What Will It Take To Alter
Makeup of Top Schools?

When 80,000 eighth-graders recently learned about their high school placement for next fall, the news took a familiar shape. Despite the high priority the Department of Education has placed on closing the achievement gap between the races, the city's specialized, most competitive high school programs remain disproportionately Asian and white in a public school system that's 70 percent black and Hispanic.

The citywide high school choice process requires eighth-graders to rank the schools they desire on an application submitted in December. The DOE informed them of the results in late March. Most students won seats at one of their top five school choices (although nearly 7,500 did not match with any high school and must participate in a second, supplemental admissions round). But about 5,400 students have known since early February where they’re headed next year – those who sat for the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), and scored high enough to be offered entry into one of the city’s eight specialized high schools, or who auditioned and won seats in the arts courses at LaGuardia High School.

The score on the SHSAT alone determines whether a student gains admission to one of the city’s specialized high schools. DOE ranks the test scores, compares the scores to applicants’ ranking of the schools they most wish to attend, and makes offers to eligible students. According to the department, just over half of the students who sat for the SHSAT in October are black or Hispanic – yet black and Hispanic students together count for only 14 percent of those admitted.

That's despite steady, incremental gains on some standardized achievement tests, and ongoing DOE initiatives to prepare promising middle-school students for the specialized high-school exam.

Of the eight specialized high schools, only one, Brooklyn Latin, enrolls black and Hispanic students in proportions that reflect or exceed their presence in the overall population. One other school, the City College High School for Math, Science and Engineering (CCNY-MSE), comes close for Hispanic students, who are 30 percent of their students (compared to 40 percent of the citywide student population) but less so for black students, at 17 percent (32 percent citywide).

But Brooklyn Latin and CCNY-MSE, with a combined enrollment of about 630 students, are miniscule islands of racial diversity. At the three oldest and biggest specialized schools – Stuyvesant High School, Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech – black students count for 2 percent, 4 percent and 13 percent, respectively, of all students. Hispanic kids represent 3 percent of Stuyvesant’s students overall, and 8 percent each at Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. These three schools together serve 10,627 students – almost five times as many students as the other five specialized high schools combined. It’s also important to note that at the same three schools, Asian students comprise the majority, although Asians represent about 15 percent of the city’s students overall.

Deputy Mayor for Education Dennis M. Walcott, who has long advanced initiatives to increase minority representation, pronounced himself "not satisfied" with the situation. "While I think we’re trying to improve the numbers of students into these schools, I don’t think we as an administration are satisfied," Walcott told City Limits.
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Quantifying progress

Chancellor Joel Klein's top deputies say the achievement gap is closing between the races – and in some places, especially in elementary school, it is narrowing, even as overall scores rise.