SHSAT.

As a product of the NYC public school system, I have no illusions that fixing these problems will be easy.

But removing the G/T programs instead of directing poorly performing schools to bring all their students up to educational levels which allow the best of them (as in every other school) to participate in G/T programs and increase their numbers in the specialized high schools.

IMHO, this is completely ass backwards.

And De Blasio is gone in January, leaving this mess to his successor.

As a NYC resident, I'm glad I don't have kids here.[1]

[0] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/testing/specialized-hig...

[1] I could go on and on about how ridiculous this is, but I am so disgusted with De Blasio and the NYC Department of Education about this stuff that I'll just stop now before this becomes an all out rant.

> The problem is that public elementary and middle schools in majority black/hispanic neighborhoods have measurably much worse educational results.

Are the students doing poorly in those schools because they are poorly run/staffed/and funded, or is it the case that the students in those schools have more problems at home leading to poorer results?

In other words, is this a problem schools can fix at all?

>Are the students doing poorly in those schools because they are poorly run/staffed/and funded, or is it the case that the students in those schools have more problems at home leading to poorer results?

There has been research (don't have it handy right now) that there's a negative feedback loop with that.

Schools in poor areas tend to have less parental involvement (and direct economic support from those parents as is common in wealthier neighborhoods), so school staff don't have as many resources and aren't as incentivized to raise expectations of the students.

That creates an environment where the students aren't learning as well as in other neighborhood schools.

I suspect that if the authority figures on either side of that raise their expectations and requirements of the students, the negative feedback loop can be, at least partially, short-circuited.

>In other words, is this a problem schools can fix at all?

Yes. They can't do as much as schools with significantly more parental involvement, but improving the teacher/staff performance would likely improve parent performance.

No, it's not a panacea, but blaming all this on poor parenting and throwing up our hands just promotes the centuries-old trope that "poor people are morally and intellectually inferior. It's obvious, if they weren't so they wouldn't be poor."

That's circular reasoning and doesn't reflect reality.

> In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

Then reject diversity.

I don't know what you're reading, but Thomas Jefferson High School is not in Fairfax. It's here in Alexandria. Fairfax would be half an hour drive for me and I live on the extreme, western edge of Alexandria. There's a whole, other city in between (Annandale). It'd be like saying something was in Brooklyn when it's actually in Queens.

Virginia is a weird state. Fairfax and Alexandria are classified as "independent cities", which exist in parallel to and outside of counties. There are only 41 independent cities in the US: Baltimore, MD; St. Louis, MO; Carson City, NV, and then 38 more in Virginia.

The signficance is that independent cities can't levy income tax, but have to pay for their own schools and roads. We make revenue through property taxes (not just land/houses, but also cars! That's a whole other story) and business licenses. The state then calculates how much it will contribute to our school funding based on our supposed "ability to pay".

Between property values and transit issues here, there are a likely more "property owners" in Fairfax than here in Alexandria. Alexandria is much more of a bedroom community for DC, whereas people in Fairfax spread more across NoVA for work. The state sees the higher property values in Alexandria, and our higher population, and thinks "oh, they are loaded, they don't need so much". But we're not. We're a town of renters. All the property is owned by DC and NYC property developers, which got sweetheart tax break incentives to build here.

You can readily see it when visiting. Fairfax's roads are nicer. Their public buildings are newer and larger. They have several, gorgeous, gigantic public parks with stuff like kiddie train rides around the perimeter. Fairfax is apparently rolling in cash. And Alexandria can't even fix a foot bridge across a 20-foot wide creek bed.

So we just don't have the money to fund our schools anymore. Hell, my own kid's school is one of the better ones in town and they can't even afford to have enough bus drivers and substitute teachers for the year. It's garden variety bad administration over the last 15 years, not anti-Asian sentiment.

My friend lives in Fairfax and her school district feeds into TJ, so I assumed it was in Fairfax. This is a front-and-center issue for her.

