Why were only seven black students admitted to this elite NYC public school?

As one of eight specialized, tuition-free public high schools in New York City, Stuyvesant High School is flooded with over 3,000 applicants every year for just under 1,000 spots. A recent New York Times report found that even considering the overall competitiveness of admissions, black students are underrepresented in the student body. In 2019, of the 895 spots given to the incoming eighth-grade class, only seven were extended to black students. The year before, only 10 black students were given spots, and the class of 2021 included only 13.

The hallmark of Stuyvesant, as well as other specialized high schools in the city, is that all students have an equal opportunity to be admitted. Admission is determined solely by students’ scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), which is offered to eighth-graders in the fall before they graduate from middle school. According to the New York City Department of Education website, the SHSAT “assesses knowledge and skill” Including skills like “the ability to comprehend English prose, to demonstrate an understanding of revising and editing skills central to writing in English, and to use problem-solving skills in mathematics.”

These scores grant some students access to schools that, in the case of Stuyvesant, offers classes in over eight different languages, provides two semesters of computer science courses, encourages students to choose from a wide range of AP classes, and makes available classes such as medical ethics, vertebrate zoology, and existentialism.

But the recent revelation that Stuyvesant’s number of black freshman has dwindled in recent years has called into question just how fair this supposedly equal-opportunity process really is.

When interviewed by the New York Times, Asian students currently attending Stuyvesant reported that they had been studying for the school’s entrance and exam and otherwise working to get into Stuyvesant for as long as they could remember. Many black students, on the other hand, hadn’t even heard of Stuyvesant until their last year of middle school. One black student told the Times that she only learned about Stuyvesant because her middle school teacher suggested she take the SHSAT, and as a result, she had the opportunity to better prepare.

“The rest of my peers did not know about the specialized high schools or Stuyvesant or any of those schools or the SHSAT until eighth grade, one month before the test,” the student explained on the Times’ ‘The Daily’ podcast. “I think a handful of other students took the test. But since I had been the only one preparing for it, I was the only one who got in.”

A growing number of people are now arguing that using solely the SHSAT score for admissions unfairly ignores other factors of a student’s merit. This is predominantly relevant among students who score high grades in their middle school classes but still don’t score well on their SHSATs. Not only is the hard work these students are doing in their classrooms ignored in favor of a single number on an exam, but they are also often essentially being punished for their schools’ failures, not their own. Eliza Shapiro, the New York Times journalist who reported this story, told The Daily podcast that the kids who are not doing well on this test are overwhelmingly black, Latinx, and low-income. Many of them said the SHSAT quizzed them on concepts they had never learned. It is not necessarily a student’s intelligence that is measured by the SHSAT, therefore, but the quality of their middle schools, which, in the city of New York, are overwhelmingly low-achieving and underfunded.

So then how are specialized schools like Stuyvesant dominated by Asian Americans, who are also often low-income public school students? Asian American Stuyvesant students told ‘The Daily’ podcast that they had been informed about the test from an early age and had been studying for years thanks to the awareness of the test in their communities. Asian American parents share their knowledge with other parents in the community, and many parents know to scrape together what money they can to put their children in summer educational programs and to hire tutors.

All of these factors have encouraged black and Latinx low-income parents and their children to call for elite public schools like Stuyvesant to get rid of the Specialized High School Admissions Test altogether. Instead, many are asking that these schools offer admission to the students who scored at the top of their class in every public middle school in New York City. According to Shapiro, if this change were implemented, the percentage of black and brown students at Stuyvesant would jump from 10 percent to 45 percent.

Given that the value put on standardized testing has been decreasing in the college application process as more elite universities have chosen to be test-optional in recent years, it seems reasonable that the same choice can and should be extended to eighth-graders who are working hard despite the conditions of their public middle schools. By deciding to judge these kids by factors like their character, work ethic, teachers’ feedback, and the grades they receive rather than a single test score, it seems inevitable that the best public schools in New York will become even better.