Blaming the test is racist: Expand gifted programs, free tutoring

Of 777 students admitted to New York City's elite Stuyvesant High this year, three are black and 21 are Latino. Admission is based on a test. Period. Most of the high scorers come from Asian families, often immigrants with modest incomes and large ambitions.

Stuyvesant High students Photo: Christopher Lee/New York Times

Don't blame the test, writes John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguist, in a New York Times op-ed. Above all, don't argue that the analytical reasoning required by tests is "incompatible with Blackness."

Blacks make up 19 percent of public-school enrollment, he notes. Many argue that the standards must be unfair and that the Specialized High School Admissions Test should be dropped.

Black students often come from poor or working-class families and attend low-performing schools, McWhorter writes. But "poverty rates for Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers are not that different."

"The sons and daughters of Asian immigrants, even if undocumented," go to the same schools, but qualify for elite high schools "at far higher rates than even white students," he writes. Seventy-one percent of students are Asian; 19 percent of the city's public school students are Asian. (Whites are about 16 percent of enrollment, 17 to 20 percent of Stuyvesant students.)

McWhorter has several theories on why the number of black students at elite high schools has gone down since the 1970's and 80's.

Programs like Prep for Prep recruit promising minority students, provide "an after-school and weekend preparatory boot camp for 14 months" and get them scholarships to private high schools, he writes. In addition, private schools, boarding schools and parochial schools offer scholarships to increase the diversity of their privileged student bodies. Many of these student might otherwise be applying to Stuyvesant.

McWhorter also blames the antitracking movement of the '90s for placing denying achievers a chance to be taught in faster-paced classes. "Black families are often not aware that New York City has free programs helping students prepare for the test, such as the New York City public schools’ DREAM program."

Asian families are heavy users of tutoring and test prep. They see the city's selective public high schools as the best route to success.

Selective universities went test-optional or test-blind during the pandemic, and are now restoring SAT/ACT requirements, writes McWhorter. It turned out that testing is the most "effective way to identify less advantaged students who would likely excel in college."

Subjective criteria, such as essays, extracurriculars and recommendations, favor the advantaged (and/or the dishonest). The "service trip" to Guatemala scores more points than the after-school job at McDonald's to help your Guatemalan parents pay the rent.

What really annoys McWhorter, who is black, is the idea that "tests of abstract cognitive ability" are inherently unfair to blacks. That includes a black educator saying that blacks “are context-driven people” and that “there’s no such thing as thinking in isolation,” and a black professor telling him it's racist for academic journals and conferences to require more statistical analysis because “that’s not what we do.”

In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi opposes giving standardized tests and asks: “What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments? What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know?”

McWhorter adds that Glenn Singleton, a black diversity trainer, calls "scientific linear thinking" "a hallmark of whiteness."

To the professor, that sounds racist: "Black people are less intelligent than others and should settle for excellence in sports and entertainment but not academia."

Keep the test, and look for ways to improve black students' achievement, McWhorter concludes. "Expand, don’t shrink, the number of gifted and talented programs. Expand and strengthen free, city-run test prep and tutoring."

Kelsey Piper agrees that shooting the messenger doesn't make much sense.

Her grandmother, who'd arrived in New York City in 1939 as a three-year-old refugee from Austria, passed the test to get into Bronx Science, which led to Barnard and law school. The city’s competitive specialized high school system is "an engine of immigrant mobility and opportunity," writes Piper. "You just take a test and prove what you can do."

As mayor in 2018, Bill de Blasio "proposed replacing test-based admissions with admitting the top 7% of each middle school," Piper writes. "Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who himself attended Bronx Science, had entertained SHSAT abolition during his campaign for state Assembly, but this week he took a much smarter approach, calling for more work to ensure that all middle schoolers are well prepared for the SHSAT."