My apologies. I've since learned that TJ is a Fairfax County School Division school. TJ is smack dab in the middle of Alexandria. I didn't realize how unrelated Virginia's school division system is to its municipal structure. I didn't grow up here, so it seems absurd to have a completely different county's schools in our city.

It's not in the City of Alexandria. It's in Fairfax County. It has an Alexandria postal address, but it is not inside Alexandria's political borders.

After your question, I asked me friend, and she said it's so damn confusing what the rules and borders are that it's easy to get confused.

No, it's in Fairfax County. Its address is Alexandria, but it's not inside the City of Alexandria[1].

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Thomas+Jefferson+High+Scho...

Well, chalk one up for "Virginia politics are stupid and unnecessarily complicated". I just learned that our school "divisions" (not districts like the rest of the country) have no correlation to our municipal structure, but also are incapable of doing their own revenue collection. We still can't afford basic stuff for our schools, despite NoVA being regularly ranked one of the richest areas in the country. Urban schools get about 1% more per student than rural schools from the state. They claim to incorporate cost of living adjustments, but it's clearly not enough if we can't do basic things like hire enough bus drivers.

This bullshit is a vestige of the Civil War when West Virginia split of to be an abolitionist state. I don't understand the fetishization of such "culturally important" (sarcasm) things like municipal structure when what we have is not working. "This hammer was my great, great grandpappies, that he bought from the Sears Robucks Catalog in 1887. Yes, the handle is cracked and the claw can't grip modern nail heads, but by God, it was good enough for him, it'll be good enough for us".

It seems outrageously unfair.

> And in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin.

False. Asians are the second highest income demographic, second only to whites: https://wherewelive.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019...

So you can still make a case that the tests for G&T measure the wealth available for test preparation.

In NYC Asians have the second-highest rate of poverty behind Hispanics.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/opportunity/poverty-in-nyc/data-to...

I don't really get that undercurrent to the decision making processes here.

Yes, NYC's specialized public schools have become heavily disproportionately filled by its Asian and Asian-American population.

The competitive forces and consolidation does a disservice to them and the rest of the admitted population as well.

When a 4.2 GPA overachieving student can't get selected to good universities or other opportunities because of all the 4.5 GPA students at the same school, that undermines the point of the system. And that system also has the side effect of exacerbating segregation?

And you want to defend it by making it about other Americans focusing specifically on disrupting Asian achievement? I understand your sentiment is and has been shared and represents a collective assumption with some groups in NYC, but its a huge stretch! The other perspective is that it just doesn't accomplish externalities well. Mix the schools up, let cultural overachievers be dispersed instead of consolidated, the mindshare will help the overall local population better.

I agree that public schools should be about education, so focus on fixing where the education occurs. Try to get better teachers and materials to other parts of the city! Yes, if your child is trying to go through school before any of this better infrastructure is set up, I can see how defensive one would be about it, I can see why the low hanging fruit of "they dont want us/my race to win" is the goto argument, but all I can say is.. welcome to the rest of the country? Shitty public schools is the most American thing ever!

That's not how cultural overachievers work though. Group overachievers together and they form a stronger culture of achievement. Split them up and they stop achieving.

might need a patch for that. the rest of America requires a support system and some distribution of self motivated exist through any set up

> Yes, NYC's specialized public schools have become heavily disproportionately filled by its Asian and Asian-American population.

Have they? The admission criteria is based on scores. The school is disproportionately filled with over-achievers who happen to be Asian.

> When a 4.2 GPA overachieving student can't get selected to good universities or other opportunities because of all the 4.5 GPA students at the same school

How is that so?

> Mix the schools up, let cultural overachievers be dispersed instead of consolidated

How is that supposed to help anyone?

> all I can say is.. welcome to the rest of the country? Shitty public schools is the most American thing ever!

Because someone eats junk food I should have to eat it too?

My supposition is that the mayor's reaction isn't because of the presence of Asian persons.

As a reflection of the American culture, the idea that the system is proposed to be dismantled because of Asian presence is also not supported.

I'm just here to argue that.