They got some relief Wednesday when Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat who attended Brooklyn Technical High School, told reporters he isn’t considering a deal to pass that bill in return for other changes, such as boosting gifted programs.
“I think we should be looking to enrich our junior high-school students as we try to put them on the path to whether it’s a specialized high school or not,” Mr. Heastie said after meeting with New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. “We need to look at the system in totality, so I didn’t agree to any trades.”Heastie Quotes on the SHSAT
Assemblyman Michael Benedetto, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the Assembly education committee, said Wednesday night more than 50 fellow Democrats in his chamber debated the bill on ending the test in a closed-door evening conference, and it wasn’t clear what would happen next. “I don’t think it should be the role of the legislature to dictate to a particular school district how they determine admission to their own high schools,” he said in an interview.
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Elite High-School Debate Simmers as Albany Session Winds Down
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Parents Mull Suit Over City Plan to Boost Diversity at Elite Schools
Vito LaBella, president of the Christa McAuliffe Parent Teacher Organization, said that if parents decide to forge ahead, the federal suit would challenge this set-aside plan. “It’s discriminatory,” he said. “I do believe our children would no longer be allowed to partake in Discovery.”
Currently the small Discovery program is available to disadvantaged applicants citywide. The mayor says he can make this change because the 1971 law on admissions at these high schools allows for a Discovery program of some sort.
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I.S. 87 Christa McAuliffe, a highly selective public school in the Borough Park neighborhood, has been a strong feeder to specialized high schools. With roughly 900 students, about 36% of its eighth-graders headed to Stuyvesant High School, 20% to Brooklyn Technical High School, and 20% to Staten Island Technical High School, according to city data for the 2016-17 school year.
That year, 67% of the school’s students were Asian, 26% were white, 6% were Hispanic and 1% were black.