Nuancing the narrative: understanding Asian American opposition to NYC’s selective high school admissions reform

ABSTRACT

In this study, the authors conduct a qualitative analysis to examine discourses embedded in the New York City specialized public high schools’ admission reform. Undertaking Critical Discourse Analysis, the article engages with historical and contextual understandings of Asian Americans in the race-conscious admission policy to elite public high schools. The findings reveal themes of racism and anti-Asian American discrimination, meritocracy and colorblindness, and systematic issues and segregation swirling around the policy debate. The authors aim to illuminate the competing values, ideologies, and fundamental issues shaping the epistemological conversation of race, power, and education equity. These discourses shed light on the challenges, benefits, and limitations of the current approach to diversifying elite public high schools in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical discourse analysis
• Asian Americans
• specialized high schools
• meritocracy
• diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For this writing, we use the term ‘Asian Americans’ cautiously as the panethnic label to encompass those populations under discussion, recognizing the politicization inherent in homogenizing this population.

2. The term ‘East Asian’ typically refers to those Asian people of Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean descent who, as of (2019), represent about 60% of NYC’s Asian and Pacific Islander population (where Chinese people themselves constitute half; NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs 2019). This delimitation places our primary focuses on those voices who have most often been highlighted in the politics of race-conscious policy in education, which both allows for a focus on those groups who may be most politically active, but also risks de-emphasizing the need to understand the voices of others who are often excluded from cultural imaginations of Asian Americans (J. Z. Park 2008).