In a Twist, Low Scores Would Earn Admission to Select Schools

Wouldn't putting mediocre athletes on the varsity teams, with scholarships, be a good idea too? Maybe even on the professional teams? After all, they'd likely improve their play if they were permitted to run with the best. Or is it foolish to think that everyone is not equally talented, and will not be a star, and so reserve those perks for the truly gifted? Isn't it the same in academia?

Honestly this seems like a horrible idea. Gifted students need to be challenged and go at an accelerated pace otherwise you run into the danger of them becoming bored and frustrated which leads to disengagement and a growing dislike of school. This happened to me. In second grade I and another student zipped into third and fourth grade math due to us having math cards with concepts and problems far above our grade level if you pushed to the last 25% of them. With some teacher help here and there it was awesome. Next year entrance to gifted program began. The next year the program was killed and we all found ourselves being "taught" materials in all subjects we had finished by half way through the previous year. Boredom ground enthusiasm out of me along with the frustration. I wound up disengaging from school at that point and never recovered until university. Better to have schools for the lowest testing students. One with smaller classes, teacher, and then two assistants. They need hands on care and teaching to improve them. That would be a good investment and not destroy the gifted schools. Also some students don't learn well in the normal teaching methods. They may be very sharp but they excel only with putting their hands on things, applying what they learning in projects. We all have our own best ways of learning; it's time we acknowledge this fact. I have friends who were horrible in school but they are incredibly bright. They just don't learn in the standard ways.

I was 12 when I first arrived in the U.S.. With my limited English I had to repeat 7th grade in order to settle in. The following year I took the admission test to Brooklyn Tech and was one of three students in my school who got accepted. Studying and learning is not like playing a team sport where you'll get better if teamed up with others who are more gifted. In a classroom environment you are on your own basically and getting a seat in a competitive setting will not make you any smarter. If anything, it may has the adverse effect of being embarrassed and shamed. This is a dumb idea, don't do it.

The 16-68-16 concept (16% good students, 16% bad students, 68% middling students) is not new in any sense. It has been around for 50 years give or take. It is a barely disguised, and inherently insulting, racial quota system. It was in force at Murrow High School when my daughter applied in 1998. These proposals are invitations to ruinously expensive reverse discrimination lawsuits which the city would lose. Instead of angrily and counterproductively focussing on the imagined problem caused by a lack of certain specific types of diversity, why don't the powers that be congratulate NYC for having a broadly racially diverse public school system with proportionally more white and Asian participation than most other urban school systems, perhaps the most of all. My daughter, having sailed into Murrow under its discriminatory and probably illegal 16-68-16 system, decided to go to Stuyvesant instead.

I hope the parents of the kids in these top schools protest, fight and win.

Does DeBlasio even care if the affirmative action kids flunk when they get to these schools, in addition to diluting the schools altogether? Or is he just doing it to claim a PR victory and votes on his quest to further his political career?

Let me tell you all something: ALL kids deserve a hand up and nothing gives a hand up more than your peer group. Your peer group is more indicative of your potential than, egads, test scores which really just test your ability to memorize, and your familiarity with the format. I was an immigrant. My parents knew nothing about anything when it came to education. I took the SATs because the guidance counselor told me to, but I knew nothing about it. The night before the SATs, my parents insisted I stay up all night and chaperoning my sister's 10th birthday party. I showed up, took a test I knew nothing about with no sleep. I likely had some learning disabilities and could have used extra time--an accommodation I would have known nothing about. My score remained my deep dark secret for decades. You know what though? Affirmative action worked and got me into a top state school where I thrived. I was always a go-getter and in the end, my grit and work ethic and my natural intelligence allowed me to have a thriving career where I rose quickly to upper management. I left work to be a mom and then did the whole PTA thing--in fact, rising to one the top district positions in a town full of Harvard grads. I wonder what they would think if I ever aired out my SAT scores? :-) I think this is great. We should not allow the accident of birth and circumstance taint a child's potential. Ever.

