U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke this past weekend at an education town hall about the specialized high schools in New York City. Instead of speaking to the proposal to get rid of admission exams for these elite schools, she questioned why all schools weren’t achieving similar reputations. What is the current discussion around the lack of diversity at specialized high schools?
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, announced last year his plans to desegregate the top high schools in the state. The top eight schools use the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which the mayor has promised to abolish and recreate. The current system is obviously flawed because, according to the major, “the prestigious high schools make 5,000 admissions offers to incoming ninth-graders. Yet, this year just 172 black students and 298 Latino students received offers. This happened in a city where two out of every three eighth-graders in our public schools are Latino or black.”
Total offers of admission to the top eight specialized high schools in New York by race
To acknowledge that a single test will never be equal across socio-economic statuses, since higher income families can afford tutors and test prep courses, the mayor has long-term plans to redo the admissions process. The new process will include taking into account how the student did academically in the context of their middle schools, and also their results of statewide tests that every student takes. Essentially, the goal is to recruit the top performers from every city middle school.
Critiques claim that taking away the Specialized High School Admissions Test would compromise the rigor of the specialized high schools. Other solutions, such as providing free test prep for low-income students, have not created any lasting impact. Not only have the numbers not been improving, but in some schools they have been declining. The percentage of black students at Stuyvesant has been declining for two decades. Under the new admission process, not all non-white students would be positively impacted. According to one study, offers to Asian-American students, who make up over 60 percent of the specialized school populations, would decrease by about half under the mayor’s plan, while offers to black students would increase five times over if that plan is approved. The same study also found that the percentage of low-income students offered admission would increase by approximately 13%.
Many Democratic leaders have been hesitant to speak out against the admissions process, but instead they have focused on the issue of the overall lack of high-quality education opportunities for students of color. While it’s of course important to increase the overall quality of education for all students, it’s particularly powerful to consider who is offered admission to the highest education institutions. The data suggests that the testing-centered admission process is failing the Hispanic and African-American students in the city. The new admission process that the major has proposed is not likely to be passed, but it is interesting to see the difference between the students who can score highly on the single test versus the students who are testing highly for their middle school. While this does not address the quality of education for students of color at middle schools and non-specialized high schools, it is a start to create better equity in admissions to the most prestigious high schools in the state.
Post by: Amber Churchwell