For many years I lived across the street from Stuyvesant
High School, Manhattan’s elite
public school, and I would sometimes get a ride
from a father of one of the students. He was a cab driver from Pakistan, a man
who liked to strike up conversations with his passengers. Usually, we talked
about two things: his pride in his academically gifted kids (another child was
already at Cornell) and his dismay at the state of affairs in Pakistan.
اضافة اعلان
Eventually, the child at Stuyvesant went on to another elite
university, and I saw less of my friendly driver, and then I moved out of the
city. But I’ve been thinking about him again in connection to the two best
things I’ve read about immigrants in recent months — and what both say about
our never-ending debates over “American values.”
The first was Michael Powell’s luminous report “How It Feels
to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School” in The Times last week. The
second is
Roya Hakakian’s book “A Beginner’s Guide to America,” a Tocquevillian
gem of sociological and psychological analysis that explains, to a mainly
American readership, just how strange this country can be to a newcomer, even —
or especially — in what seems like the most banal aspects of life.
Powell’s story looks mainly at Stuyvesant’s sister school
Brooklyn Tech, where 61 percent of the school’s nearly 6,000 students are of
Asian descent, as against just 15 percent who are Black or Latino. This is
nearly the exact reverse of the ethnic composition of New York’s public
schools, leading to charges that schools like Brooklyn Tech — where admission
is gained by scoring well on a standardized test — are functionally racist.
This, in turn, has led to calls to get rid of the test
altogether or establish variable passing scores to further diversify the school
or otherwise tinker with the rigorous meritocratic formula that turned Brooklyn
Tech and Stuyvesant into factories for future Nobel laureates and other high
achievers.
There’s a lot to ponder in Powell’s story, but two points
stand out. The first is how much genuine diversity gets lost in our current
diversity-speak, with its singular focus on Black and Latino diversity.
At Brooklyn Tech, Powell describes a “river of teenagers”
who are “Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian,
Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American.” Of these, nearly
two-thirds come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and many don’t
speak English at home. How is this evidence of racism, functional or otherwise?
The second is the progressive war on the concept of merit,
culminating in former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s move last year (rejected by his
successor, Eric Adams) to eliminate the city’s gifted-and-talented programs for
young children.
In 1981, Powell reports, nearly two-thirds of Brooklyn
Tech’s students were Black or Latino. What has changed over four decades isn’t
that New Yorkers have become more racist. It’s that
New York’s public schools
have catastrophically failed so many students through lowered expectations,
diminished curriculums, and limited opportunities for accelerated learning
despite the highest per pupil spending of the country’s largest school systems.
The success of Brooklyn Tech only casts an unflattering light on every other
corner of the public school bureaucracy.
But there’s another part of this story, one that’s best
explained by Hakakian, a Jewish immigrant from Iran with a distinguished career
as a poet and essayist. What she captures is what I could sometimes glimpse in
my rides with my Pakistani cabby: not just a parent’s ambition for his child’s
success or even the redemption of his own sacrifices but also the completion of
a journey from identity to self.
“Americans lead with ‘I,’” Hakakian writes with the
perceptiveness of someone who still sees the United States as a slightly
foreign country. “Lean in, they recommend, in praise of self-assertion.”
“The idea of ‘me time,’” she adds, “is so quintessentially
American that it might as well be dressed in a Stetson and a pair of cowboy
boots.”
A paradox of the immigrant experience is that it frequently
involves parents from cultures that emphasize collective interest in raising
children here adept at self-actualization — that is, the sorts of kids who fill
the halls at Brooklyn Tech.
Today, conservatives are furious about what they see as the
left’s assault on meritocracy and traditional family values. And progressives
are furious about what they see as the right’s assault on advances in equality
and public education. But is there a place in America where the ideals of
meritocracy and equality, traditional values and public good so seamlessly come
together as they do in a school like Brooklyn Tech?
It wasn’t long ago that
Americans understood that the
promise of this country lay in its belief that openness to immigrants was an
affirmation of our values, not a rejection of them; that our belief in equality
was a means of strengthening the ideal of merit, not obstructing it; and that
the purpose of a public education was to get beyond the politics of identity,
not wallow in it. It shouldn’t be too late to reclaim these understandings
again.
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