Blacks Hispanics Dip At Top Ny High Schools - Road to the Middle Class

ABOUT TEN YEARS ago New York City set up a special program to help boost enrollment of black and Hispanics at their three top high schools. You can only get into them by passing an academic test; no racial quotas allowed. So the program provided special tutoring for blacks and Hispanics.

Trouble is that the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics at the three top high schools has been going down in spite of the special tutoring program. What’s the problem, asks reporter Elissa Gootman in The New York Times? Robert Jackson knows. He’s “chairman of the City Council education committee.”

“The statistics clearly show that black New Yorkers are being shut out... Is it institutional racism or is it something else?”

Oh no! Not institutional racism rearing its ugly head! And in New York City too, where evil white conservative institutional racists and bigots are pretty thin on the ground! How could it happen?

Actually, if you look at the graph of enrollment at the three top New York City high schools, you can see what is happening. The real story has nothing to do with black and Hispanic students.

The real story is that enrollment of Asian students is soaring and the enrollment of white students is plummeting.

Of course, that is a story of no interest to the race baiters of New York City and the earnest liberal journalists at The New York Times. But Gootman puts her finger on the real problem for the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics.

Now parents, educators and academics explain the racial makeup of the schools by pointing to a variety of factors, including... the hiring of private tutors by the middle class and continued use of the admissions test alone.

Well. We’d better put a stop to that, for sure. Imagine, overprivileged middle-class parents are going out without permission and spending their own money on private tutors. There’s institutional racism for you. Or is it cultural racism?

Here’s an idea to deal with this problem. New York City should have a program to regulate the price charged by private tutors. Otherwise the rich and the middle class will skim off all the good tutors and the underserved communities will be marginalized and continue to be shut out of the good schools.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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