When the federal Office of Civil Rights in 1977 charged New York City with running a top-to-bottom racially segregated public school system, a big part of its complaint was that blacks and Latinos made up about 60% of public high school students but just 45% of those at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech.
After accusing the city of using academic tracking as a K-to-12 instrument of segregation, the feds struck a deal the next year that, as the New York Times summarized it, recognized the need for “common-sense grouping of children…but with the understanding that the schools are responsible for helping youngsters to work their way up from the bottom so that starting on the slow track need not determine a child’s speed forever.”
The agreement let New York maintain the 1971 law mandating that a single test, the SHSAT, determine admissions to those three elite high schools, and — quoting the Times again — it “acknowledged that there is an irreconcilable conflict between academic selectivity and admission by quotas that are aimed at insuring a perfect sample of the overall demography.”
Jump ahead four decades, and blacks and Latinos are up to about 70% of all public high school students and down to just 10% of those at the eight elite high schools that now use the test to determine admissions.
And Chancellor Richard Carranza and Mayor Bill de Blasio are furiously calling on Albany to change the law so that New York City’s elite schools will better reflect its demography — and flatly denying what the Times long ago called that “irreconcilable conflict.”
Rather, de Blasio has said, the current standard is a “monumental injustice,” and creating a new admissions standard to diversify the SHSAT schools “would raise the bar at the specialized high schools in every way” and “also make our society stronger” as “the kind of high schools we have today, will determine the kind of New York City we will have tomorrow.”
He’s right. Talent is spread across our city, but easily recognized in only a few of its pockets. It’s profoundly unhealthy to have such a segregated public system. And given how hard it is for a chancellor with three years, tops, overseeing a system it takes students 13 years to move through, to steer the ship toward a new course, there’s some moral, political and rhetorical appeal in using the elite schools to force a conversation about integration and equity (that is, if you’re not Asian-American) across the system.
But it’s absurd to pin on one test that’s supposed to have somehow become more discriminatory over time the failings of the much larger school system that produces most of the students taking it (or deciding not to).
More, I suspect the elite schools do more to burnish their own reputations than they do for students already primed for success; though they do help retain families who’d otherwise leave the system or the city. Finally, no matter how much more equitable you get, separating “the leaders and innovators of tomorrow” isn’t helpful to everyone that leaves behind.
I’m sure that compared to the political capital and rhetorical energy spent pushing the SHSAT boulder up the hill 150 miles north, de Blasio and Carranza have spent precious little on the “slow track” here.
And I’m sure that there is nothing stopping them from changing the admission standard at the five other high schools using the test to prove that they have a better approach.
(They now claim it’s not legally clear they could do this, but it is; this is a guy pretending he wants to fight screaming “hold me back!” at his own legal department.)
There’s nothing at all stopping them from opening new elite schools so even more students would benefit.
But Carranza — who’s said that the test is “a problem,” and that “some people would say it’s racist” to have a law requiring schools to use it to determine admissions — is passing: “What you’re going to do is you’re going to create another tier of schools. I don’t want to create more tiers.”
Or maybe Carranza and de Blasio just don’t want to put their money where their mouths have been.
