Diversity over Merit in New York Public Schools

It’s diversity in action. The New York Public School system has chosen to put diversity into action. In assigning children to high school, they chose diversity over merit. This meant that some high performing students were rejected for the best high schools and were assigned to the worst high schools. And some underperforming children were placed in the best high schools.

The New York Post has the story:

Top performing Manhattan middle schoolers were assigned to struggling high schools next year due to controversial admissions changes aimed at increasing diversity — and now some angry parents are scrambling for the exits.

“My kid did everything she was supposed to do,” said Herbert Bauernebel, whose District 2 child didn’t get into any of the 10 campuses she applied to despite a 97 percent average. “She worked really hard. We’re dumbfounded.”

Bauernebel said roughly 20 families at IS 276 in Battery Park City didn’t get into any of their listed schools and were instead defaulted into troubled Murray Bergtraum HS, which has long grappled with shrinking enrollment and low academic metrics.

Scrambling for the exits. Note well that phrase. Parents are not going to allow their children’s education to be sacrificed to the gods of diversity. In truth, they are doing what parents across the country have been doing for decades now. They have been seeking alternatives.

Parents at District 2’s Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies reported a similar uproar.

“People are desperate at this point,” a mom said. “Some are planning to move, some are going private if they can afford it, some are sending their kids to live with grandparents.”

And, of course, many of the best high schools will be dumbed down by including large numbers of children who underperform:

Other top District 2 high schools — including Eleanor Roosevelt HS, Baruch HS, Lab HS and Millennium HS — recently overhauled their admissions criteria.

They now each reserve at least 50 percent of seats for low-income applicants and incorporated lotteries into their admissions format.

Administrators argued that the moves would help to increase diversity at the schools that have long skewed white and Asian.

Whereas raw academic ranking was once the prime determinant of entry, standards have grown far more elastic.

It’s really about punishing overachieving children. The result will be an exodus of such children the New York public school system.