January 13, 2013

Stop the presses: Upper West Siders don't practice what they preach when it comes to their own children

Manhattan's Upper West Side is home to the people who are most responsible for the Conventional Wisdom of the media. Wikipedia writes:
The Upper West Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River and between West 59th Street and West 110th Street. The Upper West Side is sometimes also considered to include the neighborhood of Morningside Heights. 
Like the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side is an upscale, primarily residential area with many of its residents working in more commercial areas in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. While these distinctions were never hard-and-fast rules and now mean little, it has the reputation of being home to New York City's cultural and artistic workers, while the Upper East Side is traditionally perceived to be home to commercial and business types.

Not surprisingly, people who have made it all the way to the Upper West Side by preaching one set of messages don't see why those principles should apply to their own children. 

A half century ago, the people running New York City were more naive. They thought their public ideals weren't just for the rest of country, they were for their own city. In their lack of hypocrisy, they managed to almost wreck the world's most important city. On the whole, the people currently running New York City aren't making that mistake.

It can be hard for us poor dumb out-of-towners to figure out how things actually work in 21st Century New York, but, I increasingly believe, it's worth making the effort.

The NYT has been running a series of articles on the Gifted and Talented system within New York City's public schools. Here's the fourth and last article:
Gifted, Talented and Separated 
By AL BAKER 
IT is just a metal door with three windows, the kind meant to keep the clamor of an elementary school hallway from piercing a classroom’s quiet. Other than paint the color of bubble gum, it is unremarkable. 
But the pink door on Room 311 at Public School 163 on the Upper West Side [on 97th Street a block and a half west of Central Park] represents a barrier belied by its friendly hue. On one side are 21 fourth graders labeled gifted and talented by New York City’s school system. They are coursing through public school careers stamped accelerated. 
And they are mostly white. 
On the other side, sometimes sitting for reading lessons on the floor of the hallway, are those in the school’s vast majority: They are enrolled in general or special education programs. 
They are mostly children of color. [Assuming Asians are people of pallor, of course.] 
“I know what we look like,” Carolyn M. Weinberg, a 28-year veteran of P.S. 163, said of the racial disparities as she stood one day in the third-floor hallway between Room 318, where she and a colleague teach a fourth-grade general education class, and the one where Angelo Monserrate teaches the gifted class, Room 311. 
“I know what you see,” said Ms. Weinberg. 
There are 652 students enrolled at P.S. 163 this year, from prekindergarten through fifth grade. Roughly 63 percent of them are black and Hispanic; whites make up 27 percent; and Asians account for 6 percent. 
This reflects the flavor of the neighborhood, and roughly matches the New York City school system’s overall demographics. 
Yet in P.S. 163’s gifted classes, the racial dynamics of the neighborhood, the school itself and the school system are turned upside down. 
Of the 205 children enrolled in the nine gifted classes, 97, or 47 percent, are white; another 31 of the students, or 15 percent, are Asian. And a combined 65 students, or 32 percent, are black and Hispanic. 
In the 21 other classes that enroll the school’s remaining 447 students, only 80, or 18 percent, are white. 
The disparities are most apparent in the lower grades. 
Of the 24 students in Karen Engler’s kindergarten gifted class, one is black and three are Hispanic. Ayelet Cutler’s first-grade gifted class has 21 students, one of them black and two Hispanic. There are two blacks and two Hispanics among the 26 students in Athena Shapiro’s second-grade gifted class. 
On a recent morning, a line of Ms. Cutler’s students moved from the classroom to the corridor, ahead of the general education class of Linda Crews. A string of mostly white faces and then a line of mostly black and Hispanic ones walked down the hall of a school named for a New York politician who sought to end inequities in education: Alfred E. Smith. 
It was 11:25 a.m., and the classes wound their way to the cafeteria, a cavernous room at the school’s western edge. Once there, the children sat with those in their own class, each one at a separate long white table that, for a moment, froze the divisions. 
For critics of New York City’s gifted and talented programs, that image crystallizes what they say is a flawed system that reinforces racial separation in the city’s schools and contributes to disparities in achievement. 
They contend that gifted admissions standards favor middle-class children, many of them white or Asian, over black and Hispanic children who might have equal promise, and that the programs create castes within schools, one offered an education that is enriched and accelerated, the other getting a bare-bones version of the material. Because they are often embedded within larger schools, the programs bolster a false vision of diversity, these critics say, while reinforcing the negative stereotypes of class and race. 
Despite months of repeated requests, the city’s Education Department would not provide racial breakdowns of gifted and talented programs and the schools that house them.

That's a good lesson: stonewall.

