THE SEVEN PERCENT COLLUSION: The Times supports the mayor's plan!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2019

Gay doesn't want winners and losers: The New York City Public School face a very large problem.

So do our public schools all across the nation. That very large problem is defined by data like these—data you will never see in the New York Times:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
New York City Public Schools, 2017 Naep
White students: 290.71
Black students: 255.63
Hispanic students: 263.56
Asian-American students: 306.03

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Public schools nationwide, 2017 Naep
White students: 292.16
Black students: 259.60
Hispanic students: 268.49
Asian-American students: 309.52

According to a standard rule of thumb, those data define gigantic "achievement gaps." According to that rule of thumb, black kids are years behind their white and Asian-American peers, perhaps as five years behind by the time of eighth grade!

No one with an ounce of sense believes those giant achievement gaps are the product of "test prep" in any major sense. There is no test prep for the Naep. You'll never hear this is in the New York Times, but those brutally large gaps are real.

Across the nation as in Gotham, those giant achievement gaps are a major educational problem. They affect the lives and the interests of millions of good decent black kids. But you'll never read about the gaps in the New York Times, a famously upper-class, Hamptons-based newspaper whose denizens simply don't care.

At the New York Times, you're never asked to think about those embarrassing, very large gaps. At the Times, they only care about black kids who might end up going to Yale and proceed from there to elite cocktail parties in Manhattan's most swish salons.

The New York Times only cares about the talented two percent. For that reason, the paper dispatches people like Mara Gay to throw the vast majority of black kids under the bus.

Gay did just that on March 26 in an excruciating conversation with Slate's Mary Harris. That conversation ran 19 minutes. Brace yourselves, then click here.

Gay is concerned with helping a relative handful of black kids gain admission to Stuyvesant High, the most selective of New York City's eight high-powered "specialized high schools." She's concerned about black kids who might end up at Stuyvesant, and she seems to be concerned about nobody else.

She'll never describe the brutal data we've posted above—data which make it easy to understand why so few black and Hispanic kids gain admission to Stuyvesant High.

According to the rules of the game, you can't be told why so few black kids get admitted to Stuyvesant High. Indeed, the New York Times' Eliza Shapiro will even go on All Things Considered and say the problem has two causes—"test prep" and test "awareness." They'll even tell you that!

That said, it gets even worse. In the conversation at Slate, we were instantly told, by Harris, that "advocates like Mara say that, while segregation...used to look like Jim Crow in the South, it now looks like Stuyvesant."

You can't be told about the brutal data which define "the problem we all choose to ignore." Instead, you get your heartstrings tugged by a rank propagandist who keeps sliming Asian-American families while saying the current system is the modern face of "segregation."

(It's also said to be "unfair," in some way which never quite gets defined.)

Eventually. the following absurd exchange occurred between these twin propagandists. In this exchange, we're finally told about Mayor de Blasio's plan:

HARRIS (3/26/19): New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio, he's struggled to be direct about the city's schools. He even avoided calling them "segregated" until this latest admissions story popped up last week. But he has come up with a plan.

GAY: The one good thing he has done so far is put forth this plan, which we have endorsed at the board, the editorial board of the Times, to take the top seven percent highest achievers of every middle school and try and offer them admission to the city's specialized schools.

It's not perfect, but I think something drastic is required, and so that's a decent plan.

Imagine that! The mayor had been slow to say that he was running "segregated schools!" In fact, students from all major demographic groups do attend Stuyvesant High. It's just that, for the brutal reason Gay won't discuss, they gain admission to that school in vastly disproportionate numbers as compared to New York City's student population as a whole.

Gay won't tell you why that is; she and Harris just keep saying, "Segregation today, segregation forever!" But in that exchange, Gay does describe, and does endorse, this mayor's simple-minded plan. Let's look again at what she said:

GAY: The one good thing [the mayor] has done so far is put forth this plan, which we have endorsed at the board, the editorial board of the Times, to take the top seven percent highest achievers of every middle school and try and offer them admission to the city's specialized schools.

It's not perfect, but I think something drastic is required, and so that's a decent plan.

The mayor's plan "isn't perfect?" We'd call that the understatement of this, or any, year.

On the bright side, the mayor's simple-minded plan is easy to describe. He'd take the top seven percent from each of Gotham's middle schools and grant them admission to Stuyvesant or one of the other high-powered high schools.

It's isn't perfect, Gay vapidly says. But it's a decent plan.

Sadly, it pretty much isn't. Consider a few likely effects:

Some of Gotham's existing middle schools are high-powered academic schools which only offer admission to high-achieving students. Other middle schools in New York City are much, much lower-performing.

The mayor's plan would encourage ambitious black kids to stay in their lower-performing neighborhood middle schools, from which they'd be likely to emerge in the top seven percent.

In that way, de Blasio's "Seven Percent Solution" might tend to increase racial separation at the middle school level. It would encourage ambitious black kids to avoid challenging themselves in academically demanding schools on the middle school level.

It's also true that not all "top seven percents" are alike. For better or worse, the mayor's plan would almost surely lower the overall achievement level of the incoming classes at Stuyvesant High and the other specialized high schools.

For better or worse, this would likely affect the academic level on which these schools would operate in the future. Perhaps it's time to phase out such "elite, prestigious" schools altogether. But this is one likely effect of the major's simple-minded plan.

That said, there's one other major effect this simple-minded plan would have. On the individual level, the mayor's plan would have major winners and losers.

That's precisely what Mara Gay says she doesn't want! We know this, because that's what Gay told Harris:

GAY: I don't think this is an issue where there should be winners and losers. I think it's unfortunate, and it shows you what the need is in this city for great public education.

You know, I wish that we could just snap our fingers and expand and have more seats in these schools automatically. We can't do that, at least in the time being.

Mara Gay doesn't think there should be winners and losers here. We completely agree with that thought.

Tomorrow, we'll show you the basic reality concerning winners and losers with this horrible plan, as reported right in the New York Times.

We'll also touch on that second point—the possibility of "having more seats" at these high-powered high schools, so no one gets left out.

Gotham's mayor could always add seats at these high-powered schools. Instead, he supports total war, a war of the all against all.

He's proposed a simple-minded plan, a plan which is rich with winners and losers. Gay wishes we could just snap our fingers, but she says we can't.

That conversation between Harris and Gay is one of the god-awful conversations ever recorded. That said, what's going to happen to the vast majority of Gotham's black kids, the kids who are producing those horrible Naep scores?

Neither Harris nor Gay seems to care about questions like that. Upper-class elites have behaved this way for the past fifty years.

Tomorrow: Choosing which kids will "languish"