Powerful specialized high school alumni have now promised to put MILLIONS into lobbying against replacing the embattled 114 multiple-choice exam as the sole admissions criteria for these schools.
Cosmetics tycoon Ron Lauder is bankrolling a multimillion-dollar effort to stop Mayor Bill de Blasio from eliminating the admissions test to the city’s top high schools, sources told The Post on Monday.
The billionaire Clinique chairman — a 1961 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science— is prepared to spend at least “seven figures” of his personal fortune on TV commercials and other efforts to block de Blasio’s controversial proposal, sources said.
The campaign will target Albany lawmakers, whom the mayor needs to amend a 1971 state law that created the Specialized High School Admission Test — and may even include attack ads against de Blasio, one source said.
In an email sent to his friends Monday morning — and obtained by The Post — Lauder said he was “joining a new effort called the Education Equity Campaign to achieve the goal of creating new Specialized High Schools” and “will be helping this campaign however I can.”
These millions are on top of the hundreds of thousands alumni already report in lobbying.