Elite Public Education and Race: Why is Stuyvesant 73% Asian?

The New York Times yesterday did a profile of a black student at New York City’s elite public high school, Stuyvesant.  She is one of just 40 black students in a school of over three thousand students.  To get into Stuyvesant, students take an exam, and the top scorers get in–with an admit rate of under 5%, which makes it more competitive than Harvard to get in.

The interesting and important question, in my mind, is why there are so few black (and Latino) students prepared well enough to pass the exam.  The article suggests what the research in the study of US-born children of immigrants in New York City shows, which is that Asian families (in the study, Chinese) avail of the elite public system the most.  They are connected to social networks that provide information on which public schools are high-quality, and how to prepare for the entrance exam for the specialized high schools.  And, they often attend classes from an early age that prepare them for the exam, all through the ethnic network.  The study, whose book has the wonderful title Inheriting the City, explains that Dominican families, unlike Chinese families, exit the neighborhood school system most frequently by sending their children to Catholic schools when they can afford them.  The problem is that the socioeconomic outcomes for those attending the specialized high schools are better than the outcomes associated with attending NYC Catholic schools; and, of course, only those who can afford it can send their children to Catholic school (and when a family experiences economic setbacks they may have to withdraw their children from Catholic school).

It would be easy to conclude, as some do, that black and Latino students are lazy, lack the drive to pass the entrance exam, or just don’t care enough about their education–just see the comments below the NY Times article.  But, this would be a woefully inadequate and dangerous conclusion to draw, and not backed by evidence.  Instead, a close look at families’ social networks and information flows explains more thoroughly why Stuyvesant is 73% Asian.

Do elite universities encourage students to go to Wall Street and TFA, by default??

I read an interesting article by Ezra Klein today that suggests that the lack of career discussion and direction at elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton leads a large number of their students to go into finance (at Harvard, 17% of 2011 graduates).  He makes the case that part of the financial industry’s success at elite universities is that they set up a familiar competition for undergrads, much like the undergraduate admissions process.  They take applications up to a set deadline, they interview on campus, they have a set date to give decisions, etc.

Interestingly, he compares this process to the one done by Teach for America.  Here’s where it gets interesting.  I once heard that up to 50% of graduates at Harvard apply to TFA.  It used to baffle me that TFA had such a low admit rate, given the demand for teachers (at least up to the past few years) and its assumption that students from elite universities need to be recruited into teaching more.  Then, I realized that actually part of the reason TFA is so successful is precisely because it’s competitive.  Undergrads at elite universities are used to a competition, and they like them because they’ve generally been successful at them–especially at the most important one of college admissions.  So, a higher success rate for TFA might actually end up counterproductive for the organization!  This is similar to elite university admissions–every year universities boast of decreasing admit rates, which i always find perverse and harsh, especially to those 90+% of applicants who are rejected.

The TFA comparison leads me (and Klein) to the conclusion that it’s not just high pay that is leading so many elite undergraduates into finance.  It’s the competition.  So, if you want to get undergrads from elite universities on board for something, create a scarce opportunity and then have them compete for it!

Wealthy foreign parents more likely to choose urban public schools than US-born parents

An interesting story in today’s New York Times cited census data analysis showing that foreign-born parents in New York City with household incomes over $150K were almost twice as likely to choose NYC public schools than were US-born parents in the same income bracket.  The difference was even more for household incomes over $200K.  Assuming that the income distribution over $200K is somewhat similar between US-born and foreign-born New Yorkers (i.e., both have similar capacity to pay for private school), this is an interesting finding that points to cultural conceptions of what constitutes a good education. The article cites mostly Europeans, although they do interview an Indian woman.  Europeans seem to expect and assume that high-quality public education exists, whereas for affluent New Yorkers high-quality primary and secondary education may get defined by exclusivity.  I’m not sure how to explain the Indian case–in India, anyone with an income that high would be sending their children to private schools, and even poor Indians often send their children to private schools. (Some suggest that the expanding private sector schools cateriing to poor Indians may be the future of improving education in India).

The decision by a wealthy family to send their child to private vs urban-public vs. suburban public school is an intensely personal one, and one I suspect that it carries with it deeply embedded meanings attached to “good education”.  Ann Swidler talks about how culture influences our behaviors (in this case, choices) through a cultural “tool-kit” of ways of understanding the world, responding to situations, etc.  Then, based on those decisions, we define our values post-facto.  In the case of these school choices, once parents make their choices they then perhaps embed values attached to those choices–in the case of urban public schools, for example, “multicultural competency” vs., in the case of private or suburban public schools, “peers who share my aspirations, values, and interests”.  I imagine these kinds of concerns inevitably shade parents’ perceptions of the quality of the schools they visit, even if they visit both public and private schools when deciding where to send their children.

Growing Inequality in Education by Class

This article in the New York Times cites some high-quality new research showing how the gap between educational outcomes of the wealthy and poor in the United States has been steadily growing.  This is very bad news, given that Americans place such high hopes and expectations in education to reduce inequality in society.  Interestingly, the increasing gap seems to be precipitated in large part by those in the top 10% investing increasing amounts of money in education for their children, in effect pulling away from the crowd.