Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, but Is This Really a Problem?

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7/9/2015 Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem? | Brooklyn Magazine

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Search the blog... Search BROOKLYN ABRIDGED 03/31/15 2:00pm Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem? by Kristin Iversen Featured, Top Story 36 Comments

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TOP STORIES Popular Sandwich Is Victim of Its Own Popularity This was pretty good. You know what’s pretty good? The new Shake Shack chicken sandwich, the ChickenShack. Like, it’s Forget the subtle changes in the weather at this time of year, there’s really only one guaranteed basically the perfect cheap… MORE» way to know that spring is finally here: Reports are released about the students accepted at New BK Food York’s elite, testbased high schools, and it’s revealed that, once again, only a small percentage of the city’s black and Latino students will be attending. The New York City public school Where to Find the Best Damned Key Lime system has 405 public high schools, but like much else in this city, taken as a whole, these Pie in… schools are indicative of the type of inequality that runs rampant here. Some of the lower Steve’s Authentic Key Lime performing high schools have 4year graduation rates that hover at around 40% with only a tiny Piephoto by Dominique Stewart When you’re far away from http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/31/onlytenblackstudentswereofferedaspotatstuyvesanthighschoolthisyearbutisthisaproblem/ 1/12 7/9/2015 Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem? | Brooklyn Magazine fraction of the students going on to attend college or technical school, while others have 100% you grew up, getting the graduation rates and with many students going on to attend Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. occasional taste of your… MORE» BK Food And because perhaps no other public high school in this city is as celebrated as Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, the scrutiny it (along with the seven other testbased specialized high The 7 Best Bites at the New Smorgasburg schools) face with regards to its lack of racial diversity is intense. This year, the specialized high Queens, and… school’s incoming freshman class will contain 5% black students and 7% Latino students, Mini lobster roll with duck confit despite the fact that blacks and Latinos make up approximately 70% of the public school student from Danny Brown This weekend population as a whole. As a comparison, 52% of the class will be Asian and 28% will be white, —specifically, Saturday, July 11 even though both groups together comprise just under 30% of the public school population. On —marks the launch of Smorgasburg Queens, which the surface of things, at least, this seems to be a huge problem, one that Mayor de Blasio and will… MORE» School Chancellor Fariña are trying to change by changing the criteria for admission to these BK Food schools, with de Blasio saying last year, “We cannot have a dynamic where some of our greatest educational options are only available to people from certain backgrounds.” Inside the World of Bed Bugs: or, The Wild West… Since its founding over a century ago, Stuyvesant has served as a beacon for many New York Cimex Lectularius, via Wikimedia families within the public school system, a place where children who came from all Commons Like many unfortunate backgrounds would have the opportunity for an excellent education without a huge price tag. New Yorkers, science journalist Brooke Borel has suffered Stuyvesant’s elite status was obtained by the Bronx High School for Science (Bronx Science) multiple bed bug infestations. The and Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn Tech, attended by Dante de Blasio), and then first… MORE» eventually five other schools as well, all of which have a student’s score on the Specialized High Books School Aptitude Test (SHSAT) as their sole admissions requirement. Beautiful Chaos: Inside the Domino Sugar The test was first instituted in 1970 as a way of better representing the public school system’s Refinery Before It All… racial diversity; prior to the test, the vast majority of specialized high school students were Photos: Paul Raphaelson white, with only a small fraction being black, Asian, and Latino. In the more than 40 years that Long synonymous with the the test has been in place, the number of Asian students has grown, while the number of black Williamsburg waterfront, the Domino Sugar Factory is now but and Latino students (which was comparable to the number of Asian students before 1970) has a relic of the neighborhood’s… fallen precipitously. This change was gradual at first, but has happened more dramatically in MORE» recent years, according to an article in the New York Times: Photos

At Brooklyn Tech, 10 percent of the 5,332 students today are black — sizable in the realm of specialized high schools, but also a big drop from 19992000, when 24 percent were black. At Bronx Science, 3.5 percent of the 3,013 students are black, down from 9 percent in 19992000.

The number of blacks at Stuyvesant peaked in 1975, when they made up 12 percent of the school’s enrollment, or 303 of the school’s 2,536 students. In 1980, there were 212 black students; in 1990, 147; in 2000, 109; and in 2005, 66, state records show.

