This is a disturbing article on a confusing topic: racial diversity in education for the academically gifted.
Hunter College High School is an elite public school in New York City, grades 7-12, that accepts students based on a test administered prior to entry (it also has a lower school that has an exam-based entry). It just so happens that the percentage of minority students at Hunter is small. One of them, Justin Hudson, spoke at the most recent graduation ceremonies, and said the following:
I feel guilty because I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do any of you. We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on our performance on a test we took when we were 11-year-olds, or 4-year-olds. We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as ‘gifted,’ while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system.
And now, we stand on the precipice of our lives, in control of our lives, based purely and simply on luck and circumstance. If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.
Hudson is tapping into one of the huge and enormously heated controversies of our times, whether measured racial differences in intelligence are completely environmental or are the result at least partly of heredity. Let’s just say for the purposes of this post that we will not settle the question here; and that there’s a great deal of overlap among racial groups, all of which have plenty of highly intelligent members, many of whom (black, white, or whatever color) are not raised in an environment that allows them to take full advantage of whatever intellectual gifts they might possess (just take a look at the true story behind this movie if you don’t believe me).
I’m interested right now in other issues, such as what motivates a student such as Hudson to experience so much guilt that he feels the need to include this sentiment in a graduation speech, and to ignore the fact that he and other students at Hunter are not merely lucky, but have almost certainly worked long and hard to do the work there in order to graduate. My guess is that he has been exposed to a relentless barrage of PC thought that dictates that there are no innate differences—even between individuals—except for those of privilege and good fortune, and that achievement is a zero-sum game where his own advancement can only have been accomplished at the expense of others.
I was puzzled by the fact that Hudson was described in the article as a “graduation speaker.” I wondered what that meant, and why neither of the traditional terms “valedictorian” or “salutatorian” was used. So I did some research, and discovered that even Hunter has abandoned those concepts in favor of a different and less score-bound process:
To relieve some of the pressure on its students, the school does not name a valedictorian; instead, it invites seniors to submit proposed graduation speeches and a faculty committee selects one to be read. This year, it chose Mr. Hudson’s, to his surprise.
So we learn two things here: despite Hunter’s still being wedded to its old-fashioned admissions test, it has succumbed to the modern trend away from having the students with the highest and second-highest averages deliver the commencement speeches. That may relieve pressure on the students, but it also gives the faculty leeway to select whomever it pleases based on other criteria, which can include ethnic diversity—unless, of course, the speeches are submitted anonymously; but even then the content of Hudson’s speech would have been a possible clue to his racial identity.
The process reminds me somewhat of changes at the Harvard Law Review during the 70s that made it possible for students to be selected for the prestigious journal on the basis of a student vote on special writing samples rather than grades, and allowed the HLR president to be elected rather having the post go to the best student. The changes were explicitly designed to encourage the selection of minorities to the posts, and Barack Obama was one its beneficiaries.
It seems that the Hunter faculty may have used Hudson to deliver a message to the administration by proxy. They read his speech and knew its content before they selected him to give it. The test admission process had already become a bone of contention at Hunter, as its minority enrollment fell in recent years, and the disagreement breaks down as faculty vs. administration:
The events fanned a long-standing disagreement between much of the high school faculty and the administration of Hunter College over the use of a single, teacher-written test for admission to the school, which has grades 7 through 12. Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work, in part to increase minority enrollment and blunt the impact of the professional test preparation undertaken by many prospective students.
Eliminating the test, which has remained essentially unchanged for decades, is not on the table, said John Rose, the dean for diversity at Hunter College. The test, he said, is an integral part of the success of the school…
It seems to boil down to an old-fashioned disagreement between liberal faculty and more conservative administration on the mission of the school. An interesting side question is what the explanation might be for the drop in minority enrollment since the 90s:
As has happened at other prestigious city high schools that use only a test for admission, the black and Hispanic population at Hunter has fallen in recent years. In 1995, the entering seventh-grade class was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic, according to state data. This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.
Interesting; the administration of an admissions test is a practice many decades old at Hunter, and certainly predated the year 1995. Why, then, has minority enrollment dropped so precipitously since then? I don’t know the answer, but I ask the question.
One possible explanation is related to the point Hudson made: apparently, the Hunter test may not have been well-publicized in schools in heavily black and Hispanic areas. Was there perhaps a fall-off in knowledge of the test’s existence in those communities in recent years?:
Until recently, individual schools in New York were responsible for making sure their kids knew about the test. Essentially, teachers had to know about the test, know about which students to recommend and connect them to the test through a very personally [sic] process. As a result, black and Latino children have often been left out of the pool of those selected to receive the opportunity to apply to Hunter College High School and receive an amazing education for free.
That problem was corrected this year when, “for the first time, the school this year sent mailings directly to all city fifth graders who scored in the top 10 percent on both the state English and math tests, the criteria to take the Hunter test, rather than relying on schools to pass the word. Hunter High also started a mentoring program for promising third graders. One-quarter of the city students qualifying for the test this year were black or Hispanic, according to an analysis by The New York Times.”
This seems like an excellent change, although it may take a few years for the full results to show up in the student body. But this sort of thing seems to be the way to approach the problem, rather than watering down the admissions criteria because of PC considerations, laying guilt trips on hardworking students, or using graduation speakers to channel the grievances of the faculty.
