Mayor de Blasio would rather undermine merit at specialty high schools than address the city’s failure to prepare minority students for them.

City Journal reports:

Fewer than 14 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school pupils are white. How Carranza intends to redistribute them while creating significantly improved performance outcomes is not obvious, and he needs to explain a plan in detail—with particular emphasis on the historically explosive social consequences of such schemes.

Poverty has long been the go-to explainer for public school failure. But the astonishing success of the city’s often grossly impoverished Asian immigrants is steadily demolishing that argument. Poor Asians have become a commanding presence in city schools, particularly the specialized high schools, and imposing quotas on them as a matter of “justice” to other poor kids is a gross inequity.

The success of the city’s overwhelmingly minority charter schools is a daily rebuke to Carranza’s borderline racist notion that black and Hispanic kids need integrated classrooms in order to prosper educationally.

Are government schools about to get a whole lot worse in NYC?