jtrent238 test blog: Race/Related: How It Feels to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School

January 29, 2022

Tausifa Haque, a 17-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, goes to Brooklyn Tech. "This is my great chance," she said. "It's my way out."Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

The Debate Over an Entrance Exam

By Michael Powell

Domestic Correspondent, National

Tausifa Haque, a 17-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, walks in the early morning from her family's apartment in the Bronx to the elevated subway and rides south to Brooklyn, a journey of one and a half hours.

There she joins a river of teenagers who pour into Brooklyn Technical High School — Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian, Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American. The cavernous eight-story building holds about 5,850 students, one of the largest and most academically rigorous high schools in the United States.

Her father drives a cab; her mother is a lunchroom attendant. This school is a repository of her dreams and theirs. "This is my great chance," Tausifa said. "It's my way out."

Brooklyn Tech is also subject to persistent criticism and demands for far-reaching reform, along with other test-screened public high schools across the nation.

Liberal politicians, school leaders and organizers argue such schools are bastions of elitism and, because of low enrollment of Black and Latino students, functionally racist and segregated. Sixty-three percent of the city's public school students are Black and Latino yet they account for just 15 percent of Brooklyn Tech's population.

For Asian students, the percentages are flipped: They make up 61 percent of Brooklyn Tech, although they account for 18 percent of the public school population.

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Some critics imply that the presence of so many South and East Asian students, along with the white students, accentuates this injustice. Such charges reached a heated pitch a few years ago when a prominent white liberal council member said such schools were overdue for "a racial reckoning."

Richard Carranza, who served as New York's schools chancellor until last year, was more caustic. "I just don't buy into the narrative," he said, "that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools."

But several dozen in-depth interviews with Asian and Black students at Brooklyn Tech paint a more complicated portrait and often defy the political characterizations put forth in New York and across the country. These students speak of personal journeys and struggles at a far remove from the assumptions that dominate the raging battles over the future of their schools.

Brooklyn Tech, like other test-screened public high schools across the country, is subject to persistent criticism and demands for far-reaching reform.Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

Their critiques often proved searching; most Asian students spoke of wanting more Black and Latino classmates.

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Fully 63 percent of Brooklyn Tech's students are classified as economically disadvantaged. Census data shows that Asians have the lowest median income in the city and that a majority speak a language other than English at home.

The admissions debate reaches far beyond New York's selective high schools.

The San Francisco Board of Education has discarded a merit-based admissions policy and substituted a lottery at the highly regarded Lowell High School, where 55 percent of students were of Asian descent. "When we talk about merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing," a board member opined, "those are racist systems."

Officials in Fairfax County, Va., replaced the entrance exam at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology with a combination of grades and socioeconomic criteria. The next year the percentage of incoming Black and Latino students jumped and the percentage of Asian students, who skew more middle and upper middle class than in New York, declined. White student enrollment increased.

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When Asian parents sued, a federal judge told their lawyer, "Everybody knows the policy is not race-neutral and that it's designed to affect the racial composition."

That case is awaiting a decision.

Like these other institutions, Brooklyn Tech, which sits in the haute brownstone neighborhood of Fort Greene, is regarded as a diamond in the city's educational crown, along with the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School.

The school boasts many advantages, as most students are well aware. Nearly all balked, however, at describing it as segregated, not least because the descriptor "Asian" encompasses disparate ethnicities, cultures, languages and skin colors.

Tausifa looks at the multihued sea of students pouring through the doors of Tech. She expressed puzzlement that a school where three-quarters of the students are nonwhite could be described as segregated. "I have classes with students of all demographics and skin colors, and friends who speak different languages," she said. "To call this segregation does not make sense."

To which Salma Mohamed, a child of immigrants from Alexandria, Egypt, and a graduate of Brooklyn Tech, added: "It's very interesting to me that the word segregated is used in a school that is predominantly Asian. It connotes white and class privilege. That's not us."

Read the rest of the story here.

Lucy Jones

The Trojan Horse Affair

In 2014, a mysterious letter appeared on a city councillor's desk in Birmingham, England, laying out an elaborate plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the city's schools. The plot had a code name: Operation Trojan Horse.

National panic ensued, and by the time it abated, the government had launched several investigations, beefed up the country's counterterrorism policy, revamped schools and banned people from education for the rest of their lives.

To Hamza Syed, a journalism student who was watching the scandal unfold in his city, the whole thing seemed … off.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times comes The Trojan Horse Affair: a mystery in eight parts — with all episodes launching on Thursday, Feb. 3.

Listen to the trailer.

Toni Morrison's Only Short Story Addresses Race by Avoiding Race

"Recitatif," originally published in 1983 and now available in book form, features a Black girl and a white girl, but Morrison never identifies which is which.

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times

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