[StBernard] "This is the esay part."

[Westley Annis]

This. This is what is wrong with the NAACP and liberals in general.

They don't want equal opportunity, they want equal outcomes. It doesn't work
that way.

Otherwise, there would be no need to play football games on Sunday, have a
BCS championship, or a Superbowl.
--------------------------------------

For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones
 
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Ting Shi said his first two years in the United States were wretched. He
slept in a bunk bed in the same room with his grandparents and a cousin in
Chinatown, while his parents lived on East 89th Street, near a laundromat
where they endured 12-hour shifts. He saw them only on Sundays.

Even after they found an apartment together, his father often talked about
taking the family back to China. So, following the advice of friends and
relatives from Fuzhou, where he is from, Ting spent more than two years
poring over dog-eared test prep books, attending summer and after-school
classes, even going over math formulas on the walk home from school.

The afternoon his acceptance letter to Stuyvesant High School arrived in the
mail, he and his parents gathered at the laundromat, the smell of detergent
and the whirl of the washing machines filling the air. "Everyone was
excited," Ting recalled.

Ting's father said he felt rejuvenated, and now dismissed the idea of
returning: "I thought: the next generation will have a good future," he
said.

On Saturday, more than 15,000 students are expected to file into classrooms
to take a grueling 95-question test for admission to New York City's elite
public high schools. (The exam on Sunday, for about 14,000 students, was
postponed until Nov. 18 because of Hurricane Sandy.)

No one will be surprised if Asian students, who make up 14 percent of the
city's public school students, once again win most of the seats, and if
black and Hispanic students win few. Last school year, of the 14,415
students enrolled in the eight specialized high schools that require a test
for admissions, 8,549 were Asian.  

Because of the disparity, some have begun calling for an end to the policy
of using the test as the sole basis of admission to the schools, and last
month, civil rights groups filed a complaint with the federal government,
contending that the policy discriminated against students, many of whom are
black or Hispanic, who cannot afford the score-raising tutoring that other
students can. The Shis, like other Asian families who spoke about the exam
in interviews in the past month, did not deny engaging in extensive test
preparation. To the contrary, they seemed to discuss their efforts with
pride.

They also said they were puzzled about having to defend a process they
viewed as a vital steppingstone for immigrants. And more than a few saw the
criticism of the test as an attack on their cultures, as troubling to them
as grumblings about the growing Asian presence in these schools and the
prestigious colleges they feed into. "You know: 'You're Asian, you must be
smart,' " said Jan Michael Vicencio, an immigrant from Manila and a junior
at Brooklyn Tech, one of the eight schools that use the test for admission.
"And you're not sure it's a compliment or an insult. We get that a lot."

Almost universally, the Asian students described themselves on one edge of a
deep cultural chasm.

They cited their parents' observance of ancient belief systems like
Confucianism, a set of moral principles that emphasizes scholarship and
reverence for elders, as well as their rejection of child-rearing
philosophies more common in the United States that emphasize confidence and
general well-being.

Several students said their parents did not shy away from corporal
punishment as a means of motivating them. And they said that rigorous
testing was generally an accepted practice in their home countries, with the
tests viewed not so much as measures of intelligence, but of
industriousness.

"Most of our parents don't believe in 'gifted,' " said Riyan Iqbal, 15, the
son of Bangladeshi immigrants, as he and his friends - of Bengali, Korean
and Indian descent - meandered toward the subway from the Bronx High School
of Science one recent afternoon. "It's all about hard work."

No student, they said, was off the hook. Riyan, the son of a taxi driver and
a Duane Reade cashier, and his schoolmates said their parents routinely
plied them with motivational tales about the trials they endured back home,
walking to school barefoot, struggling with hunger, being set back by floods
and political unrest. "You try to make up for their hardships," Riyan said.

The summer after sixth grade, Riyan spent most days at a small storefront
"cram school," memorizing surface area and volume formulas. In seventh
grade, he was back there on Saturday and Sundays, unscrambling paragraphs
and plowing through reading passages. The classes cost his parents $200 a
month.

"I knew my parents would still love me if I didn't get into Bronx Science,"
he said. "But they would be very disappointed."

Jerome Krase, a professor emeritus in sociology at Brooklyn College, and one
of the editors of "Race and Ethnicity in New York City," said that a growing
number of Asian immigrants in recent years had experienced serious adversity
in their home countries. "The children hold the honor of the family in their
hands," Professor Krase said. "If they succeed, the family succeeds."

Complaints about the test and its effect on the racial makeup of the top
schools date back at least to the civil rights era. When school officials
began openly discussing changing the admissions policy in the early 1970s,
white parents persuaded the State Legislature to pass a law cementing the
test as the only basis of admission to the specialized high schools. At the
time, according to an article in The New York Times in 1971, Stuyvesant High
School was mostly white, 10 percent black, 4 percent Puerto Rican or "other
Spanish surnamed," and 6 percent Asian.

This year at Stuyvesant, 72 percent are Asian and less than 4 percent are
black or Hispanic.

Melissa Potter, a spokeswoman for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint with the United States
Department of Education in September, said that though some of the city's
poorest Asian immigrants had found their way into these schools, many were
still being left out, for the same reason that poor blacks and Hispanics
were: they do not have access to the grueling, expensive and time-consuming
test preparation for the exam. The complaint argued that other factors, like
school grades, teacher recommendations and personal experience should also
be taken into account.

City education officials, as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have
rejected the idea that the one-test entry system should be rethought. "You
pass the test," the mayor said last month, "you get the highest score, you
get into the school - no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your
economic background is."

The city began offering a free test-prep program several years ago for black
and Hispanic students, but after a legal challenge, other ethnic groups were
granted the same access to the course. Today, 43 percent of the students in
the program are Asian. Three years ago, Ting Shi was one of them.

The filing of the complaint has led to some uncomfortable discussions about
race, aided by the anonymity of the Internet. On the elite schools' alumni
Web sites, discussions can veer into "dangerous territory," as one commenter
from Brooklyn Tech recently noted during a heated exchange. The discussion
included a post about how the N.A.A.C.P. ought to be pushing parents to get
"more involved in their children's education."

Meanwhile, a parent on a popular education e-mail list referred to the
"Asian-ification" of the elite schools, and a post on Urban Baby grumbled
about "Asian kids taking all the spots because they prep excessively."

Criticizing Asians' success on the test is "like a defense mechanism," said
Faria Kabir, a sophomore at Brooklyn Tech, who emigrated from Bangladesh
when she was 6. "It's like someone is blaming you for something that isn't
actually your fault."

Beyond issues of race, those who favor a broader admissions policy say the
reliance on one test for admission, one that has spawned an industry of
tutoring programs, has distorted what it means to be a top student.

Sharon Chambers, the owner of a karate studio in Queens, whose son, Kyle, is
was scheduled to take the test on Saturday, said students should be able to
demonstrate their abilities in a more well-rounded way, one that might not
cost so much. "A test like this is not a full indicator of a child's
potential," Ms. Chambers, who is black, said.

Others take issue with the exam on philosophical grounds. "You shouldn't
have to prep Sunday to Sunday, to get into a good high school," said Melissa
Santana, a legal secretary whose daughter Dejanellie Falette has been
prepping this fall for the exam. "That's extreme."

But a Bensonhurst resident, Emmie Cheng, who is of Chinese descent but
emigrated here as a child from Cambodia, was not sure she agreed.

This fall, her daughter Kassidi has spent every Tuesday afternoon and all of
Saturday at the Horizon Program, a tutoring program near her house,
reviewing work she has done over the past three years. Kassidi also takes a
prep class on Sundays.

Still, Ms. Cheng, a director at a shoe importing company, said guiding her
daughter through this process - which cost her about $2,000 this year alone
- paled in comparison to what she had experienced earlier in her life. Her
father and four brothers died of starvation during Cambodia's civil war. And
once here, she said, she watched her mother struggle in a garment factory.

"This is the easy part," Ms. Cheng said.