The mayor says he is worried about poor students’ lack of access to Stuyvesant. (His interim plan, as a stopgap before he gets the legislative change he wants, is to expand an existing program so that 20 percent of seats will be set aside for low-income students from high-poverty schools who just missed the test’s cutoff score.) But already, according to the Department of Education’s own measure of poverty, 44 percent of Stuyvesant students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch or are eligible for Human Resources Administration benefits. The school is diverse in other ways, too: 36 percent of Stuyvesant students self-report speaking a language other than English at home.

The issue, of course, is sufficient racial diversity. Asians make up 75 percent of Stuyvesant students and 62 percent of specialized high school students overall. Last week Richard Carranza, the mayor’s new schools chancellor, put it this way: “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”

There is so much that is disheartening about that sentence. It pits minority groups in our city against one another. It imagines a cabal. And by describing the majority populations of these schools as “one ethnic group,” it fails to appreciate the socio-economic and other diversity among these students and internal to Asian communities. It’s no surprise that Asian alumni, students and activists have protested that the mayor’s plan is punitive toward them and are angry and demoralized by the way they are being described.

It is hard to talk about why some communities have resorted to self-help in the face of the lousy education their children get in the city’s public schools, where they should be learning the reading and math that the test — and life — requires. (The test is similar to the SAT, which is so critical for college admissions.)

Rather than lead us through that difficult conversation, the chancellor’s response is to build a straw man because no ethnic or racial group could possibly claim entitlement to Stuyvesant. Not even the school’s biggest critics can seriously allege that the admissions test is racially or ethnically biased, or that it calls for special knowledge better known to some groups.

What the protesters stand for — and I stand with them — is the universal principle that talent and hard work should be rewarded. I wish that more children across the city had the opportunities they deserve to demonstrate their talent and hard work. It is worth fighting for this principle — in our public schools perhaps most of all.