Every summer, New Yorkers ask why so many Asian students and so few black students are admitted to the city’s elite public high schools. Only three of the 777 students in Stuyvesant High School’s incoming class this year are black. This has again led to complaints about the entrance exam, demands that it be scrapped, and articles about how the system is “rigged against students of color.” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards went so far as to say black students are “being locked out—this is segregation.”
Missing from the debate is any discussion of family structure. Two numbers that seldom surface in discussions about race in America’s schools: 80% of Asian children nationwide live with married birth parents, vs. 30% of black children, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This factor—whether a child has two married parents at home—predicts success in school, or admission to a school like Stuyvesant, almost as well as or even better than race.
None of this excuses a school system that has failed black, Hispanic and low-income families, or denies the need for broader test preparation and access to better schools. But these debates often miss a fundamental reality: A student’s success can rise or fall on the structure and stability of his family more than by his skin color or his family’s bank account.
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