Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

Renu Mukerjee. She's the A-Pulse and Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute. She's a PhD student

in American politics at Boston College. And she studies a range of topics, including education,

public interest groups, political attitudes among racial and ethnic minorities,

and other topics. She's currently at work on a dissertation that focuses on affirmative action.

Rainu writes regularly for City Journal. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal,

the New York Times, and The Hill. Today, we're going to discuss her City Journal essay,

the next battle over racial preferences, which appears in our autumn issue, and it examines the push to eliminate merit-based

admissions at selective high schools. So, Rainu, thanks very much for coming on 10 blocks.

Thanks for having me, Brian. So across the country, selective public high schools offer a kind of specialized alternative

to standard schools, more rigorous, often with a sort of specific pedagogical theme.

Admission to these high schools has traditionally been merit-based and

competitive with the decisions based on students' GPAs, standardized test scores. So I wonder,

just to start, to give some background here, could you just explain what do these schools offer

that goes beyond a standard public high

school education and why is there such competition to get into them? So these schools are viewed

amongst parents and oftentimes immigrant parents as a golden ticket to the upper levels of

American society and a better life for the reason that,

whereas in a normal public school system, if your school is offering, say, five, 10 AP courses,

that's viewed as excellent, whereas taking AP courses, for example, beginning as early as your

first year or your sophomore year is sort of

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