In the long run, discrimination lawyers, as part of settlements of lawsuits, will make you publish data by race so they can trawl for disparate impact for future lawsuits. But, if you are NYC's Upper West Side, you can get away a lot longer with stonewalling than can some podunkville that the Obama Administration can push around.
But the programs tend to be in wealthier districts whose populations have fewer black and Hispanic children, and far more children qualify for them in affluent districts than in poorer ones. 
In District 3, which stretches for 63 blocks along Manhattan’s Upper West Side and includes P.S. 163, there are five gifted programs for elementary school children, including the Anderson School, one of five citywide programs. 
Farther north, for all of Districts 5 and 6, which are poorer and more heavily black and Hispanic, there are just two programs. 
And though programs are clustered in affluent neighborhoods around Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in northeastern Queens, the accelerated classes are absent from broad swaths of central Brooklyn and southeast Queens, where more families are poor and black or Hispanic. 
In District 7, in the South Bronx, there is not a single gifted program. The area, dominated by Hispanic and black residents, is among the poorest in the nation, with many people living below the official federal poverty mark. 
James H. Borland, a professor of education at Teachers College, said that looking at the gifted landscape in New York City suggests that one of two things must be true: either black and Hispanic children are less likely to be gifted, or there is something wrong with the way the city selects children for those programs. 
“It is well known in the education community that standardized tests advantage children from wealthier families and disadvantage children from poorer families,” Dr. Borland said. 
And the city’s efforts to fix the system seem to have only made it worse.
Until recently, each of the city’s 32 school districts could establish the classes as it saw fit and determine its own criteria for admission. They varied, but educators often took a holistic approach; they looked at evaluations from teachers and classroom observations, relying on tests only in part, by comparing the results of students from within a district. 
That changed in September 2008, when the Bloomberg administration ushered in admission based only on a cutoff score on two high-stakes tests given in one sitting — the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment. 
The overhaul was meant to standardize the admissions process and make it fairer.

Back in 2008, Half Sigma and I predicted that making gifted admissions fairer and more objective would reduce black and Hispanic numbers.
But the new tests decreased diversity, with children from the poorest districts offered a smaller share of kindergarten gifted slots after those were introduced, while pupils in the wealthiest districts got more.

Back then, I assumed that the Bloomberg Administration had been made stupid by political correctness. But, the more I think about it, the notion that Michael Bloomberg, one of the 20 richest people on Earth, is stupid is stupid. Isn't it more likely that Mayor Bloomberg wanted a system that would benefit the most prosperous and taxpaying whites and Asians and persuade them to not move to the suburbs when their children reached school age?

On the other hand, since nobody is allowed to explain that they want what they want, the system has lots of mindless churn in it.

This year, the department changed the process again, substituting a new test known as the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test — Second Edition, or NNAT2, for the Bracken exam. This is what children competing for placements next year started facing this month, in tests that began on Jan. 7.

Last April, I discussed this switchover.
Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, said data showed that a “more diverse range of kids” excelled on the new test because it was less rooted in test preparation and would allow educators to more accurately identify gifted pupils.

The new test "relies on abstract spatial thinking and largely eliminates language" because, as we all know, African Americans are at an unfair disadvantage with use of the English language, but are aces at abstract spatial thinking. That's why so many topologists are black, but practically no rappers.

Seriously, if you conceive of the Bloomberg Administration as essentially a conspiracy to drive African-Americans out of New York City, much that would otherwise be inexplicable begins to make sense.
... Urban districts were seen as using the programs to help prevent white flight from the schools, in essence offering a system within the system that was white-majority and focused on achievement. “There have been claims that gifted education resegregates the public schools,” Dr. Borland said. 
“Certainly there was concern with keeping middle-class families involved in public schools, and to the extent that we use tests to select kids for gifted programs, that tends to skew the programs toward children from wealthier, white families,” he added. 
... “I guess it is a question of, ‘How much diversity do you feel comfortable with?’ ” said the parent of one child in the gifted program, who did not want to be identified for fear of animosity from other parents. “Do I want him to be the only white kid in an all-black school? No. Would I like it if the racial mix was more proportionate? Yes, whatever the percentage of the makeup. That’s an honest answer, from my soul. Is it hypocritical for parents to say, ‘We’re sending our kids to public school,’ but they’re sending them to an all-white gifted and talented program? But it’s not our fault. We want the best for our children.” 
Carrie C. Reynolds, a co-president of the PTA, said parents seemed to be basing choices not on race but on the academic environment and on socioeconomic factors. 

The concept of disparate impact should only be applied to bad people, like New York City firemen, not to good people, like Upper West Side parents.
“If you were upper income, well educated, you want your kid to have a more enriched education,” she said. “I think it is more economics than race. They tend to go hand-in-hand in New York City, but I certainly know families that have made a different choice, that are here at this school, that are white and are not in gifted and talented.” 
But one afternoon at the school, Ms. Lindner, the fifth-grade teacher, said she was “always surprised” when she saw more than two or three white children in her general education classes. 
As a parent herself, and a resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she said, “there’s no way I’d put my kid in a general-education class here, no way, because it’s right next to the project and all the kids in general education come from the projects.” 

She said her experience was that many of the children in her general education classes were at grade level or below and did not get the same support from their parents that the children in the gifted classes got. “They’re tougher kids,” she said of the general education students in the school. “They’re very street-savvy. They don’t have the background; their parents are hard on them but don’t know what to do with them.” 
Andi Velasquez, who as the school’s parent coordinator has helped lead tours of the school for prospective parents over the last two years, said she had occasionally heard very “vocal” parents expressing surprise in seeing even a few black and Hispanic children in a gifted class. 
“They say, ‘It has too many minorities to be a G&T class; that can’t be a G&T class,’ ” said Ms. Velasquez, 48, who is white and is married to a Hispanic man from Colombia, and whose two children attended the dual-language program at P.S. 87. ...
SANDRA M. ECHOLS, 46, a single mother who is black, has sent all three of her children to the gifted classes at P.S. 163, beginning with her oldest son who, in 1998, when he was entering fourth grade, gained admission to the program. 
“It is an elitist program,” Ms. Echols said. “They don’t advertise it the way it should be advertised, but I’m glad I was savvy enough to navigate the system and give my children what they need.” 

