NYC Council progressives aim to hide public-school failure via outright racial discrimination
· New York PostCity Council progressives are aiming to block Asian-American kids from the city’s top public high schools — again pushing racist injustice in the name of racial justice.
Democrats Nantasha Williams (Queens) and Lincoln Restler (B’klyn) embrace the same “logic” that just drove monstrous state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa to make a New York diploma worthless: Eliminate anything that exposes public schools’ vast failure to educate black and Hispanic kids.
The council pair pretend to see a great wrong in the low numbers of such students who earn admission to Stuyvesant HS, Bronx Science and so on — but refuse to address the cause, namely the tragic shortfalls in K-8 schools that leave so few of these children prepared to excel on the race-blind Specialized High Schools Admissions Test.
So instead they want to kill the messenger, by imposing a racist admission scheme that simply excludes students from heavily Asian areas.
The duo wrote Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels urging more admissions to the eight elite high schools outside the SHSAT process, ideally killing the test altogether.
(They also call to expand enrollment by thousands of seats, though the state class-size law is on course to reduce enrollment at these schools unless the city can enlarge their buildings to create more classrooms.)
Their most immediate proposal centers on the students admitted via the summer Discovery prep program, a cohort that is now 62% Asian: They’d limit entrance to Discover to the city’s 15 lowest-income school districts — thereby cutting cutting out 90% of low-income Asian kids.
Citywide poverty rates for Asian-American students are as high or worse as for blacks and Latinos; Asians simply live in more economically diverse neighborhoods.
The honest name for the despicable Williams-Restler push would be the Asian Exclusion Act.
The odious “principle” here is “that racial diversity requires reducing opportunities for one minority group in order to increase opportunities for another,” thunders the Asian Wave Alliance.
AWA co-founder Yiatin Chu rightly ripped this “attack on merit masquerading as ‘diversity.’ ”
Felicia Thomas-Williams of the state Board of Regents inadvertently exposed the racism here by arguing for the state’s new no-standards graduation pathways: “You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees.”
Unless she’s just being cynically dishonest, the implication is that Thomas-Williams thinks we shouldn’t assess black and Hispanic kids on literacy or numeracy because she doesn’t believe they can become proficient in reading or math: That’s outright bigotry.
Nantasha Williams and Lincoln Restler are every bit as bigoted, or perhaps just equally dishonest.