End Apartheid in Admissions to NYC’s Elite High Schools
David R. Jones, La Nueva Mayoria / The New Majority
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.
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. A disturbing trend in popular two-year junior college programs shows 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.