Los Angeles isn't quite as privileged as New York in terms of immunity from disparate impact persecution, but that's how the magnet system works in L.A.. As I explained in VDARE in 2007, to get your kid into the magnet middle or high school of your choice, they have to first be rejected when applying to a magnet elementary school. So, you have to pick an extremely popular magnet elementary school where the odds are there won't be room in order to build up "points." It's such a counter-intuitive method that few people figure it out from reading about it in the official instructions. We only figured it out from listening in to other baseball parents talk about it.

70 comments:

DaveinHackensack said...

There's something odd about the UWS's demographics. 63% black "reflects the flavor of the neighborhood"? I don't know what the actual numbers are, but the flavor of the neighborhood seems decidedly more vanilla. I've been there on warm days when the only blacks I saw on the street were the occassional bike messenger, or Carribean nanny pushing white kids in a stroller, and nearly everyone else was white or Asian yuppies. Maybe the blacks who live there hangout elsewhere? I once saw a few boisterous black teens sit in the outdoor seating area of an UWS cafe until a hostess came out and told them it was closed. Then I saw them seat a white party a few minutes later. Maybe that sort of thing is common in the neighborhood?

Anonymous said...

The concept of disparate impact should only be applied to bad people, like New York City firemen, not to good people, like Upper West Side parents.

You know, if the GOP had any serious, coherent political leadership, then they would hammer home this point 24x7 from now until the end of time.

And the beauty of it is that this message would be a double-edged sword: Not only would it help to lure in the votes of the upper Midwest & central Northeast White Catholics, who still refuse to vote GOP, but it would also drive a wedge between the Scots-Irish puppeteers and their low-IQ NAM marionettes [the Negroes and the Mexicans and the mixed-race Carribean Islanders] who constitue the modern DEM party.

Jesse Helms, in his race against Harvey Gantt, back in 1990, was the only politician I've ever known to have had the gonads to pull it off, however.

Joe Six-Pack said...

There is a BBC documentary about NYC in the 1970s.

The most interesting part for me was the role of Rupert Murdoch in supporting Ed Koch mayoral campaign. Ed was the most fiscally conservative Democrat.

The Documentary made very clear that NYC was on the road to ruin in the mid-70s.

Anonymous said...

The author of the article only accounts for 96% of the total student population of 652:

27% white: 176
6% Asians: 40
63% blacks/Hispanics: 410
96% total = 626

Assuming a normal distribution, a SD of 15, and a mean IQ of 100, 107 and 85, for whites, Asians, and blacks/Hispanics, respectively, how many students in each of the populations above could be predicted to have an IQ above 100, versus the actual number enrolled in the "gifted" class?

predicted white: 88 / actual: 97 (+9 more than predicted)
predicted Asians: 27 / actual: 31 (+4 more than predicted)
predicted blacks/Hispanics: 65 / actual b/H: 65 (exactly as predicted)

Anonymous said...

“Certainly there was concern with keeping middle-class families involved in public schools,..."

You see, it's not their [the elites'] fault; the devil made them do it. Just love the way they blame it on the middle-class.

Anonymous said...

In reading this article I came across this gem: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/247908gb#page-6 evidently there is a better way to identify gifted and talented students via DISCOVER (discovering strengths and capabilities through observation while allowing for varied ethnic responses).
The study is just...bizarre.

Silas said...

"As I explained in VDARE in 2007, to get your kid into the magnet middle or high school of your choice, they have to first be rejected when applying to a magnet elementary school. So, you have to pick an extremely popular magnet elementary school where the odds are there won't be room in order to build up "points.""


Its an obscenity that you have to play these games to get a fair shot at something that should be based entirely upon merit. I never understand why the hell America put up with these damned fool liberals who were far in the minority (in terms of numbers) to begin with, coming in and screwing around with things that have such significant impacts, especially when it comes to their kids.

The real distinction should be in making schools that cater to the fools who proclaim that they want to 'enrich' themselves and their kids with diversity vs. those who want their kids to have a normal experience and be placed into tracks based upon merit.

Make 2 types of schools in each area- For those that scream for diversity, many of whom hail from the upper crust, let them send their kids to a school where all of the minority students go. That'll solve their demands, and it will stop the whining of minorities that they aren't being put into schools that are as good as whitey's.

The rest of the white kids who have sane parents, can go to the second school where their parents, being rational, can relax knowing that their kids are safe and able to learn in peace.

Darwin's Sh*tlist said...

...[S]ince nobody is allowed to explain that they want what they want, the system has lots of mindless churn in it.

Thought Laundering.

Anonymous said...

How many of the 'white' kids are Jewish?

anony-mouse said...

It's not 'Half Sigma'. It's 'Lion of the Blogosphere'.

Chicago said...

It seems like a complicated rat race. The point is to avoid having ones children fall victim to other peoples politics. Racial politics appears to have been the one major reason for the destabilization and ruination of the public school systems throughout the country, thanks to people like the Kennedys and other hypocrites.

a Newsreader said...

The new test "relies on abstract spatial thinking and largely eliminates language" because, as we all know, African Americans are at an unfair disadvantage with use of the English language, but are aces at abstract spatial thinking. That's why so many topologists are black, but practically no rappers.

Indeed, but topology also requires high verbal and mathematical ability.

Perhaps this "abstract spatial thinking" is meant to correlate with the types of visualization skills that help the best basketball and football players.

Anonymous said...

You need a label for all these posts about how the elite are doing things which would be racist if non-elite whites did them - NY kindergarten admissions, Chicago housing etc.

