| Today, the NYC Department of Education announced the results of the City’s high school choice process, including data about students admitted to the City’s eight specialized schools. As in past years, Black and Latino students are starkly under-represented among those receiving offers to these elite schools. A central question is whether the schools’ admissions policy—based exclusively on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT)—is to blame for the lack of diversity.
A new brief, Pathways to an Elite Education: Exploring Strategies to Diversify NYC’s Specialized High Schools, examines students’ pathways from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school, highlighting opportunities to intervene and improve access for underrepresented groups. The brief also simulates the effects of various admissions criteria that have been proposed as alternatives to the current SHSAT-based admissions policy, including state test score, grades, and attendance. In general, we found that these rules would increase the share of Latino, White, and female students. But, most of them would not appreciably increase the share of Black students nor reduce the concentration of offers in a small number of middle schools.
“The real take-away is from this study is the lack of diversity in the specialized schools is a much bigger problem than ‘to test or not to test?’” said James Kemple, the Research Alliance’s executive director. “We need to think more broadly about how to reduce inequality in New York City’s schools—identifying strategies that create opportunities for traditionally disadvantaged students will be a primary focus of the Research Alliance’s work in coming years.” |
