“The Stuyvesant Controversy and the Lose-Lose Fight over Educational Access” (2022-2023)
An elite high school where three-quarters of the students are Asian American, but the number of Black students remains in the single digits. An admissions reform plan that would substantially increase the representation of Black students at the school, but greatly reduce the Asian American population. The debate surrounding the admissions process for Stuyvesant High School, the highest-ranked secondary school in the city, is messy, and my initial research on it left me frustrated, uncomfortable, and lost. That’s how I knew it was an issue worth writing about.
As badly as I wanted to portray the Asian American community in a positive light, I had to acknowledge the underlying anti-Blackness embedded in arguments made by some Asian American advocacy groups against admissions reform. Their assertion that the current system, which determines admissions based solely on students’ standardized test scores, is objective disregards the systemic racism that denies New York’s Black and brown communities equal access to elite institutions and stands in the way of their push for greater equity in education.
Yet it wasn’t until I discovered articles specifically by Asian American journalists that I could at once understand that most Asian Americans do not oppose admissions reforms while also empathizing with those who do. New York City’s Asian Americans, who have a higher poverty rate than any other ethnic group in the city, often view elite high schools as their children’s only path to upward mobility. From their perspective, it is reasonable to view the admissions reform plan as harmful. Thus, while I had wanted to conclude my essay by calling for greater support for admissions reform from the Asian American community in the name of educational equity, I instead realized something that journalist Jay Caspian Kang has put into words: “It’s nearly impossible to build a collective political vision around such abstract ideas of self-sacrifice.”
In my efforts to represent both perspectives fairly, I learned to explore the deeper nuances of arguments that challenge me and to question why these perspectives are portrayed as opposites in the first place.
Joyce Li, ‘25, is a rising sophomore double majoring in journalism and social & cultural analysis at the College of Arts and Science and a staff writer at Washington Square News. She was born in Hong Kong and attended school in Guangdong, China until she was nine years old, at which point her family moved to Toronto, Canada and she became, suddenly and without warning, ‘Asian American.’ Since then, Joyce has grappled with this new aspect of her identity, fascinated by the growing solidarity that her community, with its diverse values, histories, and experiences, has built around a label that was meant to ‘other’ them. Her essay discusses Asian exceptionalism, equality in education, and the apparent divide between Black and Asian communities through an exploration of standardized testing and their use in the admission processes for New York City’s specialized high schools.