Submitted by Bob Kantor, Jul 11, 2007 14:20

To assume that, absent discrimination, all ethnic and racial groups should perform the same academically is to assume that all ethnic and racial groups are identical in attitudes, culture, aptitudes, aspirations, etc. Does anyone really believe this? Has there ever been a human society in which different ethnic and racial groups exhibited the same pattern of behavior and achieved equal outcomes?

In New York and elsewhere in the country, some groups (e.g., Chinese and Jews) on the whole perform brilliantly academically, regardless of external circumstances; other groups (e.g., blacks and Puerto Ricans) on the whole perform poorly, also regardless of external circumstances. In a city where Asians constitute a small minority of the population, the student body at the Bronx High School of Science, an elite public school, is about 60 percent Asian. Do Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein think that this superb performance is some sort of fluke having nothing to do with the attributes of the Asians themselves? How do they propose to get black students to perform at this level?

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