Tausifa Haque, a 17-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, joins “a river of teenagers who pour into Brooklyn Technical High School — Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian, Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American,” writes Michael Powell in a moving story in the New York Times. The elite exam school offers an opportunity to achieve their dreams.

Tausifa’s father drives a cab; her mother is a lunchroom attendant. “This is my great chance,” she tells Powell. “It’s my way out.”

Liberal politicians, school leaders and organizers argue such schools are bastions of elitism and, because of low enrollment of Black and Latino students, functionally racist and segregated. Sixty-three percent of the city’s public school students are Black and Latino yet they account for just 15 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s population.

For Asian students, the percentages are flipped: They make up 61 percent of Brooklyn Tech, although they account for 18 percent of the public school population.

Across the country, Asian-American students work very hard to ace exams and get into selective high schools. That breeds resentment. School boards in San Francisco and Fairfax County, Virginia changed admissions criteria to elite schools to admit more blacks and Latinos and fewer Asian Americans, Powell notes. (Fairfax ended up with more whites too.)

Tausifa looks at the multihued sea of students pouring through the doors of Tech. She expressed puzzlement that a school where three-quarters of the students are nonwhite could be described as segregated. “I have classes with students of all demographics and skin colors, and friends who speak different languages,” she said. “To call this segregation does not make sense.”

Many more black and Hispanic students used to qualify for Brooklyn Tech, writes Powell. Then “city officials, pushed by an anti-tracking movement, rolled back accelerated and honors programs . . . Some poor, majority Black and Latino districts now lack a single gifted and talented program.”

Eric Adams, the city’s new mayor “has proposed adding new gifted and talented programs in Black and Latino neighborhoods, and increasing the number of specialized high schools.”

There’s been talk of eliminating the entrance exam in favor of portfolios of student work, interviews and extracurriculars, writes Powell. Students fear being labeled as “grinds.” Furthermore, “however stressful a high-stakes test, it means a surname is no obstacle. No one knows they are Bengali, Tibetan, Nigerian or Tajik.”

The “progressive war on merit” would destroy schools like Brooklyn Tech, writes New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

In 1981, Powell reports, nearly two-thirds of Brooklyn Tech’s students were Black or Latino. What’s changed over four decades . . . (is) that New York’s public schools have catastrophically failed so many students through lowered expectations, diminished curriculums and limited opportunities for accelerated learning despite the highest per pupil spending of the country’s largest school systems.

 “Our belief in equality” should strengthen the idea of merit, he concludes. “The  purpose of a public education” is “to get beyond the politics of identity, not wallow in it.”