I was one of the few kids of Caribbean descent in Stuyvesant and I knew plenty of people who deserved to be there but didn’t test well or didn’t even know about the test.
The fact that my mother didn’t want me to go because she genuinely didn’t know what the specialized high school test was or what a specialized high school was, is indicative of the larger problem at hand — that there isn’t enough outreach done in these communities that they want to pull “diverse” students from, and that the public and elementary schools serving these communities are underfunded and woefully under-prepare students for high school, much less a specialized one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/nyregion/nyc-specialized-high-school-shsat.html