Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News is appalled at the steadily shrinking proportion of black and Hispanic students in the city’s elite exam high schools:
In 1999, three years before Michael Bloomberg became mayor, black students comprised 24% of the student body at Brooklyn Tech. This year, the percentage of black students has plummeted to 10%.
Stuyvesant’s student body was nearly 13% black in 1979; it then dropped to 4.8% by 1994; this year it’s an atrocious 1.2%.
Only 1.4% of students offered admission to Stuyvesant this year (13 of 937) were Latino, even though Latinos comprise 40% of all public school eighth-graders and were 21% of students who took the specialized high school test.
Our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who so often boasts of reducing the racial achievement gap in education, sees absolutely nothing wrong with this picture.
His first schools chancellor, Joel Klein, actually extended the same test to determine admission to five more top city high schools, with similar results.
“Stuyvesant and these other schools are as fair as fair can be,” Bloomberg said. “You pass the test, you get the highest score, you get into the school no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background is.”
The mayor would have you believe it is all about merit, which even my 13-year-old knows is nonsense.
He acts as if the giant test prep industry isn’t raking in billions of dollars precisely to offer anyone with enough cash a leg up on the rest of the city’s children.
……Asked about this, Bloomberg reacted with his typical rich man’s arrogance.
“Life isn’t always fair,” he told a City Hall reporter. “I don’t know how you would take away the right to get tutoring.”
….It’s time our school system stop glorifying the best-trained test takers and start nurturing great students.dmitted to the city’s elite examination high schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are other ways of having highly selective admissions that secure diversity for magnet schools with accelerated academic programs. Columbia Secondary School for MSE was founded under an alternative model of talent selection that has, for the last 5 years, achieved 75%-80% Latino/Black enrollment while having a highly accelerated STEM program with virtually 100% of its students participating in early college AP courses and access to college courses at Columbia University. A 6-12th grade school model that invites to its freshman class the top 25 students from each of 4 NYC districts using a mixture of grades, essay test scores and interviews, achieves classes that are highly talented, highly successful and highly diverse, many of whom while in 9th grade obtained invitations to Stuy and Bronx Science, chose to continue in a more intimate, more personalized and more innovative academic program, that includes core classes in engineering and philosophy, accelerated Regents level high school courses while in middle school and college level courses as early as 9th grade. Other similar models of small selective high schools exist in NYC that represent, i think, a better educational option for highly talented students. While CSS is too young to compare its graduates to Bronx Sci and Stuy it is a model to watch.
This is but one part of the continuing racial and SES stratification under Bloomberg policies. I believe it is a crass attempt to pull more middle and upper class White and Asian students into the system, along with their higher test scores, to make NYC schools look better. Reform with no work…
“Life isn’t always fair.”
Should social policies make life even less fair?
Is this “reform” to “elite” schools a path to increased segregation?
What a sad legacy, Mr. Bloomberg.
Please read my post on Mayor Bloomberg in How Much is Much on my blog. Wealthy people know all about what their money could really do for people if they didn’t keep it all to themselves.