Nothing says, “I have my finger on the pulse of New Yorkers and their priorities” quite like NYC mayor Bill de Blasio’s “BREAKING” news tweet—yes, in all caps—that his nanny state meddling regarding the news his predecessor’s ban on styrofoam is back on.
Hide your takeout containers and coffee cups — New York’s ban on styrofoam has been resurrected.In a brief and detail-light tweet late Friday evening, Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that a judge had upheld the ban on single-use styrofoam products championed by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.Judging by the excessive enthusiasm of its punctuation, the mayor’s office is excited [see above].. . . . The styrofoam ban was originally passed by the City Council and signed by Bloomberg in December 2013. The bill was set to take effect in January 2016, but a group of advocates who claim that polystyrene is recyclable — they even arranged a pilot program — succeeded in getting a judge to overturn it in September 2015.
To be fair, de Blasio is probably not that thrilled with the resurrection of Bloomberg’s styrofoam ban; he’s trying desperately to deflect attention from his SJW insistence that elite NYC schools become more “diversified” to reflect the diversity of New York City.
The problem: to fulfill this goal, NYC schools will have to discriminate against Asian-Americans to meet his race-based standards.
A new plan to change the way students are admitted to New York’s elite public high schools is infuriating members of some Asian communities who feel they will be pushed aside in the drive to admit more than a handful of black and Latino students.
But in a series of forceful statements on Tuesday, Richard A. Carranza, the schools chancellor, offered a blunt rebuttal to their claims. “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,” he said on Fox 5 New York.
. . . . The schools, which admit students based on a single test, look starkly different from the school system overall. While black and Hispanic students represent nearly 70 percent of public school students, they make up just 10 percent of students at the specialized high schools, a vast underrepresentation that has long been considered an injustice and a symbol of the city’s extreme school segregation.
Asian students, on the other hand, are overrepresented at the schools. While just 16 percent of public school students are Asian, they make up 62 percent of students at the specialized schools. White students also make up a disproportionate share of the students, though by a much smaller margin. They are 15 percent of the system overall and 24 percent of students at specialized schools.
Mayor Bill de Blasio offered a two-pronged plan on Saturday to address this, first by setting aside 20 percent of the seats at each of the specialized schools for students from high-poverty schools — which tend to have a high share of black and Hispanic students — who score just below the cutoff score.
But his administration’s ultimate goal, he said, is to eliminate the test entirely. In its place, top students would be chosen from every middle school in the city, a determination that would take into account their class rank and scores on statewide standardized tests. This move would require state action, because a state law dictates how specialized schools admit their students. The original law names just three schools, but the city has since created five more.
For the progressive left, it’s not enough to dumb down public education standards. They want every school, public and private, to ignore academic ability and success in favor of “fair” treatment of minorities. The problem is that “fair” in their worldview translates to completely unfair by any measure, including pedagogical and logic-based standards.
New York City has some famous selective high schools, such as Stuyvesant and the Bronx Science, that determine admission solely by scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test. The result is a politically incorrect mix of students at these schools — not many blacks and Latinos, some whites, and lots and lots of Asian Americans — and this makes Mayor Bill de Blasio sad. He wants, in particular, more black and Latino kids at these schools, and of course this means fewer of the others, particularly Asian Americans. And so he wants to get rid of that darn test.Now, no selection system is perfect, and one can certainly argue that in theory it would be good to take other factors into account besides a student’s score on just one test, grades being the most obvious example.
Rather than addressing the core issue of minority student preparedness, the progressive answer is always to level the playing field to the lowest common denominator. Their reasoning is implicit: these racial minorities cannot possibly achieve success on their own; we have to enforce “a fair and even playing field” to make up for their overwhelming inadequacies.
As a result of this (implicitly racist) thinking, the progressive line is always: Let’s not waste time and resources lifting up minorities in academic preparedness, let’s instead eliminate standards that require any standard of academic preparedness in favor of “racial equality.”
As noted by Pat Buchanan, this translates to: “we must have more Hispanic and black students, and if that means throwing out the entrance exam to cut the numbers of Asians and whites, throw out the exam.”
The problem, of course, is that there is no “racial equality” involved; instead, this is a system of race-based admissions that negatively affects not only standards of education but other racial minorities (in this case, Asian-Americans).
No wonder de Blasio is trumpeting his styrofoam ban “win” instead of facing the barrage of criticism against his attempts to undermine Asian-American students in favor of his “preferred” races.
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