Two weeks ago, New York City Councilmember Lincoln Restler and Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams pressed on with their long-running campaign against New York City’s specialized high schools by proposing an Excellence and Integration Plan.
These schools admit students solely according to their performance on the objective, rigorous, colorblind Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT). But for Restler and Williams, that process hasn’t yielded enough black and Hispanic students. (Translation, as in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard: too many Asians.)
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The Restler-Williams plan does nothing to fix the city’s nearly 1,600 other public schools, where most eighth-graders cannot do middle school math and one-third of students are chronically absent. Instead, it seeks to dumb down New York’s eight top high schools, so admired around the world that Chinese delegations have even visited one of them (Stuyvesant) to study how it works.
Their proposal contains five key points. First, it seeks to increase enrollment by 3,000 total seats at the five newer specialized high schools added under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Second, it aims to replace the SHSAT-based admissions process for those schools with an opaque, private school-style admissions process that considers grades (which can be inflated), teacher recommendations (which are subjective), “applicant backgrounds” (which are vaguely defined), and applicant essays (which can be bought). Third, it proposes introducing a new and improved math curriculum in middle school that has no objective, independent data to back up its effectiveness. Fourth, it restricts the Discovery Program—the admissions backdoor to the specialized high schools intended for individually disadvantaged students—to the 15 poorest school districts, all of which conveniently have few Asians. Finally, it calls on Albany to repeal the Hecht-Calandra Act, the 1971 New York State law that mandated the SHSAT for admissions to the city’s top-performing high schools—precisely to protect them from political interference like the Restler-Williams plan.
A better approach would be to ask why some groups outperform others on the SHSAT.
The old racial explanation—that the SHSAT was designed to favor white students—doesn’t wash, now that the specialized high schools are majority Asian, including many immigrant students who just learned English a few years ago and have scant familiarity with “whiteness.” If anything, these students are handicapped not just in the English section of the SHSAT but also in the math section, since math is taught in English, too.
Nor does wealth explain the performance disparity. For years, both Asian and Hispanic New Yorkers have outperformed blacks on the SHSAT, despite having higher poverty rates. Contrary to common misconceptions, studying for the SHSAT doesn’t have to be expensive. Poor Asian immigrant families manage to afford test preparation, many tutoring centers offer financial aid, and the city runs the free DREAM tutoring program. Public libraries offer free SHSAT books with instructions, explanations, and complete sample tests, along with free online tutoring.
Efforts to question the SHSAT’s validity also miss the mark. The proof is in the results. If the test did not successfully identify hard-working, talented students, there would be little interest in getting into the specialized schools by tens of thousands of test-takers every year. But the achievements of the schools’ graduates speak to their educational quality. The original three SHSAT schools have produced 15 Nobel laureates in the sciences, along with countless researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs whose work has advanced STEM and the American economy. No other high school admissions system has come close.
The SHSAT is not magic. Most prep is just studying, to remediate for New York City’s failing public schools and to catch up to global standards (the U.S. trails East Asia and much of Europe in PISA math rankings). More fundamentally, the mere act of sacrificing weekends to study for the SHSAT develops habits of delayed gratification, extended concentration, and focus on long-term goals, which are key to succeeding in academics and life. A Brookings Institution report found that Asian students spend almost twice as much time doing homework as white students and almost four times as much as black students.
There is a better option than the Restler-Williams plan: expand New York City’s specialized high schools.
Seat scarcity at the specialized high schools is a real phenomenon. Last year, 26,000 students took the SHSAT to compete for fewer than 5,000 spots. Majorities of all races of those who took the test, even Asians, did not get a spot.
That scarcity is self-inflicted. The city should add more seats until every student willing and able to compete at the SHSAT can get one. Not all these students or new schools would be of the same caliber, but the SHSAT sorting process would ensure that each student would study with a similarly prepared and committed peer group, bringing out the best in all of them.
This is what happened when Bloomberg added five specialized high schools from 2002 to 2006. The schools are not all of the same caliber, but they are now all immensely sought after, some more than the original three. Hecht-Calandra allows such expansion. The city doesn’t need to add more high school seats overall; it would merely shift some of them from the district schools to the specialized high schools.
New York City’s leaders should ditch the divisive racial framework and stop pitting kids against each other in identity-based hostilities. Instead, they should keep the SHSAT, add more seats, and fix public schools for the rest.