NYC Council progressives aim to hide public-school failure via outright racial discrimination

City Council progressives are aiming to block Asian-American kids from the city’s top public high schools — again pushing racist injustice in the name of racial justice.Democrats Nantasha Williams (Queens) and Lincoln Restler (B’klyn) embrace the same “logic” that just drove monstrous state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa to make a New York diploma worthless: Eliminate anything that exposes public schools’ vast failure to educate black and Hispanic kids.The council pair pretend to see a great wrong in the low numbers of such students who earn admission to Stuyvesant HS, Bronx Science and so on — but refuse to address the cause, namely the tragic shortfalls in K-8 schools that leave so few of these children prepared to excel on the race-blind Specialized High Schools Admissions Test.So instead they want to kill the messenger, by imposing a racist admission scheme that simply excludes students from heavily Asian areas.

The duo wrote Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels urging more admissions to the eight elite high schools outside the SHSAT process, ideally killing the test altogether.(They also call to expand enrollment by thousands of seats, though the state class-size law is on course to reduce enrollment at these schools unless the city can enlarge their buildings to create more classrooms.)Their most immediate proposal centers on the students admitted via the summer Discovery prep program, a cohort that is now 62% Asian: They’d limit entrance to Discover to the city’s 15 lowest-income school districts — thereby cutting cutting out 90% of low-income Asian kids.Citywide poverty rates for Asian-American students are as high or worse as for blacks and Latinos; Asians simply live in more economically diverse neighborhoods.The honest name for the despicable Williams-Restler push would be the Asian Exclusion Act.The odious “principle” here is “that racial diversity requires reducing opportunities for one minority gro...