Just over 4,000 students received acceptance letters for the fall semester after nearly 26,000 eighth-graders took the exam last fall. Black and Latino students made up more than 44 percent of all test-takers.
Another highly competitive specialized school, the Bronx High School of Science, made 21 offers to Black pupils and 55 to Hispanic students, in a freshman class of 738, down from a combined 97 offers last year.
Some of the schools admit less homogenous freshman classes: Roughly 18 percent of seats at Brooklyn Latin in Williamsburg went to Black and Hispanic students.
Starting next fall, students will take a digital version of the entrance exam for the first time. Some test preparation organizations have expressed concern that the shift could worsen inequality and place students who are less proficient with technology at a disadvantage.
Just 3% of offers at eight of the city’s specialized schools went to Black students, down from 4.5% last school year, according to Education Department data released Thursday. Meanwhile, 6.9% of offers went to Latino students compared with 7.6% a year ago. Across the city’s public schools, nearly two-thirds of students are Black or Latino.
Asian American students received nearly 54% of the offers, a slight increase. The proportion of offers that went to white students, about 26%, was flat. Nearly 17% of public school students are Asian American and about 15% are white.
Specialized high schools command outsized attention because they are widely considered to be some of the most prestigious public schools in the country, even as they only enroll about 5% of the city’s public high school students. They also contribute to the city’s status as one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.
Admission to eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools depends entirely on a student’s score on a single standardized exam. Five of the eight specialized schools that rely on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT, admitted 10 or fewer Black students this year. Out of 781 offers to Stuyvesant High School, the most selective of the specialized schools, just 8 went to Black students.
Overall, nearly 26,000 eighth graders took the SHSAT, and 4,000 were offered a seat based on their score, according to the data.
after 4,050 test takers received an offer based on their test scores, the city extended offers to 855 students to participate this summer in the Discovery program. (Not everyone who gets invited into the program will accept the offer or end up enrolling at a specialized high school.) Nearly 60%, or 509, of the participants in this year’s Discovery program were Asian American, according to city data. That’s even higher than the share of Asian Americans who got offers to specialized high schools based on the SHSAT, which was about 53%.
Overall, Asian American students make up about 17% of students citywide.
Meanwhile, nearly 12% of the Discovery program seats — or 99 — went to Black students, and 20%, or 172, went to Latino students. That’s higher than the overall percentage of Black and Latino students who got specialized high school offers based on the test, 3% and 6%, respectively.
It’s still not representative of the school system as a whole: Roughly 24% of the city’s students are Black across the city, and 41% are Latino.
Gaps at many of the other schools were also stark: Out of 287 offers made at Staten Island Technical High School, for example, two Black students were accepted — up from zero last year — along with seven Latino students.
Previously, the NYC Independent Budget Office (NYC IBO) noted that the NYC SHSAT Exam costs the city at least $8M per year in direct costs. This does not include proctors and other indirect yearly costs.
NYC IBO SHSAT Exam Annual Cost
Now, the independent department goes further to explain how the Specialized high schools are given an advantage over other public schools in a new recommendation.
Every year, the New York City Department of Education allocates additional funding to 13 public high schools with “supplementary instruction and assessments, including higher course/credit loads and AP courses.” These 13 schools include the eight specialized high schools where students are admitted based on the results of the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT): The Bronx High School of Science, The Brooklyn Latin School, Brooklyn Technical High School, High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College of New York, High School of American Studies at Lehman College, Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, Staten Island Technical High School, and Stuyvesant High School. The remaining five high schools receiving this allocation use other academic screens to admit students selectively: Bard High School Early College, NYC iSchool, Millennium Brooklyn High School, Bard High School Early College Queens, and Townsend Harris High School.
This “Specialized Academic” allocation is a component of the Fair Student Funding (FSF) formula, which funds schools based on a weighted per-pupil basis designed to provide additional funding to students with greater need and is the largest source of discretionary dollars for schools. Through the FSF formula, the 13 schools listed above are set to receive an additional $1,055 per student for the 2021-2022 school year (the amount is the same at all 13 schools).
