NAACP et al claim Stuyvesant entrance exam is racist

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The NAACP and other advocacy groups have filed a complaint, perhaps timed to capitalize on Stuyvesant High School's cheating scandal, requesting a radical alteration of the time-honored SHSAT exam-based admissions process in order to increase black and Latino enrollment. Their case is modelled on the lawsuits against exam-based admission to white-majority city agencies such as the police and fire departments, except in this case the plaintiffs are objecting to the Asian majority (72%) at Stuyvesant. Would a judge find that Stuyvesant's exam-based admissions violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act? Well, the lawsuits against the city agencies used disparate impact to shift the burden of proof from the plaintiffs to the defendants. The NAACP's arguments in this case include disparate impact, challenging the whole test-taking process and predictive validity of the objective exam, and recommending a subjective multi-measure admissions process with the express goal of redistributing seats at Stuyvesant from Asian students to black and Latino students.

Read the NAACP complaint and press release. More here, here/here/here (study authors), here, here, here (re test prep), here, here, here, here, here (history lesson), and here.

The coveted success of Asians at Stuyvesant is a source of great pride - and hope - for Asian families in New York City. Asian parents believe the key to their children's future is academic achievement, and they hold Stuyvesant in extraordinarily high esteem, even reverence. The Asian students who earn seats at Stuyvesant typically are not rich. Lower-income immigrant Asian families in particular rely on their children testing into Stuyvesant (and other exam-based specialized public high schools) as an accessible and affordable avenue of upward mobility. In a society where Asian Americans are denied the favoring advantages of white privilege and affirmative action, the SHSAT is an indispensable opportunity for Asian students to compete on a level playing field with a fair, color-blind, straightforward transparent standard. No disparate treatment. No white privilege. No affirmative action. No Asian-suppressive quota. No suspicious subjectiveness. Every Stuyvesant student from any background is qualified strictly according to objective merit. *

(* Yes, Rachel Kleinman, "You could win the national spelling bee. None of that matters." We're proud that even the Rebecca Sealfon '01 had to qualify on her SHSAT to go to Stuy, same as the rest of us.)

Among other troubling aspects, the NAACP lawsuit is anti-Asian. I would welcome more diversity in the Stuyvesant student body, but only if each student's SHSAT score qualifies him or her for one of the limited seats at Stuyvesant. However, the NAACP intends to take from Asian students the seats they would earn on the SHSAT and give those seats to unqualified students according to a predetermined ethnic division. The NAACP tries to disguise its anti-Asian goal with the straw-man argument that rich white families are gaming the system with exclusive, expensive test prep courses that box out hopelessly disadvantaged minorities, when in fact, the typical Stuyvesant student is not a scion of white privilege, but rather from a lower-income immigrant Asian family without the benefit of wealth, white privilege, or affirmative action. Asian success at Stuyvesant belies the NAACP's vision of minority helplessness. To marginalize Asians, the NAACP complaint resorts to the rhetorical trick of grouping together "whites or Asian Americans".

The test prep factor is overrated, too. See here. Asian families scrimp, scrape, and save to pay for test prep, a course of action that is equally available to black and Latino families. As well, low-cost and no-cost test prep are widely available, much of it targeted at black and Latino students. Stuyvesant alumni are actively involved in those efforts. In my experience, taking a test prep course isn't needed to qualify for Stuyvesant anyway; I prepared for the SHSAT with a book I borrowed from my local library.

Given the harmful impact on Asian children should the NAACP lawsuit succeed and in light of the racist mentality driving the lawsuit, eg, "We're saying something wrong if we're saying New York City's brightest students are almost all Chinese or Korean", I am surprised and dismayed that several Asian advocacy groups have endorsed the NAACP complaint. Any advocacy group or politician that supports the NAACP is acting in direct contravention of the interests of Asian families.

For Asian families, Stuyvesant represents the hope that America is a level playing field where success is earned with discipline, ambition, and self-improvement. The NAACP lawsuit undermines that hope and threatens Asian students with a different kind of America.

Eric