Scrapping Entry Exams: A Lousy Plan for City Kids
THE ISSUE: Mayor de Blasio’s proposal to eliminate the admissions test for the city’s elite high schools.
Mayor de Blasio should leave the admission process alone. The test has been successful in selecting the most gifted students in our city for decades (“Blas’ School Shuffle,” Editorial, June 4).
Attention should be given to improve instruction at the middle-school level for all students.
There should be free prep programs in every middle school to allow top students to further hone the skills necessary to pass the test and gain admission.
If the admissions process is changed, these schools will become just like any other city high school and will no longer be the jewels of the system they are today.
Shelley Radbel
Bayside
Ironically, the “roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence” is de Blasio himself.
Charter schools have proven their worth. Rather than providing real educational opportunities, he prefers to lower standards and quota minorities into elite high schools to appear diverse.
Progressives would rather look or feel good than be good. Do they have any idea how good it feels to know your stuff and earn your seat? Don’t rob minority students of that opportunity.
Deirdre Harvey
Valley Stream
As a 25-year Stuyvesant High School mathematics teacher, I know that the primary reason for the great success of the school is the uniformly high ability and work ethic of its students, which is guaranteed by the admissions test.
If classes consisted of a mixture of lower-and -higher-performing students, it would do a dis- service to both groups.
If teachers taught at the same level, lower performers, the ones the mayor is seeking to help, would be left behind. If they taught at a lower level, the higher performers would suffer.
Bruce Winokur
Manhattan
The mayor just doesn’t get it. This country is built on achievement, not rigging the system.
We should be focusing on how to improve the number of minorities eligible for the elite schools through performance, not with quotas. Quotas don’t make people smarter.
Larry Hootnick
Manhattan
The elite high schools will soon join the rest of city schools in becoming failure academies.
Hard work and strong families are not valued in the progressive mind.
Robert DeCandia
New Hyde Park
I graduated from Brooklyn Technical HS many years ago. I walked in off the street, took the test and passed.
My class at BTHS was very diverse by the standards of that era — we had white students of every immigrant ethnicity, and black, Latino and Asian students.
The schoolwork was hugely demanding and most of us had no social life, due to the amount of homework we were assigned. But we all helped each other and graduated together. We had a few things in common: a desire to learn, a deep love of math and science and an outstanding ability in those subjects.
Eliminate the test and you eliminate the selectivity that makes these schools elite. Not everything can be managed by quotas, although our comrade mayor seems to think so.
Thomas Bonacuso
Brooklyn
Once again, de Blasio shows how totally clueless he is. You are not helping black and Latino children by lowering the bar and scrapping admission testing.
If the mayor was not owned by the teachers unions, he would demand teacher accountability for the success of their students. Failure is endemic to New York’s public-school system. Only through reforms can these children be saved.
Joe Alloy
Wayne, NJ
The gross under representation of black and Hispanic students in the elite high schools is the direct result of Mayor de Blasio’s utter failure to provide equal opportunity for success for all students, regardless of race or culture, from the time they enter school.
Shame on de Blasio for trying to use the entrance test as the scapegoat to cover up his dismal lack of leadership.
Melvin Band
New Hope, Pa.