Part of what makes Stuy such a bad example in these debates is that anyone that has gone there knows Stuy is just not built for anything other than the kids that qualify via the entrance exam. It's a giant, highly competitive public school where your grades are calculated at end of semester on a hundred point scale to the hundredth decimal (I still remember comparing my 96.36 one semester to someone's 96.83... argh!! Must try harder.). There are incredible teachers, and incompetent teachers protected by the teacher's union. There is very little support for the students. It is sink or swim, and if you can't swim no one hears the ripples as you sink under the water. In other words, Stuy is too late. The work needs to come earlier, or you risk changing Stuy and making it a shadow of what it is today for the kids that not only figure out how to swim there, but become torpedoes.
Stuy is New York’s most prestigious high school because it admits the highest-performing students as determined entirely by scores on an objective, unbiased test.
Seats at Stuy are not allocated by race. They are not given out through a subjective process that can be influenced by politics or favoritism or money.
The kids who got in did the best, and the kids who did not do the best cannot get in, no matter how much rich parents or woke politicians want to corrupt the fair and objective admissions competition.
People like Lincoln Restler think Stuy is prestigious for reasons other than the fact that it has a rigorous objective admissions standard. He thinks the prestige these kids earned through their excellence can be redistributed to the students who are not the best that he would prefer to pretend are the best.
But these students are not prestigious because they go to Stuy; Stuy is prestigious because these students go there. And if different students — inferior students— went there, then Stuy would no longer be the school that is a magnet for the smartest kids in New York and its prestige and reputation would dissipate rapidly, just like the University of California system’s has.
Or maybe Restler knows this, and he just wants to destroy Stuy, because he wants to prevent these students’ talent from being measured and identified, so they can be scattered into low-performing schools where they will languish instead of having their talent cultivated.
Regardless, his ideology of racial grievance and destruction is a monstrous evil masquerading as “social justice,” and it will not be tolerated.