The Democratic left’s push to turn America into a mediocre society is continuing virtually unabated, as evidenced by what is happening in New York City.
Once, good grades and superior performance was a requirement to get into the city’s finest high schools, but not anymore: Grades are less of a priority now under recent ‘woke’ policy changes and now, according to the New York Post, superior grades “barely matter.”
The paper notes:
The city’s high school application process is now a crapshoot — and top grades barely matter.
One month before the application deadline, the Department of Education unveiled its long-awaited new admission system, lowering the bar for entry into many competitive high schools — and tossing kids with a range of academic achievement into a random hopper.
“It’s now essentially a lottery system masquerading as a selective process,” Effie Zakry, a vice-president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, an NYC Department of Education parental advisory body, told The Post.
In other words, in the left’s quest to ‘provide opportunities’ for all, they are subjecting all kids to subpar outcomes; it’s like the NFL requiring coaches to play second- and third-string players instead of the best players on each team, which would, of course, destroy the quality of professional football and the sport in general.
Funny how in the most ‘woke’ professional sport in existence there is no real ‘equity’; if you can’t play or can’t play as well, you don’t play, period.
In any event, according to The Post, eighth-grade students in the Big Apple have until March 1 to submit an application that lists up to a dozen high schools or special programs they would like to attend, by choice of preference. But when Principal Nancy Harris at Manhattan’s Spruce Street School explained the new selection process to eighth-graders last week, 13-year-old student Liv Olsen said “the auditorium went nuts.”
“A lot of kids were really angry: ‘What about kids who have better grades? What about everyone in this room? What the hell?’”
Other kids expressed similar outrage — and why wouldn’t they after spending their young academic careers thus far working hard to achieve top status?
Amy Nichols, a Catholic school eight-grader with straight A’s who wants to go to Townsend Harris HS in Queens or another top-ranked public school, told The Post: “I’m definitely worried about my chances. It’s pretty much a lottery.
“My friends are very smart – their grades are 90 and above – but they’re actually pretty scared of being rejected,” she added.
The Post explains this madness:
The DOE’s bewildering new system, an effort to boost equity in nearly 400 high schools, is based on a complex mathematical formula.
For each student, it will take the single top mark in four core subjects – English, math, social studies and science – in seventh or eighth grade. A point value is assigned to each of those marks. The points are then averaged to determine which of four lottery groups the student falls into. Standardized test scores, used in prior years, and attendance, won’t be factors.
Under the formula, a student with grades as low as 65 to 75 in some classes can land in the highest lottery group with kids who earned 90s across the board.
All students in the top group will be eligible to attend the most academically rigorous schools. The luck of the draw will determine the freshman class.
And let’s face it: The kids who are getting C’s and D’s in some subjects are not going to do will the “the most academically rigorous schools” — unless, of course, NYC education leftists move next to lower grading standards in the top schools in order to ‘lift equity boats.’
And you know that’s coming.
“If I’m a student with two 75s and two 85s, I’m happy,” Maurice Frumkin, a former DOE enrollment official who runs the private NYC Admissions Solutions, told The Post. “If I’m a student with all 95s, I’m not happy. They have an absolutely equal chance of getting into a given program.”
Democrats dumb down America. There is no better proof of that than what’s about to happen in NYC.
