CHEERS
“It has become a summer rite to bemoan how few Black students are admitted to Stuyvesant and other highly competitive public high schools in New York City,” begins John McWhorter, who goes on to call out those who claim the selective admissions test is racist. Among the real culprits, he argues, is the loss of accelerated learning:
Since the 1990s, too many Black students have been deprived of gifted and talented programs, in the wake of an antitracking movement that called for students of all abilities (and races) to be taught together. The gifted and talented programs smoothed the way to schools like Stuyvesant for many Black students in the past.
And thus:
Faced with such small numbers of Black kids getting into Stuyvesant, there is nothing racist in asking: “How can we make Black kids do better on the test?”
Expand, don’t shrink, the number of gifted and talented programs. Expand and strengthen free, city-run test prep and tutoring.
What’s racist is pretending the test is the problem.
Kelsey Piper agrees, explaining how critiquing standardized tests is shooting the messenger instead of tackling the problem of preparedness:
Black kids in America are much less likely to be reading at grade level. They are much less likely to take advanced math classes and less likely to take and pass AP tests. But taking away the AP tests wouldn’t mean they knew the math. And taking away the SAT wouldn’t teach them how to read…
The war against gifted programs has not led to any educational improvements—indeed, it has correlated with a substantial across-the-board slump in test scores that has been most brutal for the students who started out weakest.
JEERS
School closures are painful, but a recent complaint against Pittsburgh Public Schools alleging discrimination against Black students sounds like 2020-era madness. Naaz Modan reports:
“On average, the lower a school’s utilization rate, the higher the share of Black student enrollment,” the complaint said. “The inverse relationship between utilization rate and Black student enrollment in PPS indicates that basing school closure decisions primarily on utilization rates will disproportionately affect schools serving higher shares of Black students.”
When schools are underutilized because families have voted with their feet—either by moving out of the neighborhood or using school choice to enroll their kids elsewhere—the right answer is to ensure the remaining students get access to better schools when their campuses close. (See Jessica Poiner’s excellent look at how Cleveland should serve as a national model for consolidation.) And as our Fordham colleague Brian Fitzpatrick wrote recently, the mere fact that closures hit some groups harder is not proof of discrimination. In fact, consolidations can help put children into schools better suited to serve them.
Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a twice-weekly free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation.
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