"Do as I say, not as I do" or "for thee but not for me" ?

alexis said...

Wouldn't it be great if there were some kind of encounter meeting called "Heartlanders talk/New Yorkers listen", where the marginalized get "space" for their 200 million affinity group to have one hour to disrupt the elite echo chamber?

Anonymous said...

"But one afternoon at the school, Ms. Lindner, the fifth-grade teacher, said she was “always surprised” when she saw more than two or three white children in her general education classes. 
As a parent herself, and a resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she said, “there’s no way I’d put my kid in a general-education class here, no way, because it’s right next to the project and all the kids in general education come from the projects.” 

I hope Ms. Lindner has tenure. But speaking so bluntly signals that she is from a special group that is allowed to speak freely, if her name was Ms. McAnybody, her comment would have been sent via a dog whistle or made anonymously.

Anonymous said...

"And they are mostly white.".
This is why the Scots Irish never lobby for their own box on the census; they can hide their privileges (and hypocrisy) under the "white" heading. But, if you say anything disparaging about the Upper West Side Whites in general, the Scots Irish will hear the whistle loud and clear.

Anonymous said...

None of this would have surprised Malcom X. And no, white liberals who are at the top of the political and financial establishment aren't stupid in any way.
Gloria

Anonymous said...

"they managed to almost wreck the world's most important city"

Sweet mother of Jesus I am disappointed in you, Steve Sailor. In retrospect the most important place in the world a half century ago was Silicon Valley, Ca. Even in the New York metropolitan area places like Long Island (Grumman Aerospace), Upstate New York(IBM,Kodak,Sperry-Rand-Univac and others), Suburban New Jersey (Pharmaceuticals) were more important that New York City which was described as the hole in the doughnut.

One thing to think about is the financial bailouts of NYC industries. They remind me of attempts to keep Detroit alive during what was assumed to be just another cyclical downturn. These days nobody even uses the phrase Big Three.

Nick Diaz said...

@Steve Sailer

"In their lack of hypocrisy, they managed to almost wreck the world's most important city."

London, Hong Kong and Xangai all surpass NYC in stock exchange net trading value.

Paris, London, Berlin, Turin and Barcelona all surpass NYC in number of cultural attractions, important theatres and relevance to the World of the arts.

Mexico City, São Paulo, Tokyo and Mumbai all surpass NYC in sheer population size.

It is amazing how your über-nationalist American chest-thumping never ends. I dont think you comprehend how arrogant and yet at the same time pathetic and petty your bragadocio is.

Urban Mom said...

Is it really so important to keep these middle class people in the city? I stay in the city pretty much because my kids benefit from special treatment, and I'm not sure it's justified. (I'm not talking about having gifted programs with admissions tests, I don't have a problem with that. I'm talking about e.g. keeping class sizes low in gifted classes while underperforming schools are more and more over crowded every year.)

I can't really point to what I do for the city that is so great. I pay taxes, but they would get the payroll tax even if I lived in the suburbs, and proprty taxes are quite low. I don't generate that much sales tax for the city, since I'd rather drive out to the suburbs to shop or use Amazon than deal with parking downtown. Okay, by occupying my house I do prevent it from falling down or turning into a crack den. But is that valuable enough to justify the city catering to people like me in a way they wouldn't cater to other residents?

Cail Corishev said...

Why don't they just put all the kids in the gifted class, so they can all be gifted?

I'm a race realist who was bored to death in school because we didn't have gifted programs back then, but I can't say I'm a fan of them. Public school (if it exists at all) should be like public housing or government cheese: provide a base minimum of education that a person needs to function in society -- reading, writing, arithmetic, some basic life skills like balancing a checkbook -- and let everyone who wants more than that take care of it himself.

Using taxpayer money to teach calculus to smart kids is like picking out people with sensitive palates and giving them lots of food stamps they can use on fine wines.

Thomas O. Meehan said...

Your excellent piece also points out a phenomenon that I've witnessed in the suburbs.

Urban elites are less inclined to found private alternatives to public education. Once in the suburbs they seek to get preferential educational services within public institutions. Getting one's children private school attention on the public fisc at the expense of the whole community seems to be trait they carry with them.

When these people move en mass to our suburbs, Their demands on local educational infrastructure drive up property taxes to a degree that locals must flee.

To add insult to injury, many of the new transplanted elites end up working in the bloated educational bureaucracies they create. So in a sense they actually get paid to bankrupt their neighbors.

The only corrective to this is to shame these people into starting their own private academies. Of course, this may be asking too much of such people, given their backgrounds.

Anonymous said...

The ruling class are a bunch of hypocrites, yawn.

Great article though

Pat Boyle said...

I read Jensen's article in the 1969 edition of the Harvard Educational Review. I read it when it came out.

It seemed well reasoned and thoughtful. I was convinced. Blacks were always going to be hard to teach because they had inherent learning disadvantages - probably genetic.

I've been waiting now 45 years for the rest of the world to catch up. I expected that it would take maybe twenty years for the notion of black genetic differences to fully take hold in the public mind. Wrong.

There must have been ten thousand media articles since then that have promoted other often fanciful theories. The reality has always been simple and obvious.

If you assume that all peoples, races, and ethnic groups are identical in their capacity for thought, then the world is messy and confusing. You are haunted by phantoms like "the legacy of Jim Crow" for explanations. You interpret every little factoid of white and Asian superiority as evidence of a hidden racist conspiracy.

