A new report highlights New York City mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio's effort to reduce the number of Asians in the city's top schools.
De Blasio and Democrats in the state legislature are waging a "progressive war" on the city's best schools, which are "now dominated by Asian-American students from largely poor and working-class immigrant backgrounds," according to
City-Journal.Democratic state legislators are working to get rid of the law mandating a competitive exam as the only criterion for admission to the schools, while de Blasio is expanding a remedial-admissions program for disadvantaged students which is the one alternative to the test requirement. De Blasio and his schools chancellor Richard Carranza are "manipulating the admissions criteria so that many poor Asian kids no longer qualify."
De Blasio wants to phase out the test requirement over three years and replace it with "guaranteed admission for students in the top 5 percent to 7 percent of their eighth-grade classes (provided they were also in the top quarter of eighth-grade students citywide)." This group of students would be determined by "multiple measures of student achievement," instead of grades, and the measures would be determined by the chancellor. The chancellor would also have the exclusive right to determine "the weight of each such measure."