Blaz’s plan stinks!
Don’t scrap HS admission tests: perfume big
Billionaire mascara mogul Ron Lauder is backing a campaign to keep admission testing for New York’s elite public schools — and may butt heads with Mayor de Blasio over his controversial proposal to scrap the racially charged tests.
The cosmetics king and ex-Time Warner boss Rich- ard Parsons are supporting a new group that wants to prevent any changes in the admissions tests, which critics blame for effectively locking black and Latino students out of specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.
The Education Equity Campaign is touting an effort to keep the tests while opening new selective schools across the city and expanding middle - school gifted and tal- ented programs to allow more access to underrepresented black and Latino students.
“We could once again make our city’s education system second to none,” Lauder (above right), a Bronx Science grad, wrote in a “Your Friend, Ronald” letter to deep-pocketed pals.
Lauder’s foundation has been involved in education efforts to help Russian and Eastern European Jews, a demographic that along with Asian students is overrepresented under the current admission system.
The new campaign aims to put a civil rights spin on the effort to block the bid by de Blasio (above left) to scrap the controversial admission tests.
“I’m ready to fight like hell for greater diversity at these schools,” said Kirsten John Foy, a former official with the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. “But Mayor de Blasio’s plan is nothing more than a politically expedient shortcut that would do nothing to repair the core inequities in our city’s public education system.”
The mayor has branded the tests as a way of perpetuating segregation in New York’s sprawling public school system. Just seven of 895 students to win admission to Stuyvesant this year are black.
He hit back at the new group as a front for powerful interests seeking to maintain an unfair status quo.
“Our best high schools do not represent the diversity that makes our city great,” Olivia Lapeyrolerie, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said. “We will not let a few millionaires deter us from reforming this flawed admissions system.”