From some of the comments here, it seems that people believe not enough is being done in elementary schools to help low performing students. As a a 25 year veteran NYC elementary school teacher in a poor immigrant neighborhood, I can tell you that there isn’t anything that can be done that we’re not doing. So much money is spent on students who are low performing and not learning English as quickly as they should be, even though many were born here. Special education, teachers, ELL (ESL) teachers, Speech teachers, Reading teachers for the kids reading below level, Math teachers for the kids below level, after school and Saturday programs for low performing students are just some of what we provide. The one thing we can’t change are the parents no matter how hard we try to make them understand how important their child’s education is and what they need to do to help their child.Every single one of my high performing students had parents who made sure they did their homework, studied for tests, behaved and followed rules, and went to bed early. My students who were not successful did not have parents who did this.

As a high school teacher I understand the argument lower income and minority students need to see models of successful engagement, but this is a mistake. Throwing students into an environment in which they will not be set up to be successful will in my eyes lead to further disengagement, more work for already overworked teachers, more behavior problems, and lower quality classrooms for the kids that earned their spot with a high score. So much of a student's ability to be successful is already determined by the time they reach high school- do parents speak proper English? Were the children read to as toddlers? On summer vacation did the kids go to enriching summer programs or sit in front of the tv? Hate to break this news, but changing culture and attitudes surrounding education in poor communities are far more important than implementing this sort of band-aid policy.

I honestly believe that if you put academically unprepared students in classes where they are not prepared to succeed, much less exceed, you have created a worse situation. The real answer lies in addressing the issues low performing students face - more intervention, more assistance early on, etc. This answer may please a small group but will also frustrate the high performers and high achievers and drive them to seek other solutions, leaving everyone worse off.

These schools will no longer be elite. They will become mediocre or worse. This is not fair to the hard working kids in these top schools many whose parents are poor, but made the effort and sacrifice to pay for test prep classes because they value their child’s education.

Speaking from personal experience, it is extraordinarily hard to catch up to well-educated middle school peers after a substandard elementary school education. I entered 7th grade at a high-achieving middle school with a second-grade education (although I was reading at a 10th-grade level) due to a childhood full of moving around. For the first quarter of the year, I was flunking every single class, and my teachers assumed I had a serious learning disability--when in reality, I simply hadn't been exposed to the things my peers had learned back in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. I was lucky. With a lot of perseverance, tutoring, and one supportive teacher, I caught up by the end of the year. But it was so hard. And I'd grown up with highly educated parents who had exposed me to great books. I can't imagine what would have happened if I hadn't been a voracious reader, if I hadn't had the support of tutors or the understanding of the school. It will take a huge amount of support to keep these kids from flunking out, and I don't get the impression that the public schools in New York City have the resources to handle this. More teachers will be needed, access to tutors... And yes, even if these resources are allocated, the nature of the high-performing middle schools will change. The real solution here must be to improve elementary school education. If you don't have a solid grasp of math and reading by 4th grade, it's nearly impossible to catch up.

Despicable. NYC is codifying racism against Asian children, many of whom are poor and live in households where English is the second language.

Little Rock was desegregated in 1957. 61 years later, New York City has yet to integrate. You should be ashamed of yourselves!

Idiots delight! Forget about homework, free tutoring. Rest in comfort knowing that your new Chancellor has your back. So what if you take the space of someone more dilgent, who does homework, but alas cannot twerk like you. Carranza was just the same when he was a kid. And he got to go to a college of his choice: Southeastern Nova. Harvard, eat your heart out.

I'm starting to wonder if there is any common sense, much less educational expertise in the mayor's office or the DOE. Middle schools: would it not make more sense, if low-achieving and high-achieving are to be mixed, to do it with a district-wide plan that also revealed how these children are to be successfully taught? I don't see how the low-achieving children will benefit; will they not come away feeling worse about themselves? Then there's the SHSAT nonsense, while the DOE is ignoring the fact that the entire G&T admission system is based on a single test at the age of four, which is far more easily prepped than the SHSAT. Will this administration ever be able to step back from political expediency and put its focus on actual children?

