Andrew Boryga writes in the New Yorker about the changes that made New York City’s specialized, elite high schools more segregated than they used to be. One reason was budget cuts imposed by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

“The city’s specialized public high schools weren’t always so segregated. In the nineteen-eighties, the three oldest and most prestigious specialized schools had sizable black and Latino populations. (In 1989, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant were sixty-seven, twenty-two, and sixteen per cent black and Latino, respectively; today, those numbers have fallen to fourteen per cent, nine per cent, and three per cent.) Samuel Adewumi, a Brooklyn Tech alumnus who is now a teacher at the school, recalls that when he was growing up in the Bronx, in the late seventies, the borough had well-funded gifted-and-talented programs that served as pipelines for exceptional students. By the sixth grade, Adewumi said, he and his friends had their sights set on getting into a specialized high school. Most of their preparation for the test took place in school. “My teachers already knew what needed to happen for me to be prepared and worked it into the curriculum,” he said.

“Things began to change in the early nineties, when New York City eliminated many of its honors programs as “tracking”(separating students based on their abilities) fell out of favor. Then, under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, two billion dollars were cut from the city’s education system. Awilda Ruiz, who helped found the middle-school honors program that I attended, within an underperforming school in the South Bronx, and taught math in the program for nearly thirty years, said that during this period funding for test-prep in the program dried up. By the time I first became aware of the SHSAT, at the beginning of eighth grade, the only resource provided by my school was a thin packet of practice problems. I remember very little about sitting for the test that October, apart from feeling overwhelmed by the material, but I know that I wasn’t surprised or upset to learn that I didn’t score high enough to get into any specialized schools, in part because they never seemed meant for kids like me in the first place.

“Pedro Noguera, one of the country’s leading scholars of urban education, believes that the dismal diversity statistics in New York’s specialized high schools prove that the SHSAT is a flawed metric, and that the criteria for admission should be expanded. “There is no college in the country that admits students strictly on the basis of a test,” he told me. “The idea of using a single test is crazy and hard to justify—especially because we know grades are often better predictors of future success than test scores.” (Studies have shown that college students who are accepted to standardized-test-optional schools without submitting S.A.T. or A.C.T. scores perform around as well as those who do.) Noguera, who is a distinguished professor of education at U.C.L.A., and the author of a dozen books on urban education, is an Afro-Latino native of Brooklyn. He attended public schools in the borough and on Long Island, where his family moved when he was in the third grade, and he went on to attend Brown University, even though, as he’s put it, “most students that I went to school with did not go to college.” A big part of the problem with a school like Bronx Science, he said, is that it is overwhelmingly made up of students who don’t even live in the Bronx. “Either you open up Bronx Science to more kids,” he said, “or you create more Bronx Sciences in the Bronx.””