Another year, another nightmare: just 12 percent of admissions to New York City’s specialized high schools this year went to Black and Latinx students. That’s a slight uptick from recent years, but still shameful.
There is no overstating how much rides on this. We have lost focus on the end result. New York City children of color currently represent 65 percent of the school system, but make up just 10 percent of the enrollment in elite high schools, the primary springboard into top colleges. The racial selection blockade promotes an institutionalized apartheid-like system.
Once and for all, we need a major, coherent response to this unforgivable inequity. This calls for overturning the apple cart, to move past the inertia and cynicism. Time to take on the primary culprit in this mess, the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), which is the primary standard for admission to the city’s nine specialized schools.
First, Mayor Eric Adams should use his executive authority to set new admission standards at the five specialized schools that voluntarily adopted the SHSAT test decades ago. In fact, the mayor could argue their admission policy is still controlled by the city and jettison the SHSAT from the five schools all together. Certainly, this will ignite a fight with Albany, but the mayor would win kudos from his political base for taking this on.
In 1971, the state legislature passed legislation that limited the New York City Board of Education’s ability to alter admission policies at the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School and Stuyvesant High School. The law, which imposed the SHSAT, was denounced by opponents as seeking an exclusionary racial quota at the schools. Beginning in 2002, the Bloomberg administration adopted a SHSAT test-in at the remaining specialized high schools in a failed attempt to integrate them. NOTE: The SHSAT is not used to determine admission to LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. Admission is based on auditions and academic records.
The mayor floated the idea two years ago of building new specialized high schools in each New York City borough with different screening criteria. Nothing came of it, but adding specialized schools alone will not transform the racial demographics. The problem is getting students of color equitably admitted to the schools.
Secondly, the NYC schools should restore gifted-and-talented accelerated learning programs for high-performing middle school students, which fueled the success of the city’s public schools in the 1980s and ‘90s. These programs, such as separate gifted and talented classrooms, were eliminated or redesigned by former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Lastly, we must renew the push to scrap the SHSAT in favor of a multifactor admission strategy. Just two years ago, former Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter was shouted down when she called on the state to kill the SHSAT. I strongly support an admissions process that takes into account performance on state-mandated tests, class rank, academic records, extracurricular activities and perhaps even socio-economic factors.
Admission to specialized high schools matters because Black college and university enrollment has been dropping steadily. It was down 24 percent between 2010 and 2022, or more than 717,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. What is really disturbing is trends in popular two-year junior college programs. Enrollment by Black and Latinx men tumbled between 2019 and 2023, according to the national clearinghouse, with Black male enrollment dropping an eye-popping 23.5 percent and that of Hispanic men falling 19.7 percent.
Specialized high school admissions revolve around the SHSAT because only the top scorers on the grueling, high-stakes test get an invitation. Along with the test, students rank their schools by preference. Their test score, school preferences and seats available at each school determine if they are offered admission.
A lucrative test prep industry has grown up around the SHSAT, which is a scandal in plain sight. Students from well-heeled families pay tuition of $1,000 or more for the test training. For all intents and purposes, they are allowed to game the system with pricey test prep, while other worthy students from modest households cannot afford the classes.
Clearly, the SHSAT is the rate limiting factor in Black and Latinx admissions. As recently as 1975, some of the specialized high schools were as high as 50 percent Black and Latinx, an oasis for smart kids from troubled neighborhoods. It is no coincidence that enrollment of children of color has fallen precipitously as predicted four decades ago by opponents of the SHSAT.
Either you believe that Black and Latinx students are intellectually inferior to White and Asian students, or you think there is something wrong with how we are choosing kids for these schools: one of the two has to be true.
The SHSAT needs to go.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.
Clearly, Jones’ stereotype that Black’s cannot achieve because they are Black has to go. Especially since we are at the cusp of electing our second Black President. We don’t need to change laws to get oir people through the door, we can open them ourselves, thank you very much. When we get into the Oval Office it will be because we earned it.
I would like to call out the [presumably] white author as racist.
Clearly, you don’t think Asians are people of color. Perhaps you should educate yourself, you privileged ignoramus.
You say “Black and Latinx students are intellectually inferior to White and Asian students”. I would say every year fewer and fewer white students get into these schools.
Now why do more Asians get in every year instead of Black and Latino? That is an excellent question that should be investigated… but I can tell you it isn’t monetary or racial privilege. Asian students come fro some of the most low-income family and very few of the high income.
Perhaps instead of denouncing the system investigate the cause… because Because “children of color” don’t make up “10 percent of the enrollment in elite high schools… they make up the MAJORITY. But Asians clearly aren’t colorful enough for you.
Specialized High Schools have 50%+ of low income students, something we should all be proud of. Saying that gaining admission to these schools is just about paying money for tutoring and therefore something only wealthy families can afford is simply inaccurate. The author purposefully doesn’t mention the free programs and resources offered to low income students and explicitly targeted towards BIPOC students in districts that traditionally send fewer students to SHS (for instance the Bronx and upper Manhattan). Students get a call at the end of 6th grade and are offered a free enrollment in these programs.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day … there are two aspects where the author is very correct though:
1. We need to urgently restore G&T programs – with a real objective (test based) selection of students and a real accelerated curriculum (not the lottery nonsense we have today, resulting in heterogeneous classes and no acceleration whatsoever) because those have historically been the pipelines for SHS. And sadly the districts that do not send many students to SHS are the same districts where these programs never existed or were shut down.
2. State test scores are a critical measure of performance and proficiency and should be used for entry to accelerated programs. Not SHS, as those are using the SHSAT, but many screened middle and high schools in the city that used these scores in the past but now admit students based on a wishy-washy combination of GPAs (overinflated, subjective and inaccurate) and lottery.
The selective color blindness of this author is troubling and frankly embarrassing – maybe he should take a walk near Brooklyn Tech at 3pm to “see” the diversity for himself ?
Other commenters have already addressed the flaw in this person’s argument, but can we also call attention to the fact that it’s incredibly offensive to compare what may ail the NYC public school system to *apartheid*? It’s cheap, hyperbolic, and inaccurate.
What about studying? Have they tried studying?