But if you simply adopt the opposite view, that there are differences, then everything like school performance, poverty rates, crime rates and state of Detroit falls nicely into place.

If you were an atheist in twelfth century Europe, I imagine you would keep your tongue and wait for enlightenment and tolerance to spread. But you would not be heartened to know just how long it would be before you could safely speak your mind.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

'upper west siders' also allow Eruvim strung up on publicly owned light posts polls, etc.
Don't know how..that violates'separation of 'church and state'... the scot irish also succeeded in blatantly banning Christians from using public schools for meetings on Sunday- saying it would make a 'hostile' environment for non Christians (*more likely for hateful scots irish)

Anonymous said...

Steve, I have close friends that live in Venice. They are non diverse and can't afford the privates. I have basically told them they need to basically move to Agoura Hills or San Marino in order to get a great school system. But based on your post, you seem to know of ways to get in to good no cost charter schools in the Venice area. is there a blog of some sort where this is discussed where parents can figure out which schools are safe and good and how to get sons and daughters in to them in the venice area

Anonymous said...

http://listverse.com/2012/04/11/top-10-most-notorious-insanity-defense-cases/

Anonymous said...

NYT reporter Al Baker buries the data in a way that forces you to reconstruct the natural frequencies, the bastard. But what I get from the data he does provide is

PS163 total: N=652
Asian: N=39=6%
White: N=176=27%
Black & Hispanic: N=411=63%

PS163 gifted: N=205
Asian: N=31=15%
White: N=97=47%
Black & Hispanic: N=65=32%

Unsurprising implication: Asians qualify as gifted at a high rate, followed by Whites, followed by Blacks+Hispanics. [Why does Baker lump them together???]

Surprising implication: the corresponding rates at which kids qualify as gifted -- Asian=31/39=79%, White=97/176=55%, B&H=65/411=16% -- imply* that this school admits you to their "gifted" program at a cutoff of IQ=98!

I thought NYC had a cutoff of 97%ile (IQ=128) or higher! (Baker, 10/29/12) It's all very strange.

-SWPH

* Under standard assumptions: IQ for Blacks+Hispanics = -1SD, Asians = +0.5SD; population sample reflects general populations; blah blah blah.

Anonymous said...

The other gem from this article is that the bureaucrat (Dr. Pepe) claims that white parents value diversity and were drawn to PS163 because of it, but the white parents themselves say they hate diversity -- and "fear" speaking openly about their concerns. A (presumably) white teacher agrees with them!

Do bureaucrats ever actually talk to their customers? Do they permit them to speak honestly? Do they listen?

-SWPH

Anonymous said...

Aaron Swartz, an Internet savant, committed suicide in Crown Heights on this dreary weekend. He was 26. I had never heard of him before today.
Being an indefatigable Wikipedia Fan Boy, I was especially saddened (and humbled) to read this piece he wrote when he was 19:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Anonymous said...

It helps that NY is Jewish-dominated. No one dares take the fight to Jews. If NY were wasp-dominated, it might be different.

Lesson: If white urbanites want protection, hand over power to Jewish elites. Jews can get away with anything. Under the Jewish umbrella, white liberal urban privilege can thrive.

Anonymous said...

Them riggaz sho is baaaaad.

Anonymous said...

"Seriously, if you conceive of the Bloomberg Administration as essentially a conspiracy to drive African-Americans out of New York City, much that would otherwise be inexplicable begins to make sense."

Yup.

Anonymous said...

Let's unleash Django on the Upper West Side.

Anonymous said...

how dare you ask SWPL liberals to live up to their own standards, that's for flyover racists...

Anonymous said...

Upper West Side Story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exGJsv6ZNlo

When you're a Jew,
You're a Jew all the way
From the first jet you flew
To the last goy you slay.

Anonymous said...

Jetsets vs the Darks.

Steve Sailer said...

Have your Venice friends Google

Sandra Tsingh Loh Magnet Yenta

Auntie Analogue said...


NIMBYpocrisy writ large.

Anonymous said...

Seriously, if you conceive of the Bloomberg Administration as essentially a conspiracy to drive African-Americans out of New York City, much that would otherwise be inexplicable begins to make sense
bloomberg is one of the most corrupt mayors in history, totally covered by his scots irish bretheren the amount of public land and public assets he has turned over to his co-ethnics is staggering.

Cail Corishev said...

"Do bureaucrats ever actually talk to their customers?"

Bureaucrats don't have customers; they have subjects.

Anonymous said...

In retrospect the most important place in the world a half century ago was Silicon Valley, Ca. Even in the New York metropolitan area places like Long Island (Grumman Aerospace), Upstate New York(IBM,Kodak,Sperry-Rand-Univac and others), Suburban New Jersey (Pharmaceuticals) were more important that New York City which was described as the hole in the doughnut.

Yeah, it's always been rather shocking to me that just about NOTHING of any significance in any important human endeavor has come out of NYC in my lifetime.

Off the top of my head, I'd say that literally the last truly important human event in NYC would have been Glenn Gould coming down from Toronto, in May of 1981, to re-record the Goldberg Variations.

And that was more than three decades ago - nowadays, quality recording equipment is so ubiquitous that he wouldn't have even needed to have left home.

EDIT TO ADD: Just remembered that Jon Manasse sometimes comes down from Eastman, to teach at Julliard, so when he's in town, I guess they've got that going for them.

Anonymous said...


Unsurprising implication: Asians qualify as gifted at a high rate, followed by Whites, followed by Blacks+Hispanics. [Why does Baker lump them together???]

