Her math is correct, but what she fails to mention is that while Asian students make up only 15 percent of all students in New York, they are a whopping 74 percent of students at Stuyvesant, the school she references. She claims this is inequity and represents a racial wealth gap. But exactly what systems does she believe that New York City has in place that can explain the extraordinary achievements of Asian students? Are Asians getting better schools? More resources? In what way are Asians the beneficiaries of a racial wealth gap?
Don’t expect answers any time soon. This is a question Democrats and their allies in the news media have no answer for, and can barely even bring themselves to mention. The pebble in their shoe is that despite obvious racism that exists and has always existed towards Asian Americans, they succeed anyway, by almost every metric.
The biggest problem with Ocasio-Cortez and de Blasio’s position is not that it is unfair to high-achieving Asian students (it is), but that changing the admission process at elite high schools does absolutely nothing to solve the underlying problem. The real problem is that black and Latino kids are not currently achieving in ways we historically know they are capable of.
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