…Yet for years, neither the mayor nor the Legislature — nor anyone in Hunter College leadership — has taken the necessary action to overhaul a system that bases admissions to the most coveted schools on just a test, the SHSAT or the Hunter test. There’s not a single elite college in America that bases its admissions only on SAT or ACT scores, yet New York City’s best high schools make a single, homegrown exam make or break for thousands of students, despite results that worsen segregation.
What NYC should do with the Specialized High School Admissions Test
Now, we’re turning to the experts. In this week’s “Ask the Experts” feature, we reached out to Syed Ali, a professor of sociology at Long Island University-Brooklyn; Zakiyah Ansari, the advocacy director for the Alliance for Quality Education; David Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College; and Soo Kim, president of the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association.
I’m an Asian American graduate of Brooklyn Tech. Please don’t use me as a wedge in your education lawsuit
…The lawsuit, brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation ostensibly to contest alleged discrimination against Asian American students, targets changes to the city’s expanding Discovery Program. It allows students attending low-income middle schools to receive an offer to one of the city’s elite high schools if they score just below the admissions cut-off on the Specialized High School Admissions Test.
Fortunately, a district judge ruled Feb. 25 that the preliminary injunction the plaintiffs sought to halt the plan was not warranted. But the Pacific Legal Foundation appears prepared to take its case all the way to the U.S.
New York City’s Discriminating Schools
…n a city where residential patterns have made the student bodies of nearly half the public schools predominantly nonwhite, the effective integration of the special schools, and the maintenance of their high academic standards, should be cause for celebration, not condemnation. The Office of Civil Rights may not realize that, racial issues aside, the special schools have been under recurrent attack from those who abhor Jefferson’s “aristocracy of talent” as an affront to egalitarianism. They are dangerously wrong. New York’s special schools are not an aberration but the guiding beacons of public education.