Specialized high schools are demographically wealthier than almost all other NYC public schools. In other words, the SHSAT exam has found a way to favor wealthier students over poorer students.

But the mayor’s 2018 proposal statistically increases the number of poor students at specialized high schools.

According to DoE data, out of NYC’s over 500 public high schools, specialized high schools ALL fall in the top 92% ( percentile ) for wealth.

Further, the NYC non-partisan IBO states…

Students in the specialized high schools came from census tracts where the median household income averaged $62,457 compared with $46,392 for students in other high schools. (All dollar amounts are reported in 2012 dollars).

If we rank the census tracts by their median income and then divide the tracts into equal fifths (quintiles), we observe large differences between the share of students in specialized high schools and other high schools from each quintile.

NYC IBO Report on Specialized high schools

Source: https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/cgi-park2/2015/04/do-a-larger-share-of-students-attending-the-citys-specialized-high-schools-live-in-neighborhoods-with-higher-median-incomes-than-those-attending-the-citys-other-high-schools/

It’s important to realize that New York families are not very wealthy in aggregate.

With test prep ranching from $1,000 to $5,000 do we really want to continue a system that just about forces poor families to invest sometimes 5-10% of their annual income into test-prep for a single exam?