NYC's war on academic excellence

“I also have a dream.”

This rallying cry, on a sign held by an Asian-American mom at a protest last week against liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to radically transform New York City's public schools, says it all. A new civil rights struggle in education has exploded — yet the national media and the usual celebrity voices for equality and justice are nowhere to be found.

While student “Dreamers” here illegally garner bleeding-heart front-page stories and nightly news dispatches, the high-achieving children of legal immigrants from Asia are getting shafted by far-left Democrats. And it's all in the perverted name of “diversity.”

De Blasio is hell-bent on destroying equal opportunity and merit-based admissions because the results are not equally distributed according to his social-engineering agenda. The Big Apple's famed specialized schools, such as the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, require an academic entrance exam. It's a highly competitive process in which tens of thousands of students vie for about 5,000 slots.

So what's the problem? According to the bean-counting extremists, too many Asian-Americans have aced the test and are “overrepresented.” A bill to eliminate the exams passed the state assembly education committee earlier this month. The toxic principles underlying the legislation have infected the left for decades.

Dullard de Blasio falsely argues that white privilege and class privilege are to blame for the lack of black and Latino student representation at the elite schools. The two groups account for 67 percent of public school students but only made up 10 percent of elite school admissions offers last year. By contrast, Asian-Americans, who make up 16 percent of public school students, received 52 percent of offers in the past year.

So are Asian-Americans classified as “white” now? And how does de Blasio get away with the lie that these best and brightest Asian-American students are economically privileged?

Fact: The city's own poverty assessment shows that Asians are the poorest demographic group, with 24.1 percent living at or below poverty — vs. 19.5 percent citywide.

Liberal race-fixers believe that “too many” Asian-American students winning school admissions on their own merits is a bad, bad thing. In our case, overcoming the supposed encumbrances of ethnicity and skin color is viewed not as a proud accomplishment but as a political liability.

Many of the very leaders who have lobbied hardest to rejigger the numbers on college campuses to fit a politically correct, proportional ideal are supposedly “progressive” Asian-Americans. I personally endured attacks from many of them who labeled me and other conservative minority leaders “sellouts” for opposing government-imposed diversity policies that sabotaged color-blindness and punished academic excellence.

Now, those same quota champions are seeing those same policies blow up in their faces in New York City's high schools. “Diversity” at all costs means taking the hardest-working, top-scoring students who earned their seats on the bus — and tossing them under the wheels.

Tell me again who the real sellouts are?

Michelle Malkin is host of “Michelle Malkin Investigates” on CRTV.com. Her email address is writemalkin@gmail.com.