A parent slap for DOE plan

Diversity bid jeered

Department of Education personnel visited one of the city’s top academic districts to sell their plan to change specialized highschool admissions — but an irate crowd of mostly Asian-American parents would have none of it.

Two DOE staffers tasked with presenting the proposal — aimed at boosting black and Hispanic enrollment — were repeatedly jeered at the raucous meeting of Community Education Council 20, a parental advisory group, Wednesday night in Brooklyn.

District 20, which includes Dyker Heights, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst and parts of Sunset Park, sends a high proportion of its students to the city’s eight elite high schools under the current single-test admissions system.

Holding signs and chanting, the crowd accused the DOE of discrimination and said Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza were more vested in political than educational outcomes.

“Instead of fixing the broken schools, they want to break the ones that are working,” a man shouted during the DOE presentation at IS 201 in Dyker Heights. “We want education, not politics.”

Kenneth Chiu, head of the New York City Asian-American Democratic Club, said officials were groping for quick fixes to racial achievement gaps.

“They want fast results. Have a press conference, shove them in and say they did it,” he said. “But they don’t talk about whose ex- pense it comes at.”

The plan’s backers argue that systemic change is needed to address the grimly low percentage of black and Hispanic enrollees at the city’s top schools.

The DOE wants to replace the current single-test format with multiple measures of assessment.

It also wants to reserve a percentage of seats at the high schools for top-tier students at all city middle schools. Currently, a relatively small number of middle schools provide a high percentage of elite high-school enrollment.

The single-test system, de Blasio and Carranza say, is a narrow measure of potential and bars certain groups of students from attending the schools.

But District 20 parents said the current system rewards effort, and they pushed back on claims that the elite schools were preserves of privilege, arguing that the campuses enroll many children of low-income immigrants.

“For us, this is our dream,” speaker Nancy Tong said. “Don’t punish those who study hard.”

The DOE has noted New York is the only major city where elite public high schools admit students on the basis of only one test.

But another speaker said that was a plus.

“We teach to be leaders, not followers. You want to be like other cities, you want to follow other cities?” she asked the crowd. “No! You want New York City to be at the top!”

The education council passed a resolution urging state lawmakers to oppose the DOE’s proposal.