New York City’s specialized high schools made fewer offers to Black and Hispanic test-takers this year, drawing renewed attention to persistent racial disparities at the prestigious programs, according to admissions data released Thursday.
Just 3% of offers were extended to Black students and 6.9% to Hispanic students, down from last year when 4.5% and 7.6% of seats went to Black and Hispanic applicants, respectively. The data reversed marginal gains made in the last admissions cycle to diversify the programs.
Specialized high schools, widely considered the crown jewels of the city’s school system, have at the same time faced scrutiny for failing to admit classes representative of the larger public school population: Close to two-thirds of the city’s enrollment is Black or Hispanic.
At the center of the controversy is that eight schools rely on a single test for admissions. Of them, five, including Stuyvesant High School and Staten Island Technical High School, made offers to single-digit numbers of Black students this year based on their SHSAT scores, the data showed.
Nearly 26,000 eighth graders took the SHSAT this year, and more than 4,000 were offered a seat through the exam.
Most of the students who scored highly on the test were Asian or white, with 25.9% of offers made to white applicants and 53.5% to Asian applicants. Asian families have been among the most vocal opponents to any changes to the SHSAT that could limit their access to the schools and the opportunities they provide.
Debate over how city leaders should respond to the racial disparities recently made headlines again when a contract renewal with the test-maker came before the Panel for Educational Policy, the city’s school board where most members are appointed by the mayor. The vote was delayed twice before it ultimately passed the panel.
Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, a Bronx Science alum, said during the primary that he has no plans to change the current SHSAT-based admissions process, though he supports an independent analysis of the exam for racial and gender bias. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo supports continuing using the SHSAT, though he says more students should have access to test prep.
Mayor Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, has largely avoided wading into the debate over specialized high schools, promising instead to open more accelerated high schools in diverse neighborhoods.
Three of those schools — two locations of Bard High School Early College in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and HBCU Early College Prep in Queens — started admitting students in recent years. Close to 8 in 10 students in HBCU Prep’s inaugural class are Black, according to the data.
At least half of the student body at all three schools is considered to be living in poverty — with a 68% poverty rate at the Bronx program, through which students may earn a free associate’s degree.
Overall, more high school applicants received offers to one of their top-choice schools. About 59% of the 72,000 eighth graders who just went through the process were matched with the program they ranked first, up from 51% last year, the data showed.
Only 3% of rising high schoolers were placed at schools no where on their applications, compared to 6% in 2022 coming out of the pandemic and the many changes to school admissions that came with it.
Thursday’s data drop was the latest in recent history and came minutes after the education news source Chalkbeat published an article on the unprecedented delay. The highly anticipated statistics are typically released by mid-June.
Originally Published: