S2 E8: The Only Way Out

School Colors

Brooklyn Deep

Politics, Education, Government, News

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT. For years, advocates had argued that the test favored white and Asian students while systematically keeping Black and Latinx kids out of the city's most elite and well-resourced high schools. But many Asian American parents felt targeted by the mayor’s plan, and they mobilized to defend the test. So when the District 28 diversity planning process was rolled out a year later, many Chinese immigrant parents in Queens saw this as “just another attack." This time, however, they were ready to fight back. The SHSAT is just one example of "merit-based" admissions to advanced or "gifted" education programs. These programs can start as early as kindergarten and they have become a third rail in New York City politics. In this episode, we ask why gifted education gets so much attention, even though it affects relatively few students. How do we even define what it means to be "gifted"? And by focusing on these programs, whose needs do we overlook?

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Stelush. We are in Forest Hills, Queens, in District 28 in New York City.
0:06.5	And I am a parent of a current seventh grader at a middle school in Forest Hills.
0:12.0	Stella is a parent leader at her son's school and the education chair of the Forest Hills Asian Association.
0:18.0	She was born in Shanghai.
0:19.7	Going back a bit, my father was a very good student. He was
0:25.9	the top of his class, smartest kid ever, graduated top of his high school class. And unfortunately,
0:32.1	just as he was about to go to college, the cultural revolution happened. So during that time,
0:36.7	all the educational institutions in China shut down.
0:39.6	He wasn't afforded a chance to attend college. And he wanted to come to the states
0:46.2	because social mobility in China is very limited. So, you know, to risk a corny joke, he wanted to come here and pursue the American dream.
0:55.3	Stella moved to Queens in 1987 when she was 10 years old.
0:58.8	Her family's first apartment was in a neighborhood called Elmhurst.
1:02.1	My father, my mother, and I in one bedroom, and it was another family.
1:06.5	It was a father and his teenage son and his teenage daughter.
1:11.6	So it was six of you in a two-bedroom apartment?
1:14.6	Yeah, it was crowded.
1:16.6	I think by American standards, like if I were to explain it's my son, he'd be horrified.
1:22.6	But for me, you know, I was already in a two-bedroom apartment with my grandparents and my cousin.
1:30.2	We didn't have running water.
1:32.5	There was a communal kitchen that was shared by everybody on the floor.
1:36.7	So to me, when I came to Umpurst, I was like, oh, my God, I have a flushing toilet.
1:41.0	This is the best thing ever.
	...

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