Surprising implication: the corresponding rates at which kids qualify as gifted -- Asian=31/39=79%, White=97/176=55%, B&H=65/411=16% -- imply* that this school admits you to their "gifted" program at a cutoff of IQ=98!


Yeah, I noticed that, too. I mean, come on, 79% of Asian and 55% of white kids are not gifted. The problem is that if you do it like we do in Texas, and cut it off at the 85%ile, then the program will be more heavily Asian with just a few token NAMs. Here we just give NAM's 15 extra points for being NAM's and move on with it. As it is, those parents of the 65 black kids are probably just smart enough and easily aggressive enough to demand the program continue. Others may just hide behind them saying that here you see them really making some progress and now it is going to be taken away! Maybe they will redefine gifted even lower, like IQ 95, so they can trumpet even more success and diversity and get even more "middle class" parents involved in public schools.

Anonymous said...


Yeah, it's always been rather shocking to me that just about NOTHING of any significance in any important human endeavor has come out of NYC in my lifetime.


Bravo.

I told a friend who works at AEI that growth in the financial sector is not growth. Likewise achievement in the financial sector is not achievement. It is just usury.

Anonymous said...

Ms. Lindner certainly does not mince her words. Will she be allowed to keep her job?It seems insane to speak so truthfully to a reporter.

Anonymous said...

New York is only important for banking and the MSM both of which are almost entirely malign.

Soldier Dan said...

"London, Hong Kong and Xangai all surpass NYC in stock exchange net trading value.

Paris, London, Berlin, Turin and Barcelona all surpass NYC in number of cultural attractions, important theatres and relevance to the World of the arts.

Mexico City, São Paulo, Tokyo and Mumbai all surpass NYC in sheer population size.

It is amazing how your über-nationalist American chest-thumping never ends. I dont think you comprehend how arrogant and yet at the same time pathetic and petty your bragadocio is."



Nick my boy, for someone who complains so much about people thinking negatively about modern immigration (esp. the hispanic variety), it is truly astounding how blind you are to how much your own comments refute your own views. NYC used to be a leader in these categories (with the possible exception of size, but who really gives three fs and a damn about that), but has changed since then. What difference has occurred? Well, a major one has been the influence of immigration of NAMs.

Anonymous said...

Of course NY is the "world's most important city", it is the biggest city in the most important country in the world - that's my view. Sure the SF area has been more significant in my lifetime. Many people prefer the LA life and weather. Massachusetts, California, and, I feel, Pennsylvania outclass us in higher education. I wish we were #1 in everything - it would be great for us, but maybe not for the country as a whole. Geographic distribution of talent benefits us in the event of a hurricane, earthquake, terrorist strike, famine- name your calamity.

Cail Corishev said...

Unsurprising implication: Asians qualify as gifted at a high rate, followed by Whites, followed by Blacks+Hispanics. [Why does Baker lump them together???]

To keep/encourage them thinking of themselves as a united voting bloc, of course. If they all think of themselves as NAMs, then even if their voting patterns average out at about 80% Democrat (halfway between 90% for blacks and 70% for Hispanics), that's a huge gain for the Dems, especially after they amnesty another 11 million. They'll do anything they can to make Hispanics more comfortable being allied with blacks.

Average Joe said...

I think one of the reasons why this sort of thing can happen in the Upper West Side of Manhattan is because of its large "Scotch-Irish" population. Places with fewer "Scotch-Irish" people are generally not going to get away with this sort of thing.

Average Joe said...

You know, if the GOP had any serious, coherent political leadership, then they would hammer home this point 24x7 from now until the end of time.

What? And risk alienating all those millions of blacks who are really Republicans who just don't know it yet?

Anonymous said...

"Paris, London, Berlin, Turin and Barcelona all surpass NYC in number of cultural attractions, important theatres and relevance to the World of the arts."

Turin and Barcelona over Rome or Florence in art and architecture?

I always thought Rome was above Turin in art and architecture attractions.

Maybe Turin and Barcelona are more important for modern times.

Anonymous said...

"..were upper income, well educated.."

The old school class/caste systems had one nice feature - They admitted they were there.

Deckin said...

A couple of commenters are around this point, noting that too many Whites and Asians are admitted than their mean IQs would seem to dictate.

But this is strong evidence that they're using not IQ distributions broken out by race, but rather the IQ distribution of the student population in NYC as a whole. Given that, it's no surprise the numbers you see. 55% percent of White kids are in the top 10% or whatever of all kids in NYC sounds totally unsurprising.

But this leads to something else. I think Steve isn't giving Bloomberg enough credit. This strategy of using Gifted Programs is not just a means of keeping intelligent White and Asian parents in the city, it's a way of drawing in those kinds of parents from the suburbs.

Think of it, if you're in the suburbs (all my evidence comes from the Bay Area), the Gifted Program will draw from the distribution of students there, heavily White/Asian. White parents (and even Asians) can't guarantee access to a Gifted Program, though they will be in a generally decent school.

But move to NYC, and you can basically guarantee acceptance to the Gifted Program against the minority population there and you get to stay in the Big City! Free public school and great culture; that's a nice draw for lots of young striving parents.

Scrutineer said...

Nick Diaz: London, Hong Kong and Xangai all surpass NYC in stock exchange net trading value.

Data + link, please.

William Boot said...

"London, Hong Kong and Xangai all surpass NYC in stock exchange net trading value."

