Can we fix elitist public high school admissions?

Only 5,000 kids are offered admission to the nine prestigious college-prep high schools in New York City, and they are predominantly male, and white or Asian, reports Alia Wong in The Atlantic. In 2013, just four percent of incoming freshman were black, and five percent Latino, to the three most prominent schools: Stuyvesant, Bronx School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Admission to a specialized school hinges solely on a 150-minute multiple-choice test, the SHSAT; many feel this solitary requirement encourages a lack of student diversity. Critics include plaintiffs in a federal suit with the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, and Mayor Bill de Blasio and state legislators, who tried to change the rule. But NYU's Research Alliance for New York City has found the issue to be larger than testing. Some proposed solutions, such as broader admissions criteria like grades or attendance records, would not enhance minority representation, and certain alternatives would decrease it. What research found, unsurprisingly, is that ethnic and gender disparities trace back to deeper systemic problems and emerge much earlier than eighth-grade admissions. "Sorting" of supposedly high- and low-achieving kids causes uneven distributions early on, by testing and segregating children from the get-go. The only policy that would substantially change selective-school demographics would be one that guaranteed admission to all eighth-graders in the top 10 percent of their middle school. More

Source:  Public Education News Blast

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Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) is an education support organization that works as a collaborative partner in high-poverty communities.