It is a fact that each year there are students who achieved high test scores and were admitted to selective schools who nevertheless drop out because of the intense competition. How could low ranking students thrive and/or survive in such an atmosphere. Is anyone suggesting that the selective schools lower the curriculum standard to accommodate these students??

The current debate regarding the allocation of seats in what are considered to be the best middle and high schools in NYC, is an absolute recipe for disaster and looks at our current problem, too few seats and too little diversity, from the wrong direction. Excellent education does not have to be a limited commodity that is allocated by complex formulas. Instead of taking it away from some to give to others, the city should focus on expanding the number of high quality schools. Follow the Bloomberg model and add new school, such as HSMSE, Brooklyn Latin, Lehman, and take this debate off the table for good. Any solution that does not focus on that is a guarantee that the problem with persist. Creating new schools will take time, effort and money, but we know it can be done. Just walk into one of the schools mentioned above and you will witness for yourself. Education is not a zero sum game, but a rare opportunity to provide access to all. I urge Mayor the Blasio to take this opportunity and expand the system instead of shuffling the students around.

I'm considering the reactions to this alongside the Stuyvesant and Bronx Science proposals. I think it's a reasonable idea to suggest in the high school case, the solution is not quotas, but to fix the pipeline. Yet here we are, ostensibly with an idea to help address the pipeline, that is also getting rejected and pushed further "up the chain". So I'm left wondering when it would be okay to have these presumably equal and pipeline-fixing educational experiences. Elementary school? Pre-K? The womb? It's a thorny problem because people do want the best for their kids, and in our current educational system it is somewhat of a zero sum game. I don't think anyone comes to this with bad intentions. But I find positions that are not logically consistent to be troubling.

This sounds very much like a tired effort from the far left called affirmative action. Readers here love to tout Europe and parts of Asia as being superior to the US as they provide free college. But they fail, always, to recognize that college admission is based solely on academic merit. That is the way it should be. But, when I went to college I agreed with affirmative action. After all, blacks had been held back as they went to lousy K-12 schools and lived in poor areas of the city. I also thought this was to be temporary as the K-12 would improve for all. Fast forward decades and we are worse off today than then. It is highly unfair to the child, the school teachers, and the other students to take 25% of the seats and give them to low performing students. News flash - things move to the lowest common denominator. And to turn kids away that worked hard to get in just because they achieved their goals is utter nonsense. Will be the undoing of the US and it's competitiveness.

Were he alive, Orwell would fall into a deep depression that he didn't coin the term "academic diversity". Next on the wish list: "cognitive diversity", to ensure that professions like rocket scientist and brain surgeon reflect the population bell curve of cognitive skill.

So now low and middle class Asians are not the right kind of minority? Why does DeBlasio want to punish the children of immigrant restaurant workers for studying too hard? I'm Asian and a middle of the road Democrat, and this is how Democrats end up losing easy votes to Republicans. As a minority, who grew up in hick town with a bunch or racists in the 80/90's, I'm all for diversity, but too many people want to be 'special' based on solely on their identity instead of hustling and working harder.

Out of all those teachers, the Super couldn't come up with enough to open more seats and sections to include all academically qualified students, so the plan is to toss out those of the wrong color who need the slots academically and put them in gen ed? The Blue Eyed Experiment wasn't a part of the PhD studies for anyone who helped come up with that plan? Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Why are high performing students always the first to be discriminated against? There are so little opportunities for them to realize their potential without painfully waiting for the "teach to the middle" philosophy to catch up with them. DeBlasio's race to the bottom stinks on all accounts and is absolutely racist. I have taught the product of the city's elementary and high school system for over thirty years, and it needs to be fixed. Don't punish the ones who work the hardest for your political gain, DeBlaz.