Uh, no they don't. Not even close. The volume of trading on the NYSE and Nasdaq combined are greater than the combined trading volume of all other world exchanges:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/166143/largest-stock-exchanges-worldwide-by-trading-volume/

"Paris, London, Berlin, Turin and Barcelona all surpass NYC in number of cultural attractions, important theatres and relevance to the World of the arts."

Uh, that's nearly as moronic. London beats New York, nearly across the board, culturally. The rest of those cities are not even in the same league.

Museums? The Louvre is a better art museum than any in NY and the Orsay is probably a better second-best museum than the Frick, but New York dominates after that. Moma demolishes the Pompidou. And the combo of the Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, and Hispanic Society crush the smaller museums of Paris. And, of course, New York has a major science museum, which Paris lacks.

No other city comes close. Dallas-Fort Worth has better museums than Barcelona and Turin.

Architecture? If you're talking about general quality of buildings, all the other cities win, simply because they were built before architecture self destructed after WWI.

If you're talking about great buildings, only London and Paris win. I love Barcelona but a few important buildings by Gaudi and a few more better ones by Domenech do not come close to matching New York, which has more significant buildings from 1850 to present than any other city.

Theater? New York has more of that than all the cities you mentioned (save London), combined.

How about music by sales? Again, London is in the hunt here, depending on how far back you want to go, but other than than, New York beats the rest combined.

Modern art, particularly among living artists? New York sales are higher than all the other cities, by far. See the excellent "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark" for an explanation of just how dominant NYC is in modern art.

CharlotteNC said...

Did the minority students have to score the same, or less, than white students to gain entrance into Gifted and Talented classes?

I was a student in the Charlotte Mecklenburg (North Carolina) school system in the late 1970s.
There were four different attainment levels for entrance into Gifted and Talented classes back then.
White males had to score the highest, followed by white females, black females, and finally black males.

Silver said...

Uh, no they don't. Not even close. The volume of trading on the NYSE and Nasdaq combined are greater than the combined trading volume of all other world exchanges:

Just as funny was his attempt to sound knowledgeable with the use of the pseudo-specialist phrase "net trading volume."

And Nick, "most important city in the world" is not a ridiculous way to refer to New York, but it's more likely Sailer's ironic reference to New Yorkers' view of themselves than a deep-seated belief of Sailer's.

ATBOTL said...

The question is why is the mass media not talking about the increasing leeway on the most sensitive issues being afforded to the Metropole?

Open racial profiling and violation of constitutional rights on a mass scale, a private illegal worldwide spy network, 99% segregated Scotch Irish neighborhoods with private security patrols to keep the schvatzes out and so on.

TH said...

In "global city" rankings, only NYC and London get the highest rating. You can of course always squabble about the criteria, but they seem reasonable enough.

Anonymous said...

this school admits you to their 'gifted' program at a cutoff of IQ=98!

Yes, I noticed this too. At first sight, it seems rather ridiculous that over 30% (205 out of 652) of the students are considered "gifted", when the usual percentage of consensus is between 2% and 5%. But it is actually a brilliant plan, as Steve alluded to in this great post. By placing almost a third of the students in "gifted" classes, and counting on the sheer force of the normal distribution curve, as it pertains to IQ, Bloomberg guarantees that at least 50% of those studends will be white; at the same time, the percentage of black students is forced down to its "natural" level, about 16% (since only 16% of blacks have equal or greater IQ than 50% of whites).

This plan should be put in place wherever a high level of "diversity" is found.

International Jew said...

That PS 163 is only a block away from a public housing project (the Frederick Douglass Houses) of over 4000 residents that few of us would enjoy walking past. So let's give those white parents (however hypocritical for having probably supported Obama) some credit for sending their kids to that school at all. Might not be so smart in fact; the kids might be safe in their gifted class but the hallways, bathrooms, stairwells and entrances might be dicey.

Also, if those parents seem politically effective, that could have a lot to do with the fact they live in a dense and walkable city where they have many frequent informal encounters with their neighbors and thus opportunities to share information and organize. Compare that to a typical car-oriented suburb where even if you know everyone within 100 yards that's still not many people, and as everyone comes and goes by car you rarely see anyone spontaneously.

Anonymous said...

It's like Israel gets to do whatever it wants.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I noticed this too. At first sight, it seems rather ridiculous that over 30% (205 out of 652) of the students are considered "gifted", when the usual percentage of consensus is between 2% and 5%. But it is actually a brilliant plan, as Steve alluded to in this great post. By placing almost a third of the students in "gifted" classes, and counting on the sheer force of the normal distribution curve, as it pertains to IQ, Bloomberg guarantees that at least 50% of those studends will be white; at the same time, the percentage of black students is forced down to its "natural" level, about 16% (since only 16% of blacks have equal or greater IQ than 50% of whites).

More political manipulation of so-called "gifted" programs. I am willing to bet that most of the real gifted kids (IQ 160+) of gifted parents are being homeschooled - most likely for their own protection, in addition to the educational benefits.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 1/14/13, 1:30 AM:
At first sight, it seems rather ridiculous that over 30% (205 out of 652) of the students are considered "gifted", when the usual percentage of consensus is between 2% and 5%. But it is actually a brilliant plan...

I agree that this is clever (and necessary) in any place where whites & Asians confront NAM hordes, especially given IJ's observation that PS163's NAMs in particular come from the projects.

Shhh. Don't tell SPLC.

-SWPH

Anonymous said...

