NY Chalkbeat recounts the story of a black student who won admission to York High School in Queens, one of the most selective in New York City. Admission is based on students’ test scores on one test of mathematics and reading, offered on one day. Only those with the highest scores are admitted.
The first thing Elizabeth Yarde noticed on her first day at Queens High School for the Sciences at York College was the lack of Black students.
The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Yarde felt intense stares from other students, their looks seemingly questioning Yarde’s place at the elite high school, and she heard racial slurs being tossed around freely. At lunch, when Yarde started up a conversation with a fellow student, he remarked that he had never had a Black friend before.
“I started to slowly realize that a lot of these kids had kind of been sheltered from other races of people to the point where they didn’t really know how to be racially sensitive,” said Yarde, 17, who graduated Monday. “It seemed like kids were either automatically intimidated by me, or they immediately undermined me.”
As one of the eight specialized public high schools in the city where admissions is determined solely by the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or the SHSAT, York High School, as Yarde’s school is sometimes called, does not have a student body that comes close to representing the nation’s largest public school system. Asian American students account for more than 80% of the student body – about 480 students – while only 3% of students are Black, even though Black students make up roughly a quarter of students in New York City’s public schools.
Over the course of her freshman year, Yarde felt her mental health deteriorate. Panic attacks became regular occurrences. She often felt overwhelmed and ran to the bathroom to cry. Racist remarks from other students – such as one student’s comment that his mother would rather he be gay than date a Black girl – wore her down.
Yarde begged her mother to let her transfer to a different school, but her mother encouraged her to stay. As the youngest of 10 children, and the first to attend a specialized high school, she felt significant pressure not only to stick it out but also to perform well academically.
And she has. She is graduating with a 3.8 GPA, and she will start college in the fall at Northeastern University in Boston. A member of student government and the school’s student leadership team, Yarde discovered at York High School that she has a strong voice and deft communication skills. She aspires to be a lawyer or a marketing executive one day.
But Yarde’s academic success has come at a cost, one that she is not sure she would be willing to pay again.
“I don’t personally think it was worth it,” she said. “I don’t think that Black children should always have to face trauma in order to be stronger. The world is already very difficult as a Black child – walking down the street, going anywhere with your friends, always having to be so racially aware at such a young age. If you can have a safe place for four years, eight hours a day, five days a week, you go there.”
The nation’s most segregated school system
New York City’s public school system is the most segregated in the country. According to a recent report released by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, about 85% of Black students and about 75% of Latino students attend segregated schools in the city. Only 11% of white students and 43% of Asian American students do.
The racial divide is especially evident in the city’s specialized high schools. This year, only eight Black students were offered a seat at Stuyvesant out of 749 seats, and only one Black student got into Staten Island Technical High School. At York High School, 10 Black students were offered seats, an increase from last year’s 8.
Black and Latino students, who together make up almost 70% of the school system, received 9% of offers to specialized schools for the coming school year – a decline from 11% the year before..
Ironically, Elizabeth Yarde chose to attend Northeastern University, where black students are only 3% of the enrollment. She knows she can handle it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gary Orfield’s work continues to use the concept of “non-white” enrollment even though white students are now only the fourth-largest racial/ethnic demographic group in NYC public schools. Stuyvesant is 70% “non-white.” Is Stuyvesant a “segregated school” because it’s overwhelmingly non-white, or because it’s overwhelmingly non-black and non-Hispanic?
The numbers at Stuyvesant are not reflective of NYC’s population. That’s all there is to it. If you haven’t read The Hate U Give yet, I highly recommend it. The film version is powerful too. It’s about a girl who goes to an elite school. I know what it feels like to be the different one in the room, and I still would never presume to fully understand.
Tons of schools in NYC do not reflect NYC’s population.
That’s the problem. NYC is the most segregated district in the country. Having charter schools contributes to the problem. Having selective admission schools adds to the problem. My school in Los Angeles was diverse just a few years ago. They added selective programs recently, and now I teach at a segregation school. Many parents and teachers are thrilled that they can use my school to avoid unwanted classmates. I am devastated. It’s not good for Los Angeles.
On a tangent to the “only one like me in the room” theme, I worked many years in an inner-city high school where most of the kids struggled with severe poverty and a lack of English skills — I got to see firsthand the other side to this story, where quite a few students were only able to attend and get through their school year because they were among peers. Separating them out and sending them off to so-called ‘better’ schools would have been giving them the complete opposite of what they needed.