Typically, this allocation represents about 16 percent of the total FSF allocations received by the 13 schools.
Based on school enrollment from the 2020-2021 school year, the total amount these schools would receive for the current school year is just over $20 million, ranging from $6 million for Brooklyn Tech to $400,000 for the High School of American Studies at Lehman College. The value of the academic bonus has been relatively stable over the years, with per-student allocations increasing slightly from $1,021 in the 2017-2018 school year to $1,055 in 2021-2022. Total
enrollment at the 13 eligible high schools has grown by an average of 1.0 percent annually between 2016-2017 and 2020- 2021, with 19,471 students enrolled in 2020-2021.
NYC IBO Report
The report continues
Proponents might argue that most of these schools are already well-resourced, having experienced teachers and well-connected parents and alumni. Some, like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, boast significant endowments to help fund extracurricular activities. Given that these 13 high schools are not the only schools which educate/enroll academically well-prepared students with advanced curricula and/or AP courses, this is an inequitable use of funds. Proponents might also argue that this allocation is inequitable because of the disproportionately low number of Black students and Hispanic students enrolled in these 13 schools. Further, this funding is for supplemental enrichment rather than student need, although the latter is the primary focus of FSF.
In fall 2020, when an admission test was used, just 4 percent of offers went to Black pre-K students, according to data from the Department of Education. That percentage rose to 11 percent when a universal screen was used in fall 2021. Seven percent of offers went to Hispanic students in 2020, compared with 13 percent in 2021.
Asian and white students comprised more than three-quarters of students across all Gifted & Talented programs in 2018-2019, despite being about a third of the overall kindergarten cohort.
Conversely, Black and Hispanic kindergarteners comprised 63 percent of the kindergarten population but only 16 percent of students in Gifted & Talented programs.
The disparity was particularly acute for Hispanic students. Despite being much more numerous across all kindergarten programs (40.1 percent) than Black students (22.9 percent), Hispanic students were only moderately ahead of Black students with respect to participation in Gifted & Talented programs (9.3 percent versus 6.7 percent).
Our findings also lead us to some larger conclusions about flaws inherent in New York City’s entire system of choice in public high school admissions. Because under this system, there is no simple, direct relationship between an individual applicant’s academic strengths and the caliber of the high school she or he ultimately attends. Myriad other factors intervene, including: exposure to and awareness of the application process and the range of high-quality school options available; quality of middle school counseling; ability or willingness to undertake long inter-borough commutes to school; and others.
Success on the SHSAT and in the high school choice process often go hand-in-hand, because both require resources above and beyond academic ability alone. For evidence, one need only look at the expensive “arms race” of prep tutoring and courses for the SHSAT that many families take part in every year.
An in-depth report on the state of specialized high schools across the nation.
NYC specialized high schools are the only “one-exam-only” admissions in the nation
reformers might do better instead to look to Chicago’s use of area-based geographical tiers. One advantage of this system is that it retains the high-stakes entrance examination but takes inequality into account by having students with similar backgrounds compete against each other rather than pooling students from all backgrounds into one group.
The most radical option is for cities to simply abolish their selective high schools. The evidence for their impact on long-run outcomes is mixed. A number of studies have compared long-run outcomes for students who scored just below and just above the passing score (i.e. with a regression discontinuity design). Reviewing evidence from studies of the New York and Boston schools, Dynarski concludes that there is a “precisely zero effect of the exam schools on college attendance, college selectivity, and college graduation.” A 2018 study of the Chicago schools by Barrow, Sartain and de la Torre comes to similar conclusions concerning college enrollment rates. It is possible that students who scored much higher do reap benefits (or that those who scored considerably lower could do so if admitted). The overall picture however is that students from those schools do well, but many of them were going to do well anyway. Perhaps the energy, political capital, and money going to these schools could be better spent elsewhere.
