Two years after my mother and I arrived in this country from China, she was newly divorced, jobless, unable to speak English, and on the verge of eviction. Her focus, however, was firmly fixed on my education. I had just turned ten, and as September rolled around, the prospect of our homelessness did not worry my mother as much as that of my schoollessness or, rather, my élite schoollessness. I had completed the third and fourth grades at a public school, in New Haven, with which she had been distinctly dissatisfied. My mother had been a doctor in China and she felt that the academics at the school were not rigorous enough—a complaint that she couldn’t express to the school administrators due to her lack of English. So she pushed me to fly through the school’s English as a Second Language workbooks so fast and so far ahead of schedule that I was sent home with a stern handwritten admonishment to “follow the assignment guidelines.” My teacher, an affable red-haired woman in her mid-thirties, told me to explain to my mother that skipping ahead of the class did no one any good. “Besides, you should not be spending all your time on these workbooks,” she counselled me gently. “Go outside. Give yourself a break.” My mother snorted with derision when I delivered that message. “If we wanted to while away our time taking breaks,” she said, “we couldn’t have come to this country.” So we searched Connecticut for a place to live in the richest Zip Codes, which in this new world, my mother had learned, were directly correlated with the best public schools. We eventually found one in Fairfield County, the wealthiest county in the state, and I entered fifth grade as one of two Asians in the class (there were no other students of color) and the only student in the school who wasn’t born in America.

The story of an education-obsessed immigrant Chinese mother browbeating her bewildered child into compliance is, at this point, the stuff of YouTube parody. But the Asian preoccupation with education has also become a pivotal point of reckoning in a recent proposal, introduced by Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York City, to overhaul admission to eight of the city’s nine premier specialized high schools, the best known of which—Stuyvesant and Bronx Science—represent the highest levels of academic achievement in the country’s public-education system. (Admission to the ninth school, LaGuardia, is based on a student’s record and an arts audition.) For decades, admission to these schools has traditionally been based on an exhausting exam called the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). African-American and Latino students, who represent sixty-seven per cent of the city’s public-school population, hold just ten per cent of the places in these schools. White students, who make up fifteen per cent of that population, hold about twenty-seven per cent of the seats. But Asian-American students, who make up sixteen per cent of the public schools, account for sixty-two per cent.

For de Blasio, this situation constitutes a “monumental injustice” and, by way of a remedy, he has proposed a plan to help the population of the élite high schools better reflect the city’s demographics. It includes eliminating the SHSAT, and admitting top-performing students from every public middle school in the city based on their grades and scores on statewide tests. Eventually, the top seven per cent from each school will be offered seats. In the interim, twenty per cent of the seats would be reserved for students who attend predominantly low-income schools and whose test scores fall just below the cutoff point, as long as they attend a summer study program. (A limited version of this provision is already in place in some high schools.)

The pursuit of equality is something that few people can, in good faith, oppose. Reading news of the plan as it spilled over my various social-media feeds, my own reaction was closest to that of people who expressed skepticism about both the fairness and the usefulness of standardized tests. As an Asian-American educator wrote in a Times Op-Ed, titled “De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist,” “the myth that the entrance exam identifies the most-deserving students for these top schools denies all the inequalities in resources, treatment and service that present varying barriers to success.” (More affluent families can also enter their children in expensive test-prep programs.) Just as important is a notion underpinning America’s immigrant roots, which holds that diversity itself is an instrumental, intrinsic good that benefits the society at large: to be in a classroom with a broad range of races serves not only newly included students but every child.

Yet I couldn’t help but feel the privilege of my position as someone who, as it were, had no skin in the game. After all, I had already reaped the advantages of an élite American education, and did not have any adolescent children of my own in the immediate future to fret over. The Asian students and their parents who marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to protest the proposal did not share this luxury. A phrase that I heard repeatedly from community leaders and educators was “zero-sum game.” Michael Lee, a third-generation Chinese-American and the director of a nonprofit mentorship program for Asian and immigrant youths, told me that many Chinese parents understand exactly what it’s like to be deprived of an educational opportunity in their own country—the culture-annihilating Cultural Revolution shut down schools nationwide for a decade. “The perceived nastiness that’s coming out of the community is a defensiveness,” Lee told me. “And it is a defensiveness born of a fear that they might fail their children.” Yet, in a zero-sum game, someone inevitably loses.

A public-school education may be America’s greatest resource, but, for too long, it has also been an insufficient resource. In New York City and across the country, the demand for schools far outstrips their supply. Many educators have recently made the point that specialized high schools account for only about six per cent of seats in the city’s public high schools, so reforming these schools hardly comes close to solving the problem. (In fact, a third of the city’s public high schools currently screen students for admission based on their academic performance, but those schools, too, have limited capacities and enrollments that are more Asian, more white, and more affluent than the over-all public-school population.)

“Putting aside the issue of élite high schools, there’s a severe shortage of high-school seats period,” Stanley Ng, a former lower Manhattan representative for the Citywide Council on High Schools, told me. Like many others who work in education, Ng emphasized the structural problems throughout the system. “The D.O.E. has underserved Latino and black kids in underperforming areas, at the same time that it is failing Asians, because they haven’t built enough schools in traditionally Asian-heavy neighborhoods in Queens and South Brooklyn to accommodate them.”

For Ng, the lack of pipeline middle schools is crucial, too: currently, twenty-one middle schools graduate more than half the students accepted at the specialized high schools, and none of them are in black and Latino communities. “If the city doesn’t help create more middle schools with gifted-and-talented programs that adequately prepare students for schools like Stuy, how can the students feel ready?”