Opinion | No Ethnic Group Owns Stuyvesant. All New Yorkers Do. (original) (raw)

Opinion|No Ethnic Group Owns Stuyvesant. All New Yorkers Do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/opinion/de-blasio-stuyvesant-school.html

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Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan would destroy the best high schools in New York City.

June 13, 2018

Boaz Weinstein

Mr. Weinstein is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School and is on the board of its alumni association.

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Protesting Mayor Bill de Blasio's proposal to revamp admissions to New York City’s specialized high schools.Credit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times

Like many alumni of Stuyvesant, the city’s premier public specialized high school, I believe that admission to the school was one of the seminal events of my life. I came from a public middle school; my father was an insurance broker on Coney Island Avenue and my mother was an immigrant who worked as a translator. On weekends, I walked around Brooklyn placing fliers advertising my father’s business under the windshield wipers of cars.

The facilities and the teachers at Stuyvesant were not materially different from any other New York City public school. I quickly learned that the magic of the place, then as now, was its cohort of incredibly bright kids encouraged by camaraderie and competition to push themselves to succeed. I got to sit next to Omar Jadwat in metal shop, Gary Shteyngart in homeroom, Naval Ravikant in history, and Ruvim Breydo in physics, and that made all the difference.

Admission to Stuyvesant was and remains determined by a single test available to all middle school students in the city. There are no soft criteria for admission: no interviews, no favoritism for legacies, no strings to be pulled. It’s all about whether you do well on the test, which best determines whether or not you can do the academic work.

You would think that Mayor Bill de Blasio would celebrate Stuyvesant as the crown jewel of the city’s school system. Instead, he has announced a plan that will destroy it in all but name.

This month, the mayor said he would seek legislation that would eliminate the test completely. Instead, he’d guarantee automatic admission to Stuyvesant — and the seven other specialized high schools in the city — for the top students at every middle school, regardless of their abilities.

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