I understand the drive for racial and socioeconomic diversity, but to purposely water down schools by adding students with very low test scores is beyond indefensible. This policy essentially rewards students for scoring very low, which goes against everything this country stands for. Let's take this a step further: if you're a student who normally scores 3s, you have a perverse incentive to purposely bomb the tests to score 1s so you have "priority" in getting into the school you want.

Education is a track and field event. Some kids have excellent muscle function and physical training. They can easily jump hurdles. Some have broken bones and weak muscles. So, the proposals being discussed today and yesterday, regarding the SHSAT and this plan, seek to lower the hurdles so everyone can jump them. Well, how about getting some medical help to those poor kids with broken bones, healing them and providing physical therapy,thus addressing the real problem? Would any medical professional simply tell you to walk slower or avoid jumping if you were hurt? What a terribly irresponsible approach the Board of Ed is taking

This decision admits that the key ingredient of good schooling is having smart classmates. Implied here is that the single most important resource in education is smart kids and not good teachers of strong funding. If I were a NYC parent with a high scoring, high achieving child, I would demand a tax break from the city for sending my kid, a resource and asset, to public schools. De Blasio *could* shuffle the best teachers by sending some of them from good schools to bad schools, but he seems to know it's not teachers who make a difference. It's smart kids. Smart kids are the key, scarce resource here. Not teachers. Not funding. Not computers. If I were a NYC parent of a smart kid whom I sent to public school, I would demand that the city remunerate me by setting up a college fund for my child as a way to pay me/us back for elevating the quality of the public school(s) my child attends. Legislation like this will hip the parents of smart kids to the fact that their smart children are the greatest educational resource in the city.

Many properly suggest that we need to fix grade and middle schools in impoverished areas so that these students can better compete with middle and upper middle class students. But the problem is that nobody knows how to improve these schools on a large and replicable basis. Aside from socio-economic factors, the most important factor in getting kids to learn is being motivated, if not at home, then by a teacher at school. And while some extraordinary teachers are able to connect with kids on a large scale and motivate them, the number of these teachers is necessarily very limited. So the two most important factors - socio-economic factors and motivators - cannot be replicated unless, in the former case, the poor single parent miraculously becomes a married middle class person and, in the latter case, we find tens of thousands of teachers that are truly superior motivators.

As a grandmother of two NYC public school students, I feel this is a very misguided idea. This will drive the middle class from the city, further stratifying the population into haves and have nots. In the past, public schools and public colleges in NYC have produced brilliant and prominent individuals in all professions and as business leaders. This is not the answer to educating today’s students. Better preparation at the pre-school and primary school level is what is needed, and comprehensive vocational training. Not every child is capable of high powered academic achievement. Working to accomodate the needs of all students is a better plan.

This is a great way to get middle class families to move out of NYC and to the suburbs. The reason G&T programs were set up in the first place (one of the reasons) was to ensure that middle class families stayed in NYC and that buoyed the rest of the school system. It also brought back the City from the brink of self-destruction. If you threaten kids' educations, those that can leave for guaranteed excellent education will leave.

They're not doing these kids any favors if they're going to get destroyed academically by the kids that got in by merit. They will also get destroyed in the real world because the real world is largely a meritocracy.

Put these kids in a prep year first. Give them the best possible chance to catch up academically and to prepare themselves mentally for the rigors of a higher-level of education. Otherwise, you are just setting these kids up to fail.

Here goes DeBlasio with another stupid idea. By accepting lower performing students he will, by definition, make these schools non-elite. They are based on a single exam where everyone has an equal chance to get in. It should remain that way. Some kind of ridiculous race quota doesn’t fix the education gap, it simply disguises it and shifts the blame. Start with the elementary schools, that’s how you fix the problem. He was the pre-k for all champion, it would make sense to go next to Kindergarten, not just skip all the way to high school. Fix the underlying problem not the result.

