This is a great explainer on why leftist agita over Yang is unfounded and exactly the sort of Barkanalysis I come to you for, but there's one (admittedly minor) part of this piece that is frustratingly off-the-mark, and that's the bit about the SHSAT and school segregation. Yeah, the kids at Stuy are disproportionately Asian. They're also mostly first-gen and immigrant kids, mostly living in or perilously close to living in poverty, for whom the SHSAT schools represent one of their few avenues to the middle class. Sort of like CUNY in that regard, except for whatever reason the left loves loves *loves* CUNY and hates hates *hates* the SHSAT schools. (No shade on my alma mater, but CUNY is way less integrated than its rep would suggest.)
Do I think that your solution to school segregation - eliminating private and private-ish schools in NYC altogether - is a good one? Hell yes I do. Will it happen? Hell no it won't, as you say. But then you just sort of move on to a different topic, rather than spell out just *why* there's such opposition to rezoning Flatbush so that the black kids and the white kids attend the same public schools. I want to say something snarky here like "hint hint, it rhymes with 'schmasidim'" (and to be clear, I think it's pretty dishonest for pols talk about desegregating NYC schools and then ignore lily-white yeshivas) but this is one of the few places where Lubavitchers and UWS yuppies and even the Maya Wileys of the world can find common ground. Ask me to bus my children, I hope they take down your name; love me, I'm a liberal, etc etc.
So TL;DR, it'd be cool if you just called SHSAT abolition what it is - a way for lefties to give school desegregation lip service without alienating any of the voters whose lifestyles actual school desegregation would "threaten." (Threaten in scare quotes because, yes, duh, there is no real "threat," integrated schools perform better in XYZ ways, yadda yadda yadda. You know what I mean here.)
I like your comment Quiara, I agree with you about the SHSAT - I just feel like at this point it's taking too much air up in the desegregation debate for a small minority of schools that are basically the symbol for Asian working-class dreams as you say. And yeah CUNY is a mix, overall it is very diverse but has a couple schools that have a very low percentage White & Asian, meanwhile the program I'm in Macaulay Honors College is basically CUNY's SHSAT equivalent (mostly White & Asian first-gen immigrants).
How exactly did we go from deBlasio who came in largely on antiBloomberg/stop and frisk sentiment to two leading candidates who embody different aspects of that period?
This is a great explainer on why leftist agita over Yang is unfounded and exactly the sort of Barkanalysis I come to you for, but there's one (admittedly minor) part of this piece that is frustratingly off-the-mark, and that's the bit about the SHSAT and school segregation. Yeah, the kids at Stuy are disproportionately Asian. They're also mostly first-gen and immigrant kids, mostly living in or perilously close to living in poverty, for whom the SHSAT schools represent one of their few avenues to the middle class. Sort of like CUNY in that regard, except for whatever reason the left loves loves *loves* CUNY and hates hates *hates* the SHSAT schools. (No shade on my alma mater, but CUNY is way less integrated than its rep would suggest.)
Do I think that your solution to school segregation - eliminating private and private-ish schools in NYC altogether - is a good one? Hell yes I do. Will it happen? Hell no it won't, as you say. But then you just sort of move on to a different topic, rather than spell out just *why* there's such opposition to rezoning Flatbush so that the black kids and the white kids attend the same public schools. I want to say something snarky here like "hint hint, it rhymes with 'schmasidim'" (and to be clear, I think it's pretty dishonest for pols talk about desegregating NYC schools and then ignore lily-white yeshivas) but this is one of the few places where Lubavitchers and UWS yuppies and even the Maya Wileys of the world can find common ground. Ask me to bus my children, I hope they take down your name; love me, I'm a liberal, etc etc.
So TL;DR, it'd be cool if you just called SHSAT abolition what it is - a way for lefties to give school desegregation lip service without alienating any of the voters whose lifestyles actual school desegregation would "threaten." (Threaten in scare quotes because, yes, duh, there is no real "threat," integrated schools perform better in XYZ ways, yadda yadda yadda. You know what I mean here.)
I like your comment Quiara, I agree with you about the SHSAT - I just feel like at this point it's taking too much air up in the desegregation debate for a small minority of schools that are basically the symbol for Asian working-class dreams as you say. And yeah CUNY is a mix, overall it is very diverse but has a couple schools that have a very low percentage White & Asian, meanwhile the program I'm in Macaulay Honors College is basically CUNY's SHSAT equivalent (mostly White & Asian first-gen immigrants).
How exactly did we go from deBlasio who came in largely on antiBloomberg/stop and frisk sentiment to two leading candidates who embody different aspects of that period?