"Life isn't always fair. ... We're not here about equal results. We're here about equal opportunity. Look, an awful lot of kids were a lot smarter than me in school. That's just the way it was. There's nothing you can do about that."—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in response to a question about a complaint brought by the NAACP over admission rates to NYC's elite high schools.
Among the schools in the NAACP complaint is Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, where just 1% of students are black. The civil rights group says the exam discriminates against black and Latino students because they're denied admission "at rates far higher than other racial groups."Because life isn't fair, but standardized tests are.
Nearly 31% of white students and 35% of Asian students who take the exam get into one of the top schools. That's compared to 7% for Latinos and 5% for blacks.
In his defense of the admissions process, the billionaire mayor said he has no interest in seeing it change.
"These are the schools designed for the best and the brightest," he said.
"There's nothing subjective about this," Bloomberg added. "You pass the test, you get the highest score, you get into the school, no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background is. That's been the tradition in these schools since they were founded and it's going to continue to be."
Insert every single smart thing ever written about privilege and standardized tests, and every single smart thing ever written about reducing students to a fucking test score. All of the things. Ever.
[H/T to @djolder, via @angryblackwomen.]
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