It is because of statistics like this that politicians and administrators have long sought to get rid of the test, or at least minimize its impact on admissions. Mayor Bloomberg was a notable LATEST VIDEO proponent of the test, saying that it is “as fair as fair can be… You pass the test, you get the highest score, you get into the school — no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your A Night At The economic background is.” But de Blasio has been vociferously in favor of looking at new Opera admissions criteria, and Chancellor Fariña recently said in a statement, “Our goal is to ensure from BROOKLYN MAGAZINE PLUS specialized high schools reflect New York City’s unique diversity, while upholding the same high standards. We continue to review a variety of ideas to increase diversity at our specialized 01:18 high schools such as increasing access to the SHSAT, offering expanded free test prep and

continuing to examine changes to admissions policies.” De Blasio, Fariña, and other advocates A Night At The Opera from BROOKLYN for reform seem to think that if the specialized high schools adopt similar admissions MAGAZINE on Vimeo. requirements to some of the city’s other screened high schools, like Bard High School Early College, Beacon, and Millennium, that diversity will be a natural outcome, and that the schools’ SPONSORED POSTS makeups will be more reflective of the city as a whole. Spinlister Brings Bikes To You As it turns out, though, this does not look to be the case. A fascinating new study by the Sponsored Research Alliance for New York City Schools indicates that not only would diversity at the specialized high schools probably not increase if admissions were changed, but it is possible that http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/31/onlytenblackstudentswereofferedaspotatstuyvesanthighschoolthisyearbutisthisaproblem/ 2/12 7/9/2015 Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem? | Brooklyn Magazine the only students who would significantly be helped would be economically advantaged, white How to Make It in Brooklyn, students. As Sean Corcoran, a researcher from NYU and one of the cowriters of the report, told From the Experts Chalkbeat, “Maybe it was naive, but I thought if you switched to more holistic measures, it Sponsored would diversify the admissions pool considerably. It turns out that students disproportionately offered admission to specialized high schools are the same students who get high scores on the 6 Exotic Ingredients You state tests and get high grades.” Should Try in the Kitchen And, you know, maybe it was naive! Because as is evidenced by the population makeups of Sponsored many of the city’s elite, screened high schools, while they might possess larger populations of black and Latino students than at the specialized schools, there is also a significantly higher population of one race of students in particular: whites. The fact is that the students who would most benefit from things like an interview process or an evaluation of things like extracurricular activities are those who already possess an awareness of the the type of social cues that are a product of being born into a privileged social, racial, and economic class. Getting rid of the test would only serve to discriminate against the type of kid who doesn’t know how to do well in an interview, but who can ace the kind of difficult exam which rightly serves as a determination of how well they will be able to do over the next four years of high school.

The other thing that very few opponents of the test like to talk about is the fact that it benefits precisely no one (least of all the students themselves) to allow kids to enter a fastpaced, ultra competitive school where they have little chance of, well, competing. One thing that the big three (Stuy, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech) specialized high schools all have in common is how large they are. The incoming freshman classes of both Stuy and Bronx Science hover at just under 1,000 students, for Brooklyn Tech, that number is over 1,700. These schools foster atmospheres where independent, selfmotivated learners can thrive; students who need more guidance and supervision tend to flail and falter. It serves no one to allow students to enter into an academic setting where they have no chance of succeeding.

But so where should they go? This, in the end, is the real question. Why, after all, is there a focus on dismantling what are inarguably some of the most successful schools in this city, when there are so many others that are failing? Why seek to compromise a positive environment when there are countless other schools that could use some attention? And, really, why is there a focus on the black and Latino kids who are highachievers already, and who can thrive at schools like Medgar Evers Preparatory School or Midwood High School, where they can get excellent educations, simply because they aren’t attending Stuy? The answer, I think, is as simple as it is depressing: Schools like Stuyvesant will always be a lightning rod because they are examples of the system working (albeit imperfectly), and politicians and administrators would rather focus on a school like that than talk about the far more troubling fact that while only a small percentage of black and Latino students might get into Stuy, less than 65% of blacks and Latinos graduate from high school at all, as compared with over 80% of white and Asian students. But fixing the systemic problems in this city’s public school system are obviously a much bigger task than addressing the lack of diversity in a few of the schools, and so public figures simply distract people from the real problems, and focus on relatively insignificant ones instead. But How about we… ride our bikes from doing that helps no one, least of all the students who need help the most. downtown BK to Far Rockaway beach. Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen A.Lee, 28, F Send Message New York City public schools, racism, SHSAT, specialized high schools, Stuyvesant A Brooklyn Literary Map: The Best Book for Each Brooklyn NeighborhoodA Brooklyn Around Brooklyn See More  Literary Map: The Best Book for Each Brooklyn Neighborhood | Brooklyn Magazine

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