Sunny Pai on “weaponizing Asian Americans”

BPS educator Sung-Joon Pai’s tweets about the complicated role of Asian Americans in the fight over exam school admissions

BPS educator Sunny Pai was one of the lead organizers of the campaign for a fairer approach to admissions. Many other Asian Americans also played important roles.

But many speakers on the other side were Asian, too, and the photo that newspapers kept choosing to illustrate the conflict showed mostly Asian-American demonstrators in front of Boston Latin School holding signs that read, “Keep Exam,” “Save Boston Exam School,” and “No Lottery Schools.”

Pai recently posted a thread about all this on Twitter. Here it is, along with supporting charts:

(More than 2,000 people signed Pai’s petition supporting the original Task Force plan rather than give in to pressure from anonymous city councilors for a 20 percent set-aside that would favor wealthy, mostly white families.)

At the School Committee’s July 14 meeting, Pai described how his class at Boston Arts Academy bridged their wide range of math skills to everyone’s benefit.

(As Pai said, the new plan addresses the disparate impact of this year’s admissions system on Chinatown.)

For more, see here.

(Actually, the new plan is projected to bring the percentage of all Asian American students back to about what it was before before the pandemic, not just those who live in Chinatown.)

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More on exam school admissions

*The surprises keep coming in fight over exam school admissions, July 12*

*Equity Coalition slides show why the School Committee should pass the original Exam School Task Force admissions plan — no 20% carve-out, July 7*

*A minority report from the Exam School Admissions Task Force, July 1*

*Exam School Admissions: Surprise ending for the Task Force, June 30*

*Exam School Task Force hears what happened to “rigor” when colleges dropped entrance exams, June 28*

*Crunch time for exam school admissions: Task force members seek agreement despite deep splits, June 14*

*What is “rigor”?, June 15*

*Should “exam” schools be just for the “best,” or all who can handle the work? June 16*

*Jeri Robinson: Replicate BLS to meet demand, add attractive magnet schools. No more winners and losers. June 17*

*Test or no test? June 22*

*Is exam school admissions a zero-sum game? A student from Chinatown says that’s not fair. June 23*

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