Perhaps DeBlasio should also start a new Airline company in New York. Call it AA airlines ( Affirmative Action Airlines) all employees from gate keepers, pilots, mechanics will be affirmative actions hires. Also require all city employees when they travel to only use Affirmative Action Airlines

Incredibly foolish. As stupid as the idea of eliminating exams for entry to Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. All kind of "progressive" posturing does is set up the kids chosen for failure. The real problems start at age 2-3 yrs with those factors that reduce linguistic and math skills relative to higher performing kids, whatever their racial and ethnic backgrounds. They are amplified by cultural factors that make education less of a priority for those with low socioeconomic status. The NYC public school system has failed utterly to devise a strategy to address these issues. Destroying the best middle schools and high schools will solve nothing, discriminate agains high performing kids, especially those of Asian descent and produce a new exodus from the public school system to private schools. The Mayor has done many arrogant foolish and destructive things but this is the worst.

This approach will set up students with low test scores and grades for failure, and will end up hurting, not helping, their self-image and confidence. Accepting students based on merit is a more reasonable approach with a higher likelihood of success. Consider putting more resources into schools with lower scoring students with lower GPAs, like teachers who have experience helping this group of students improve and acquire the necessary learning skills to succeed. Putting unprepared students into situations they can’t handle serves no one.

Classic liberal hypocrisy: fight discrimination with more discrimination. No idea why Asian Americans would ever vote Democrat.

Another stupid idea to make the NYC public schools a hotbed of mediocrity. The de Blasio ideal is to destroy all quality education, whether it is found in private schools, charter schools or public schools. The notion that adding poorly performing students to classes filled with highly motivated and high performing students without hurting the high performing students is just idiotic. The notion that Hispanic and black students are incapable of performing at high academic levels is racist and wrong. But ignoring the reasons why Hispanic and black students are not performing at high academic levels is political correctness at its worst. The unwillingness to address reality is leading de Blasio to try to destroy public school education in NYC. De Blasio would rather see all public school students fail than to see some, but not all, students succeed.

Is this really how we plan to prepare our children to survive in an increasingly competitive and connected world? Schools in China, India, France and many other countries have competitive admissions criteria where only the most prepared can proceed. These are the same persons who will then be competing with our children for access to colleges and places of work. How is it helpful to remove a race-blind standardized test to access SHS? Shouldn't the focus be on why lower and middle schools don't properly prepare certain students? How exactly creating a "favored" class of students who everyone will tag as unprepared favors anyone? Yes, they may get into the SHS and then? simply get Ds and move on? We're implementing policies that will result in a whole generation being left unable to compete with the rest of the world

"Amy Stuart Wells, a professor [of Education] at Teachers College at Columbia University, said that all students can achieve at a higher level if teachers are well-trained and use an approach targeted to each child’s level of achievement, among other things." It would be fun to grant Professor Wells admission to a graduate program in astrophysics at MIT and watch her "achieve" as her professors struggle to teach her physics alongside the other students who were admitted based on 800s on their Graduate Record Exams and Advanced Physics Achievement Tests.

How about enriching schools from the very beginning? For promising but disadvantaged children, how about: after school programs, weekend programs, vacation programs and summer programs, all designed to teach more stuff AND more skills, including sitting still, following a schedule, persistence, etc., which many children lack, particularly when the household is chaotic or lacking consistent adult presence? How about teaching study skills and academics so that these children will be able to compete with the other children whose parents for whatever reason are able to provide this structure without outside support? Let's level the playing field rather than setting children up for failure.

While it may not seem very progressive, the idea that you can get into one of the city's best high schools based on an essentially anonymous test, and nothing more (or less) is not only very democratic, but also a fairly good indicator as to how the kids will do in high school. 1) If kids of certain groups don't qualify, it shows that we need to improve early education and access to it. But admitting kids to high-powered competitive schools without the ability to handle the material would be a disaster. 2) Basically, If you go to a place like Bronx Science, a test may be the best way to decide whether you get in. A good deal of the curriculum is devoted to tests, and if you're not a good test-taker you're going to have a very difficult time there. We simply cannot fix systemic problems by treating the symptoms rather than the root causes. Make good education available to all, provide the atmosphere where kids can learn, and do it early on. That is the only way to address the problems mentioned in this article.

