A debate has been raging in New York between parents, schools, and city officials since the results of the high school placement test were released in March. Most recently, sparks flew at a city council hearing as city officials proposed removing the admissions test to eight selective public high schools in the city.
The test data were shocking and threw New York’s public school segregation into the spotlight. Two-thirds of all students in New York City public schools are black or Latino, but less than 10% of black or Latino students passed the test for admission to the city’s eight highly selective and specialized high schools.
At Stuyvesant, the city’s most selective high school, only seven black students were admitted out of 895 seats in the incoming freshman class. In half of the eight selective high schools, acceptance of black students has declined over the past five years.
Conversely, Asian American students’ representation at selective schools is more than twice their representation in the general population. It was their parents leading several hundred others at the city council meeting last week.
Efforts such as providing free test preparation to minority students and changing the time of the test to during the school day have not increased diversity within the schools. It is clear that deeper inequalities within the system exist.
Continuing to believe that the test is the problem covers up the ugly, yet rather obvious truth: New York (and most other American cities) are filled with public schools that are de facto segregated by race and class.
We know the reason for this. Zip-code assigned schools reflect their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods in large cities are segregated by race and class. Families within those neighborhoods have neither the means to move neighborhoods for a better, more integrated school nor the ability to pay for private school tuition.
What should the way forward be for leaders and policymakers? There are several possible solutions.
First, there is a clear supply-side issue with charter schools in New York. For the 2019 school year, charters received an estimated 79,600 applicants for the approximately 26,900 seats available in 238 schools. Nine in 10 of these schools report having waiting lists that are at least double the number of available seats. The city could consider investing in the creation of more schools that are free of district bureaucracy, union control, and standardization.
Second, as each year passes without a policy for private school choice in New York, more seats in New York parochial schools sit empty. Worse, these schools, despite producing minority leaders such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, are shuttering in low-income communities. Programs that promote educational freedom for low-income families, such as tax-credit scholarships, are a tried-and-true solution.
Third, recent research from the Manhattan Institute’s Education Policy Director Ray Domanico argues that government officials should prioritize the numerous other diverse, high-achieving public schools that do exist in the city. Research displays that 50 to 75 such schools exist; enriching these would prove a more effective tool for improving education for minority students.
Don’t abolish the test. Choose to treat the root cause of the problem, not its symptom.
Kate Hardiman is a contributor to Red Alert Politics. She is pursuing a master’s degree in education from Notre Dame University and teaches English and religion at a high school in Chicago.
