The New York State legislature adjourned at the end of June without addressing controversial admission policies at New York City’s three elite public high schools, policies mandated by state law. Wealthy corporate interests, including conservative political power brokers, mobilized to defend the current test-based admission policy. Billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, and Richard Parsons, a former chairman of Citigroup, launched a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign to convince state legislators to block any legislation that would alter the current admissions policy.
In legislative hearings and public meetings, New York City School Chancellor Richard Carranza labeled the city's high-stakes Special High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) and its supporters racist. Carranza's statements were not politically smart. Dismissing as racist communities and school alumni who believe the test policy is valid does not convince anyone to change their mind or recruit new allies.
The test itself isn't racist, although the policy of using it as the single criteria for admission to select high schools has a discriminatory impact. Federal law prohibits policies that may not intentionally discriminate if there is a "disparate impact" on racial, ethnic, and gender groups and requires that government agencies demonstrate the policies serve a legitimate purpose. Because of this law, Brooklyn Technical High School and Stuyvesant High School started to admit girls around 1970 and the Bronx High School of Science ended a restrictive quota.
In March we learned that only seven of the 895 students offered admission into Stuyvesant High School’s Class of 2023 are black. Only twelve African American middle school students were offered spots in the city’s elite Bronx High School of Science. At Brooklyn Technical High School black students will make up 5% of the incoming student body. The numbers are similarly dismal at other highly regarded schools that use the tests to select students, although they are not covered by the same law. They include Brooklyn Latin School and Staten Island Technical High School, and at specialized academic high schools located on the City College, Lehman College, and York College campuses.
All eight schools base admission on difficult and competitive multiple-choice examinations that sort out applicants and have created racially exclusive student bodies, overwhelming white and Asia. Supporters of the admission policy claim student performance on the exams is a valid measure of how they will do in elite academic programs, although there is not evidence that students who score just above the cut score will do any better than students who fall just below it. The Lauder-Parsons initiative proposed to address the racial imbalance in the elite high schools by intensifying test prep in New York City middle schools.
There is also no evidence that a particular score is predictive of how a student will do in high school, college, or in life. In fact, there is no passing score for the test, only a limited number of seats. The reality is that New York City rations educational opportunity and students from more affluent families that can easily afford tutors and test-prep classes, or from immigrant working-class families willing to pay for multiple-year tutoring, buy their way into these schools.
The difficulty diversifying the student population at New York City’s elite public high schools is political, not educational. If the city could establish that these schools provide a special curriculum only mastered by a few and could demonstrate that a specific score or composite evaluation is needed to perform in this elevated setting, every student who gets the requisite score should get the education. There is no justification for a competitive exam that denies a seat to otherwise qualified students.
Families whose children earn admission under the current criteria, or hope to, and their political representatives charge that changing the policy would be unfair to them and is a racially motivated attack on the city’s south and east Asian population. But if every qualified student received a “specialized” education,much of the opposition would be mollified.
City officials wring their hands and claim the admission policy is imbedded in state law, so they cannot do anything about it. But of course, the state law only mandates using the test for the three original specialized schools. The city could easily and immediately change the admission policy for the other five.
There is also a way around the 1971 Hecht-Calandra law that requires admission to Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School and Brooklyn Technical High “be solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination.”
During the Bloomberg mayoralty, New York City closed and then reorganized over 150 schools. The city simply has to “close” Science, Stuyvesant, and Tech and create “new” schools at the same sites using different and fairer admissions criteria, perhaps reserving seats for top students from every middle school in the city as part of an admissions package.
Other than fairness, there is another reason to take these steps. New York City’s young people must be prepared to live and work is diverse settings. Ghettoized schools, even elite academic ghettos, do a disservice to young people by not preparing them for their futures.
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