While the stated intent of this initiative is laudable, isn't the real question how to raise the overall standard at all the City's middle schools for the benefit of all students? I don't think that it's the intention, but it does smack of score-based gerrymandering to make the school system look more equal. Here is why: Shuffling low-performing students to, on average, high performing schools will lower the average scores of those schools. Conversely, removing some of those lowest-performing students from the on average lower performing schools will, statistically, improve the scores of those schools. Look, we achieve greater equality, and didn't have to spend another dollar! Now, if being in a better school indeed improves the learning of poorly performing students, it's all good. However, if this is mostly about making the school system look less unequal, it stinks.

"... mixed-ability classrooms can raise achievement especially for low-performing students...though some studies have also suggested that it can adversely affect high-achieving students." From personal experience it is very clear that it can "adversely affect high-achieving students". Unfortunately, I had the following experience, which distinguishes the effect of income and motivation: When I graduated from an excellent NYC public JHS, my grades on a statewide achievement test for Spanish was in the high 90s. The only time I went to a private school ( a big mistake), was for 3 years on scholarship in HS. Because Spanish was considered less difficult than French, the other students in the Spanish class tended to be the less-motivated students. Although I remained the same highly motivated student, because the class was pulled back by students who did not do their homework (remember, these were NOT economically deprived kids) over the 3 years of HS, my Spanish statewide achievement scores dropped to the mid-70s. Classmates in this, and other, classes (e.g. physics) often asked why I worked so hard, and indeed, discouraged me from doing so, telling me that I made them "look bad". I would be happy to help a fellow student who is motivated but struggling. However, mixing unmotivated low achieving students in with highly motivated students can hurt. NYC should support and treasure its many strivers and inspiring high achievers.

This plan also penalize high achieving black & Hispanic students. PS235, an black and hispanic feeder school- 11% of its student accepted to Brooklyn Tech in 2017 (http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2016-17/School_Quality_Snapshot_.... Under mayor proposal, the school is hard cap to send only their top 7% to SHS for the sake of diversity. The remaining students must face an random number generator for their hardwork in the second round. An totally backward step,

I'm AGAINST this proposal. I'm born and bred New Yorker. There is nothing racist about admission by exam. It's 100% meritocratic. It's 100% fair. New York's reputation will be sullied if lower-qualified students are admitted to the high-track schools. And that hurts all of us.

(1) all students can achieve at a higher level Uh no they can NOT. Some -if fact a very large percentage - simply do not have the intellectual capacity. You could spend 20 years trying to teach quadratic equations and integral calculus to a large portion of the US and they would NEVER get it. They do not have the intelligence to grasp it. (2) What a brilliant idea. Take selective schools that were created so the highly-able students could go on ahead of the average or lower performers and not be held back and turn them into the same-old-same-old. The class has to be taught to the lowest level and the highly-able are held back. Yes there is a correlation between poverty and academic ability. It is not -contrary to the do-gooders beliefs -solely the result of poverty. In the UK they studied the innate abilities of students and found that there is something that is correlated to poverty - the lack of intelligence. Dumb parents have dumb kids. The brain -like the rest of the body - is controlled by biology and inherited characteristics. All the 'diversity of ability' in a classroom is not going to turn a kid who is in the bottom 50% of the IQ scale (or whatever it is called today) into a 10 percenter.

Are the calculus and trig courses at Bronx Science going to be watered down for the unprepared students? Instead of lowering the standards for admission into special high schools, a better idea I think would be to RAISE the standards in grammar and middle schools.