Deckin:
they're using not IQ distributions broken out by race, but rather the IQ distribution of the student population in NYC as a whole. Given that, it's no surprise the numbers you see. 55% percent of White kids are in the top 10% or whatever of all kids in NYC sounds totally unsurprising.

I agree with Deckin's judgement about the benefits of gifted programs - or indeed any program, like charters or magnets, that have the effect of re-segregating schools in NAM-heavy areas.

But I was unclear when I presented my facts: it's not just whites & Asians that are getting a leg up on gifted designations. Hispanics and Blacks are, too. The cutoff I posited of IQ=98 best fit the data for all three groups:

Group / Assumed Average IQ / Predicted Pct / Actual Pct
Asian / 107.5 / 74% / 79%
White / 100 / 55% / 55%
Black&Hispanic / 85 / 19% / 16%

So PS163 is clearly practicing some sort of Gifted Affirmative Action, or Defining Gifted Down, across all three groups.

(Though note that I chose the lowest estimate of combined Black & Hispanic average IQ (85), and still the actuals come out one-sixth lower than predicted. If it were a more credible IQ=87 then we'd predict 23% - half again the actual - to reach even the IQ=98 threshold. So IJ may be onto something, that the NAMs around PS163 are even dumber than usual.)

-SWPH

ATBOTL said...


"Also, if those parents seem politically effective, that could have a lot to do with the fact they live in a dense and walkable city where they have many frequent informal encounters with their neighbors and thus opportunities to share information and organize. Compare that to a typical car-oriented suburb where even if you know everyone within 100 yards that's still not many people, and as everyone comes and goes by car you rarely see anyone spontaneously."

They way UWSiders live is the opposite of the atomized, hyper individualist, homogenized, red state exurban model. The former is grossly superior in building political, financial and cultural power.

Charlesz Martel said...

Everybody, I think Steve was referring to New York City in the 60s and 70s when he made his comment about it being the most important city in the country. He is absolutely right about what happened.
I attended PS 6 at that time. For those who know New York City, this was considered the absolute best public school in the entire city at the time. ( if not the country!)I went to the IG classes, this meant "intellectually gifted". You simply would not believe what happened when bussing actually came along.
5'10" black sixth grade girls physically assaulting female teachers while screaming "honky bitch" while rich white kids cowered in fear. We had quite simply never seen anything like it. We had all been told that being sent to the Principal's office, and having something on your permanent record, was about the worst thing that happened to us in school. Boy, we learned fast!!
From what my parents told me, I learned of a whole bunch of parents screaming for more integration of the school while they kept their kids in private schools. My problem was solved because my family left the city. But every return to New York saw it getting worse and worse and worse. Steve, go check out statistics for the great blackout of 1965 versus the great blackout of 1977 – tells the whole story right there.
Mayor Lindsay allowed his friends to loot the city, as Bloomberg apparently does( see an earlier post- I don't keep up with NYC politics- too depressing). By the late 70's NY's decline was obvious to all. A succession of idiot Mayors kept making things worse, until Koch and Giuliani took charge. But getting blacks out was key. I believe that Manhattan now has the lowest percentage of blacks under six years old that it has had in 5O years.
It is, indeed, astonishing how people have managed to not see the obvious cause and effect for the last 50 years.

FredR said...

"There's something odd about the UWS's demographics."

There are a few projects in the UWS (I think there's one on 88th and one down somewhere in the 60s), but generally it's a pretty white (or, if you prefer, Jewish) neighborhood.

Anonymous said...

I didn't realize this when I first posted, but it's shocking:

Principled gifted-ed professionals typically set the cutoff around IQ=130. This of course yields gifted programs with far more Asians & Whites than Blacks & Hispanics, even in districts where the general school population has more Bs & Hs. The result is a comfortably segregated gifted program for the small number of kids who test in, but the problem is that it also leaves the majority of Ws & As out in the cold of Namville. That won't fly in NYC.

But taking a hint from La Griffe, even with a fair test you could engineer any ethnic mix you want simply by adjusting the cutoff.
a) Want racial equity? Set the cutoff low.
b) Want the fewest NAMS? Set it high. Simple...
c) But if an Evil Genius with forbidden knowledge of HBD were to set out deliberately and secretly to abuse GATE in order to create a shadow school system with the maximum degree of segregation of As&Ws from Bs&Hs, he could do that too simply by adjusting the cutoff. It turns out that in order to create a shadow public school system with the maximum absolute gap in enrollment between Whites&Asians and Blacks&Hispanics, (that is, simultaneously the largest number of As&Ws and the smallest number of Bs&Hs) you'd want to choose the cutoff in the mid-to-upper nineties.*

Now compare which model better fits the observed cutoff (IQ=98) at PS163:

the Principled Professional Cutoff (130)
or
the Evil Genius Cutoff (96)

Voila. Lots of happy W & A parents, and no one's the wiser. Plausible deniability is maintained: "Oh, Reverend Bacon, we'd just love to have a more diverse gifted program - but, well, a test is a test and the process is completely objective." Snicker.

-SWPH



* Let A(x) and B(x) be the number of students enrolled from groups A and B at cutoff x. Assume A(x)=erf(x,meanA) and B(x)=erf(x,meanB). The absolute gap in enrollment G(x)=A(x)-B(x) reaches maximum where A'=B', or norm(x,meanA)=norm(x,meanB), which happens at x*=(meanA+meanB)/2. If we lump together W&A and B&H we get meanA=103 and meanB=89, thus x*=96.