Leonie Haimson lays out the case for reforming the admission practices of New York City’s elite admission-by-exam high schools. Changes are long overdue, she says.

The problem is that so few black and Hispanic students gain admission to the city’s eight specialized high schools.

As a Leonie points out, “Only 10 percent of students admitted to these selective high schools are black and Hispanic, while these students make up 67 percent of the overall public school population. This year, only 10 black students were offered admission to the city’s most selective of these high schools, Stuyvesant, out of 902 students admitted.”

However, only three high schools are shielded by state law from changes initiated by the city’s Board of Education. The Mayor could direct his board to make changes at five of the selective schools now.

New York city’s selective schools are the only ones in the nation that base admission solely on a single test.

The problems are not limited to three or eight high schools.

“The competitive nature of this process worsened under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. The number of high schools that admitted students through academic screening increased from 29 in 1997 to 112 in 2017, while the proportion of “ed-opt” high schools, designed to accept students at all different levels of achievement, dropped sharply. Even so-called unscreened programs actually do screen students, in covert ways. Moreover, the Gates-funded small schools that proliferated after 2002 initially barred students with disabilities or English language learners from their schools, prompting a civil rights complaint in 2006.“

A major fix would require reducing class sizes in the elementary and middle schools to improve the education of all children.