Last night, while these parents gathered in Manhattan to raucously protest a plan to get more black/Latino students into NYC’s elite PUBLIC high schools, I was in BK with @Teens_Tk_Charge, a group of blk/brown students demanding educational equality and integration.
I wish these two groups could have been in the same room, so that the progressive parents arguing their already advantaged kids deserve exclusive access to the best public high schools in the city could look the children they would deny this same privilege to in the eyes. 
It is a jarring juxtaposition between those who want to maintain inequality and those who want to expand opportunity. It is these parents, who would take great offense if you suggested they don’t believe in racial inequality, who show why NYC has never desegregated its schools.
I think about the NYU professor who spoke out against a plan that would let top 7% of middle school students into the elite high school. These aren’t Trump voters.
How does one claim to believe in equality and then fight to sustain an apartheid system that in some cases admits 4 percent Latino/black students in a school system that is 70 percent black and Latino?
@Teens_Tk_Charge told stories of studying for the the SHSAT for a year because that’s when they’d learned of it, only to find out other kids had been groomed to this test since elementary school, of having all the hard work they’d done their whole lives negated by a single test.
They talked about opening the envelope and seeing the rejections and that sense of realization that all the years they’d been told if they’d work hard, they’d have the same opportunities as anyone else, that their zip code did not matter. They talked about feeling inferior.
While these often very economically and socially privileged ADULTS were arguing to maintain exclusive advantage for their own children, these KIDS were fighting for equality for ALL kids. Whose side will you be on?
