In a very revealing New York Times article today, a multiracial boy graduating from Elena Kagan’s elite Hunter public high school said this in his graduation speech:
“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city,” he said, “then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights. And I refuse to accept that.”
The article describes the throes of guilt the school is dealing with because its admission test has created these statistics: “This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.” The Hunter admissions test, reports the article, “has remained essentially unchanged for decades” and was presumably taken by sixth-grader Elena Kagan to gain her own admission into Hunter.
Judson Hudson, age 18, refuses to accept the “demographics of intelligence” Hunter represents. If Judson is correct, what then is going on here? Surely there is something more to be done about this disparity than to use Hunter as a whipping boy on the front page of the New York Times.
The problem is not that Hunter is a great school. The real problem is that most primarily black and Hispanic New York City public schools are often just awful. Sixth-graders from awful schools score poorly on Hunter’s test.
How can the true demographics of intelligence of New York City be reflected in the level of educational achievement of the next generation of New York City youngsters? A powerful new tool is coming into prominence: individual access to online knowledge. There is today a seven-year-old in a Bedford-Stuyvesant project practicing her vocabulary outside of school, on her mobile. By taking schooling into her own hands, she has a real chance to sit one day on the United States Supreme Court.
That chance is virtually nonexistent for children whose only education is obtained in awful NYC public schools. Shoving a few kids from the projects into Hunter simply applies another bandaid to crumbling public [socialized] education and to our collective guilt.
