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The Upside-Down Results of Affirmative Action

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Admissions to New York City’s top public high schools are based on a single, highly competitive entrance exam. Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to relax those standards, reports William McGurn in the WSJ, because the mayor is mortified by the results.

For example, of the 895 openings for the freshman class at the NYC’s most selective high school – Stuyvesant High – only seven went to African-Americans.

The mayor is right that this is an appalling statistic. But it’s telling that he’s angry at the test and not at the city’s public schools, which he runs, for failing to provide black and Latino children with an education that would make them competitive.

Instead of insisting on fixing the public schools where children aren’t learning, or giving students access to charters or parochial schools where they would learn, Mr. de Blasio opts for the Felicity Huffman option: find a side door. That means replacing a merit-based entrance exam with a new formula that would ensure the desired racial outcome—even though it would mean admitting less-qualified students at the expense of more-qualified students, again mostly Asian-Americans.

Read more here.

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Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, driving her Porsche Boxter S through Vermont and Maine, and practicing yoga.