Better in their words…

Great advice for us all: my liberal friends, but also my conservative ones.
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By WARREN KOZAK

This is the season when college notifications go out, and a simple “yes” is seen as a ticket to success. Applicants, though, can never be quite sure why they were accepted or rejected—subjective criteria, in addition to test scores, are used in the evaluations.

For many New York City teenagers, a similar academic turning point comes even earlier in life, but with one big difference: The judgment is purely objective, based solely on the numbers.

Welcome to one of America’s last meritocracies: New York’s specialized high schools, led by Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. These schools are nationally ranked, their alumni include Nobel laureates, and they are feeders to the nation’s top colleges. The admissions test comes in two parts—verbal and math—and takes two-and-a-half hours. Roughly 28,000 eighth-graders took the test in the fall. As always, those with the highest scores earned the coveted slots.

Here is the ethnic breakdown of acceptances for next fall’s Stuyvesant freshman class: 9 black students, 24 Latinos, 177 whites and 620 Asian-Americans. Although the numbers were slightly different at the other two high schools, the ethnic mix is roughly the same.

At a time when the affirmative-action debate has been rekindled in the Supreme Court, when the president calls for free preschool for all low- and moderate-income children, and when the debates over education reform reverberate across the country, the numbers 9-24-177-620 amount to a Rorschach test for an already polarized society.

For some, the specialized-high-school test itself is clearly racist. Repeated demands have been made to change the entrance requirements. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a complaint with the Department of Education in September of 2012, calling the test a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (No kidding.)

Perhaps in response to such challenges and the fact that some parents enroll their children in private prep courses hoping to improve scores, the New York Board of Education offers free summer test-prep programs for disadvantaged students. Not enough black and Hispanic students have taken advantage of the extra help.

The Stuyvesant story speaks to a larger matter: the national disparity in educational advancement according to race and ethnicity. Reading and vocabulary skills are cumulative, meaning that verbal skills are not based on what an eighth-grader can cram into his head in a few weeks before a test. They come from everything read and heard since infancy.

Yet some Asian children with high scores come from immigrant homes where English isn’t the first language. This raises the question of the importance of culture—and the strong emphasis on hard work and higher parental expectations at home that make it possible to thrive academically.

Several years ago, Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the teens who were National Spelling Bee finalists. She wanted to find out what they did to get there.

Many people might assume that the spelling whizzes have a genetic advantage, but Ms. Duckworth found a more important trait: tenacity. The finalists are willing to forgo the immediate gratification of watching TV or texting friends so they can spend hours and do the tedious and merciless grunt work. They write out thousands of flashcards with words and definitions and memorize them.

It is an unusual child who can do this while being constantly bombarded by popular culture’s seductive images. But it also takes strong parents willing to guide the child and demand hours of difficult work.

The recent national fascination with Dr. Benjamin Carson is timely. He grew up in an impoverished section of Detroit and could have headed into the dead-end life that awaited many others around him. He had one huge advantage, though. His mother, who had no more than a third-grade education, turned off the TV, demanded that he study and, most of all, accepted absolutely no excuses. Ben Carson went on to become a noted neurosurgeon and author.

It is vital for America’s future that those Stuyvesant numbers even out. But that won’t happen simply by pouring more money into schools, hiring a thousand new teachers or offering Head Start to every 4-year-old from Maine to California. A better and much less expensive way may be for parents to look at what is going on in Asian-American families, or what went on in Dr. Carson’s home, and copy it.

Mr. Kozak is the author of “Presidential Courage: Three Speeches That Changed America,” an eBook published last year.

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Call Them Tiger Students. And Get to Work..

Warren Kozak: Call Them Tiger Students. And Get to Work..