Assuming Massey is right that segregation is the vehicle “through which Black poverty is transmitted and reproduced,” policymakers of good will face the enormous and perhaps insuperable task of restoring integration to center stage while somehow avoiding the political and logistical errors that characterized busing and affirmative action in the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/opinion/school-integration-segregation.html
Despite these grim odds, young Indians continue arriving in Kota, and the coaching institutes have become a big business, encompassing 300 or so centers that generate $350 million to $450 million in revenue every year, according to one estimate. The largest coaching company, the Allen Career Institute, instructs more than one million students.
“There are two types of students in Kota — rankers and bankers,” Amit Gupta, a coaching-center biology instructor, told me. “One ranker will attract thousands of bankers. This is our modus operandi. We are in the business of selling dreams.” By Gupta’s definition, rankers are students with the potential to get into elite colleges, while bankers, who are in the majority, are students whose ambitions outrank their capacities. “A ranker was always going to get selected,” Gupta told me. “If he gets good teachers, his rank may improve, but he was already capable of selection. The business model of the coaching industry relies on the banker. We show him a dream — ‘You can also become an I.I.T.-ian or a doctor’ — even though we know all along that he would never be selected because there are just not enough seats.”
According to the latest National Crime Records Bureau report, from 2021, 13,081 students committed suicide in India, the highest number in five years, with “failure in examination” listed among the causes. They hanged themselves from ceiling fans, drank rat poison and jumped to their deaths. In 2022 alone, 15 students committed suicide in Kota. After three suicides took place on Dec. 12, two in the same boardinghouse, the National Human Rights Commission demanded that the Rajasthan government regulate the coaching industry in Kota.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/magazine/india-cram-schools-kota.html
While today’s school subdistrict boundaries were mostly established in the late 1960s, their historical roots are much older, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, when New York City as we know it today was formed by consolidating what are now the five boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—into one unit. In 1902, a centralized board of education took control of the entire city school system, which was divided into 46 geographic school subdistricts, each with their own local board and administrator
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584211038939
These days, however, many Asian parents are unfortunately wasting hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on expensive tutoring and preparatory classes. This industry’s sole purpose is to train children to ace standardized admissions tests, which bar the entrance to many magnet high schools and colleges across the country. “Enroll your child, and we’ll virtually guarantee they get into the top schools!” This, of course, is a lie. For example, TJ only has a few hundred openings each year, despite the thousands of kids who apply. Starting in the early 2000s, countless Asian parents across the region were marketed to with the same message: access to TJ has to go through these test prep programs. If you weren’t willing to spend the money, then you weren’t a good parent.
https://jiunwei.substack.com/p/ending-the-exploitation-of-asian?s=r
The earlier test that Judge Wood ruled was discriminatory, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, was used until 2004. She said that because the minority candidates were failing that test in greater numbers, the burden was on public officials to prove the test served a valid purpose. In similar rulings, judges around the country have thrown out written exams for firefighters and police officers, ruling they were not relevant to the tasks they would perform.