Another year, another dispiriting set of results for those who care about the city’s eight elite high schools serving New Yorkers of all backgrounds.
In a school system where Black and Latino students make up two-thirds of the student population, Black students constituted just 4.5% of offers to those schools — and Latino students, just 7.6%. Asian American students got 52% of the offers, and 26% went to white students.
At one of the most sought-after schools, the numbers are especially low: Stuyvesant offered seats to just 10 Black students. Bronx Science was better: 97 out of about 712.
Putting all this in perspective, these admissions numbers for the typically underrepresented populations were higher than for recent years, in fact up to their highest levels since 2013, or about 13.6%.
We do not believe that the supposed crown jewel high schools must admit students in ratios precisely equal to their overall share of the school system — that would be a quota — but something is clearly awry when numbers are so stubbornly low.
The disparity has many sources. Charter schools have begun serving many more African-American kids looking for a rigorous education. And many top-tier private high schools make a habit of extending scholarships to Black and Latino youngsters to diversify their student bodies. So some of this is the result of kids from minority backgrounds choosing with their feet.
But there’s no question that one problem is an admissions system that uses a test and only a test, the Specialized High School Admissions Test, to determine who gets over the bar.
As colleges have been reminded since mistakenly moving to SAT- and ACT-optional admissions, exams make sense as one of many measures; they actually play a valuable role in leveling the playing field for kids from a range of backgrounds. But when a standardized assessment is the sole determinant of entry, it becomes an obsessive focus — and can effectively be gamed by families with money or those that pay disproportionate attention to passing with flying colors.
While low-cost SHSAT prep courses are available to many New Yorkers, top-flight programs cost thousands of dollars. One-on-one tutors can charge hundreds of dollars an hour.
We cast no aspersions at the students who work hard and excel on the SHSAT, many of whom are from working-class or middle-class households. They have nothing to apologize for, nor should they be punished for excelling on the terms the city created.
But this endlessly diverse city shouldn’t tolerate a system that continues to skew toward stellar test-takers at the exclusion of considering other measures of excellence that may well result in a student body that’s better mixed by ethnic background.
Indeed, even as admissions at the likes of Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the rest have been put under the electron microscope, no one in his or her right mind is proposing reducing admissions at those schools to a single score on a single test. Even those who believe in testing understand that it should be put in context.
Keep the SHSAT, base admissions on a range of factors including the test — and see New York City’s most coveted public schools admit kids from a wider range of backgrounds, representing this great city more fully and fairly.