Reddit mentions of Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Congrats you are doing race.

You carry many assumptions into this it kind of hard to know where to start. First off that those who do not get in with the current tests are lazy. Bam labeled, stored, done. The issue is much much bigger than that. Not to mention the forever long stereotype of lazy blacks/Hispanics and the slacker white boy who has oh so much "potential". The next assumption that is inherent much through all of reddit is that the top smartest people are the ones entitled to the top public education. The divergence is how do you test smart? You can't standardize critical reasoning which is why the standards boards proposed interviews. Back in the USSR they had interviews with professors before you could get into college but after you passed the standardized test. Anything was fair game and for the most part you were given problems you could never solve. The idea was to have a professor look and see at HOW you struggle, see where your brain moves and how fast it gets there as a predictor of possible success. Which yet again brings us to standardized tests that everyone loves to rally against. For the most part the test only measures how well you prepared for the test and in that it is valuable. It shows a student's commitment or ability for rote memorization. Given that k-12 education is nothing but an ever increasing staircase of rote memorization it would certainly seem that a test like that would be apropos. Yet again the issues with both interviews and standard tests lay in who is interpreting them and what they are looking for. Much like colleges it would seem from this article that those high schools that did interviews looked for intangibles that are quite frankly human resources level of bullshit.

Another interesting implication that could be made is that hard work IS merit. That if you work hard enough you deserve to be in these schools. That really ends up being a value call and to be honest when drawing upon such a large student body as that of NYC I would say it really shouldn't be. Hard work as merit is a last resort. Work you can teach, you can force it on the students if they actually want to be there. Merit as a test is something that sits perfectly well in Eastern cultures since the times of bureaucracy exams. Chinese immigrants grew up in a society that has favored exams as a tool for social mobility for longer than America has existed so when asked to take an exam for social mobility do you not think that it in some way favors them? Shit Chinese public school are even more competitive with even more rigorous exams and let's not even get started on the rigors of the Japanese college entrance exams.

This is what I feel you and the writer and a lot of people are missing in your definition of bias and something the city is trying to bring up. First off that everything is biased but that entrance exams are also very skewed not necessarily towards wealth but to certain cultures. In first generation immigrants like those described in this article I feel that this exam taking culture could still be very well alive depending on country of origin because honestly you can't just say Asian...it doesn't work at all to describe the multitude of different countries. Filipino and Vietnamese people are almost nothing like the Chinese in their culture and ways but yet you can throw them into one group and say they're good at ____.