Podhoretz is, as always, wrong on facts while he's being a smug and arrogant prick.

It doesn't matter at all what the population of the *city* is, but rather the population of the public schools.

Whites and Asians are both 15% of public school children. https://twitter.com/HotlineJosh/status/1387873302669107201

In other words, whites aren't nearly as interested in going to the specialized high schools as Asians are (and the whites who are interested are disproportionately immigrants).

In fact, whites and Asians get accepted at almost identical rates.

But whites aren't interested in the specialized high schools.

That's a problem. That is, by the way, ALWAYS the problem that people are trying to fix by ending the test. They *say* they want more diversity. But what they *want* is more whites.

And the way to get more whites is to get fewer Asians, not because Asians are too smart, but because Americans (and I mean Americans, not whites) find Asian immigrant culture incredibly unpleasant. Too obsessed with grades over ability and depth.

You can think that's unfair. Doesn't matter. The push to end test schools is a push to end Asian obsession with getting into these schools, and get more whites. More whites = more willingness to support public schools and not leave for private.

Now, that's not what the NYTimes reporter says, but that's not because she doesn't know the real story, but because she's saying the shit she's suppose to say, which Podhoretz is too ignorant to understand.

So focus hard: the push to end test schools is not a push to end meritocracy. Whites manage to have really good schools with great culture, a reasonable chunk of diversity, and they are schools that smart blacks want to go to, which is why *they* aren't taking the test, either.

Asian *immigrant* education culture, particularly Chinese, Indian, Korean, is unattractive to Americans. We don't like it. Trust me, Podhoretz wouldn't for a second put his kids in an all Asian school.

THis is not a rant against Asians. I get it. And I firmly believe it's the responsibility of schools to *not* reward behavior that we find really unattractive and inconsistent with intelligence and education. But we do. And this is what happens.

This is also why colleges discriminate against Asians. They want enough of them to keep average SAT scores high, but not enough to kill the culture that they value. So they literally just pick enough of the swotters to keep scores high without any regard for individual value.

Conservative failure to grok this is really, really annoying. Because they are so eager to shit all over whites who reject this system that they ignore whether or not it makes sense to devote 8 public schools and resources to an almost entirely foreign-born population.

Because if it comes to spending more $ on services for poor NYC Americans or spending resources on Asian and Eastern European immigrants who come over here at 8 and spend 5 years prepping for a test, I am ALL in favor of taking removing exclusively immigrant schools.

So everyone pay attention to the hardcore truth at the heart of this rant:
Test only schools are Asian because whites don't want to go there, and whites don't want to go there because the schools are Asian.

Whites have really good schools without the tests.