Vince Lombardi, perhaps the greatest football coach ever, once said, “If you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.”
He may have said this to his players before taking the field and leading them to victory, but the quote should also serve as the ideal approach to education.
New York City, in admitting students for its elite public high schools such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech, requires that students pass a stringent entrance examination. However, this requirement has led to a federal complaint filed by a number of advocacy groups alleging that the city’s reliance on such a test was discriminatory to minority students.
In defense of the testing policy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg hit the nail on the head in saying that “life isn’t always fair.” He went on to state that the admission system is “strictly on merit, and it’s one of the bright lights in our school system.”
“There’s nothing subjective about this,” he added. “You pass the test with the higher score, you get into the school, no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background.”
The New York Times reported that “although 70 percent of the city’s public school students are black and Hispanic, a far smaller percentage have scored high enough to receive offers from one of the schools.”
“According to the complaint, 733 of the 12,525 black and Hispanic students who took the exam were offered seats this year,” the report noted. “For whites, 1,253 of the 4,101 test takers were offered seats. Of 7,119 Asian students who took the test, 2,490 were offered seats. At Stuyvesant High School, the most sought-after school, 19 blacks were offered seats in a freshman class of 967.”
The NAACP is charging that white parents can afford to hire tutors to assist their children in taking entrance tests. However, School Chancellor Dennis Walcott has fostered programs to better prepare black and Hispanic students for these entrance tests.
The trouble is that the city has had a difficult time recruiting black and Hispanic students for the free test-preparation courses aimed at poor students.
Back in 1971, there were complaints lodged against the testonly criteria for entrance and officials toyed with the idea of adding other criteria for admission. But protests from many parents, mostly white, persuaded the State Legislature to enshrine the rule in state law.
The law still stands and Bloomberg defended its existence. “I do not think state law should be changed in terms of these specialty schools,” he said. “These are schools designed for the best and the brightest. If some kids want to work harder and some parents are able to focus and get more help for their kids, those kids are beneficiaries.”
It has been reported that nearly 100 percent of all black and Hispanic kids who do enter these schools go on to graduate and then to college. This would seem to prove that the exam is a good indicator of success.
Lawsuits and dumbing down entrance tests do our children a great disservice. Our society needs to instill a sense that hard work and sacrifice are required stops on the road to excellence in everything. If they work hard, study and pass, not only can students get into the school they want, but they also learn the greatest lesson of all: when you give your best, you get the best in return.
