Mayor Passes The Buck On Elite School Diversity, Experts Say

NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio's overtures to Albany to help make the city's top high schools more diverse are just a "cop-out," education experts say.

After eight of the city's nine specialized high schools offered just 10 percent of their seats for next year to black and Latino students, the mayor last Friday said state law has to change so that the schools can consider factors other than a student's score on a single standardized exam, the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

But only three schools — Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Technical High School and Bronx High School of Science — have to use the the test under a decades-old state law. The Department of Education could act immediately to create a more equitable admission system at the other five, experts said.

"He (the mayor) can de-designate those five schools as specialized high schools with the stroke of a pen," said Lazar Treschan, the director of youth policy for the Community Service Society, an advocacy group.

State lawmakers named Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts as the city's first specialized high schools in 1971.

Under the law, known as the Hecht-Calandra Act, the three schools must use a "competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination" as the sole basis of admission. Admission to LaGuardia is based on an audition and academic review under the same law.

As the law allows, the city designated the five other specialized high schools in the 2000s under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg: The Brooklyn Latin School, Staten Island Technical High School, Queens High School for the Sciences, the High School of Science, Mathematics and Engineering and the High School of American Studies.

But there's nothing in state law that prevents officials from using different admission standards at those schools, experts say.

All it would take is a vote by the Panel for Educational Policy — the Department of Education's governing board — to "un-designate" them as specialized schools and base acceptance on something other than the test, which has had perpetuated racial disparities since its inception, said David C. Bloomfield, an education policy professor at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. The mayor appoints eight of the panel's 13 members.

"It makes no educational sense to have admission based on a single rank-ordered test," Bloomfield said. "So this would be a step in the right direction not only in terms of diversity but in terms of educational practice."

As the city interprets it, the state law applies to every specialized high school, including those the city designates that aren't named in the statute, Department of Education spokeswoman Toya Holness said in an email.

De Blasio has suggested the ultimate solution is to "get rid of" the test altogether. But the law doesn't lay out a process for "de-designating" schools, and any effort to do so would likely meet some sort of challenge, Holness said.

"The administration is supportive of changes to the admissions process that would increase the numbers of black and Latino students admitted," Holness said. "A change in admissions would require a change to state law."

But Treschan said the city's explanation is just "another cop-out." The five newer specialized schools would be the perfect proving ground for a new admission system based on different factors, he said.

"So there would be a challenge. They have a thousand lawyers," Treschan said. "This is a good place to take a legal stand on equity and opportunity."

The Community Service Society in 2015 recommended offering admission based on kids' scores on the state English and math exams rather than the specialized high schools test. That would better reflect students' understanding of the actual middle school curriculum and help parents avoid the headache of costly test prep, the group argued.

But Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of InsideSchools.org, said applying changes to the five newest schools would only be a partial fix, given that Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science hold nearly three quarters of all specialized high school seats.

"There’s not a simple solution," Hemphill said.

(Lead image: Photo by CLS Digital Arts/Shutterstock)