I went to elementary school in a racially diverse, working class/poor neighborhood (because that's what we were). Many of my classmates received free or reduced-price lunches and by the end of first grade, most were receiving remedial reading or math instruction, if not both. I could read and do addition/subtraction when I started kindergarten. In 2nd grade, the teacher thought I was what was simply called "hyperactive" in the 70s. Nope, just bored. By 5th grade, I was in my own reading and math group and spent much of the school day putting up bulletin boards and helping a couple of recent immigrants (from Korea and Hungary) learn to speak English. I spent the 2nd half of 5th grade in 6th grade. Academically, it was great, but socially, it was a disaster ... one that still causes me struggles as an adult. I'm not sure I see the benefits for anyone in putting students who are not academically qualified to be in these schools in classes with students who are at the other end of the curve. Some won't be able to keep up, while others will be held back as teachers struggle to find a compromise. Inevitably, that compromise will suit relatively few students anyway. So who really will be helped by this?

I went to a middle, Mott, school that combined grades 7, 8, and 9 into two years. A student needed a minimum IQ of 135 to qualify for admission. While there I dissected a frog, a heart, observed life under a microscope, drew and typed my own blood, and went off to Science High well prepared. So, this is now OVER?

What a misguided plan! All this will do is drag down the academic quality and achievement of everyone else as the resources and teaching has to be adjusted to compensate for students who simply should not be in those classes. Diversity is good... but throwing out educational standards is not a sensible way to achieve it.

Efforts to achieve diversity in New York City Middle and High Schools are misplaced. The place to focus on diversity is in the elementary schools. Allowing under qualified students into elite High Schools and Middle Schools is simply going to widen the achievement gap as those students fall further and further behind. For example, there is no mention in this article, of the extra funding these schools will need to pay guidance counselors, social workers, and resource room teachers to give these troubled students the support they will need to thrive in more competitive environments. Desegregation itself is not the goal. There is little value in having a more diverse school if poor minority students are left at the fringes of their classrooms and schools. The goal is educational equality. The Mayor and Chancellor are not helping anybody by simply throwing kids together without the support they will need to succeed.

The meaning of this action would teach students and parents exact the wrong understanding of life. And what about those students who are striving hard and succeeding to earn the grades which normally would bring them into a stronger position for selection? And contrary to some of the implications here, this has nothing to do with race or money or history. It has only to do with choices and enormous sacrifice. Eventually, after all the talk and hype, that reality is what remains.

Better be careful. My roommate at Yale Law back in the 1960s went to Queens College, which was part of the City University of New York, and was highly selective (viz., you had to be smart to get in). It was one of the most prestigious public colleges in the U.S. I was told that the yearly tuition was about $50.00. The College had some of the most esteemed faculty members. The students for the most part, would have been in Ivy League schools, were it not for the fact that they were from New York, and the Ivys would only take so many students from New York. In the next decade, the city colleges embarked on what was called "open admissions." The educational quality fell through the basement, as the faculty began to focus on "remedial" education, since most of the students couldn't do math or reading at a high school level. A physician friend of mine recounted the story of his friend who was a classics professor at Queens College, who was tasked with teaching students how to read and write: he left. The dirty little secret to all of this is that not everyone belongs in a "select school" and not everyone belongs in college, despite what mouthpieces for the "business" of education will tell you. What's next? Medical school and law school for everyone?

This narrow policy debate is based on scarce resources. If the society - meaning the city, state, or federal governments - would commit to educating all citizens and members of the society, then this discussion would be about how, not about distribution of coveted seats. It's the same story from K through graduate school. Most individuals see this issue as, how can I get something good for my kid or for myself? We become atomized and compete with one another. We get into false arguments about merit and fairness. This fosters group hatred. How could it not? Those nations that, for whatever reason (because they're mono-ethnic, or wiser than us, or luckier in their leaders) invest in educating all of their residents will surpass us in the near future. In fact, we are in the same boat and refuse to realize it.

What a clever idea! Maybe we should extend this into politics, and elect incompetent fools to go with the brilliant leaders we've already got. But I expect the voters will do just the opposite....