SHSAT: A Struggle of Class and Race at NYC's Elite High Schools

Okay, here it is: Scrapbook (Journal? Let's go with blog)  entry #1! I've been building a list of ideas for posts since the beginning of the semester, so I'll be cranking these out fairly quickly. For my first topic, I decided I'd pick something very near and dear to my heart: The raging debate that has enveloped the NY public education system since my senior year of high school in 2012 (with roots even before that) over admission to New York City's specialized high schools. See, unlike most high schools in New York City, where admission is usually guaranteed if you live in the same district as your high school, or otherwise is based on a combination of standardized test scores and middle school grades, admission to one of NYC's nine specialized high schools, such as Staten Island Tech, my alma mater, is based solely on one's performance when taking the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT—at the start of the test, you mark your three top high schools, and after all scores are tallied,  the seats are awarded to all of the top scorers, until they are all filled. Recently, this system has come under fire in a complaint filed by the NAACP in 2012, stating that a single test should not be the sole determinant for entry into the elite schools, and that blacks and Latinos were disproportionately underrepresented in the admitted student population: "For example, of the 967 eighth-grade students offered admission to Stuyvesant for the 2012-13 school year, just 19 (2%) of the students were African American and 32 (3.3%) were Latino." The reforms being pushed in the state legislature (specialized high school admissions have been protected by state law since 1971) would instead build a composite score using other criteria, such as teacher recommendations and middle school report cards.

However, others pose that the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in the admitted demographics is not a problem rooted in the test, but rather with the underlying social and economic disparities that riddle the NYC education system. Loosening admissions requirements does not necessarily equate to the admission of black and Hispanic students that will be able to perform well in the rigorous, competitive environment of these schools. Part of the issue, I think, is cultural: The NYCDOE does offer free test prep for the SHSAT to high school students in public schools across the city, but you can be certain not everyone who could benefit from them capitalizes on the opportunity; schools with a higher concentration of economically disadvantaged minority children also tend to have less money available, and academic performance on standardized test scores is lower. And yet a large amount of students in my high school could be considered poor—Asian and Hispanic children who made it in through grit and hard work, and reaped the rewards. The issue likely builds off of the model for the culture of poverty we discussed in class; it is self-perpetuating, where exposure to more violence and the lack of sheltered childhoods creates fatalistic and defeatist behaviors in children exposed to them. Most likely, children from these groups would choose to stick with what they were used to. Even if they were accepted (statistics on those demographics are not kept), they may never attend because they feel the environment would be too different.

I don't think a holistic admissions process is the answer; in fact, the specialized high schools were actually less diverse before the SHSAT was administered. As one article in Brooklyn Magazine puts it, "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."
  
Well, what are your thoughts on the issue? Sound off in the comments below!