I know. I taught at one of those schools. It stinks that we have allowed areas of generational poverty to grow, and now people are used to the way things are. I suppose it’s not a good idea to uproot people suddenly or en masse. Mandatory busing was harsh for many, including me when I was in school. There was a lot of culture shock. But getting rid of school admission and expectation policies like those of Success Academy and Stuyvesant would not uproot people that drastically.
Stuyvesant could be shut down completely and it wouldn’t have any impact on “segregation” in NYC public schools. FYI, only about 20% of the students at Stuy are white.
I recommend to families with the means to move out of the city or to send their kids to private school, rather than go through 12 years of stress over constantly shifting admissions criteria due to political fights about whether X school has the right demographics.
15% of NYC’s students are white. If you define segregation by reference to the percentage of white students are at a school (which seems to be Orfield’s method), you’re not going to be able to “desegregate” NYC schools. There aren’t enough white students to spread around.
I don’t think trying to micromanage the demographics of each school to make sure they reflect city’s demographics is the best way to improve education in NYC, but I know this is a minority view here.
There are ways to desegregate. My understanding is that integration was on the rise in the 1960s and 1970s, until white flight instincts took over in the 1980s. One way to desegregate it to get rid of selective admissions. An even better way is to get rid of all segregationist school choice policies. There are magnet schools, there could have been busing if white America hadn’t rejected it so vehemently… There are ways, when there is a will instead of excuses.
Again, if your notion of “segregation” is based on how many white students attend a school, there is no way to get “desegregate” NYC public schools, because even if you spread all the white students across the entire system according to their race — which would require shipping kids from Staten Island to Queens, and kids from Queens to the Bronx or Brooklyn—you will have schools that are only 15 percent white.
I’m done with the racial bean-counting.
New York City has not just the most segregated school district; it is the most segregated city. It won’t desegregate itself. Fighting for racial justice takes a great deal of work, and a whole bunch of privileged people have to give up some of their privileges. NYC has schools that are almost entirely one class of people, and other schools almost entirely a different class. 16 > 1.
Sorry, 15, not 16.
Leftcoastteacher,
If your concern is about socioeconomic class, Stuyvesant would appear to to be among the most balanced in the city: about half of the students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch, half are not. No doubt there are some children from wealthy families as well. It may be that Stuyvesant is the most diverse school in the system if we are talking about “class”.
You may be surprised, FLERP, but I agree with you. I believe in racial integration but there are enough white students to make it feasible. Even if every school was 15% white, they would still be considered segregated. And if every white student were assigned to a distant school to produce that 15%, many parents would leave the city or the public schools.
When people outside NYC read “NYC has the most segregated school system in the country”, they probably don’t understand what that means in reality. White students are disproportionately represented at a smaller group of NYC public high schools, and virtually missing from others, but in most cases, the NYC public high schools that white students attend would be considered incredibly diverse if they were in the suburbs. If you told Americans outside NYC that a popular NYC public high school whose demographics are 38% white, 27% Asian, 20% Latino, 13% Black is typical of a “segregated” school system, they’d probably be surprised, since most people understand that word to mean something else.
Most white students in NYC public schools attend schools that are far more diverse than in the suburbs, where schools are often majority white.
But when only 1% of the students at a large high school like Stuyvesant are African American, that should have been a red flag years ago that there was something wrong with SHSAT-only admissions.
I don’t mean to saturate the discussion with my views. Apologies!
Same!
Alas, temptation is getting the best of me. Please allow me to make an analogy. We tell billionaires they need to pay taxes. They reply with why they should not: they earned what they have with study and hard work (not true), they are the best and brightest so they should be the power brokers (not true), America is all about freedom (not true), if they have to pay taxes they will take their businesses elsewhere (not true), it’s too difficult and too complicated to find where they hid all the money (not true), their taxes won’t make a big difference (not true)…
Apologies again.
It is unfortunate that this young women had such a poor experience. Having grown up mostly in a rural area of Texas, attended a public community college and public universities, and later taught at a public college in SC, it never would have occurred to me to question the presence of minority students as classmates or as students. It’s not like we all sat in a circle and sang cum ba ya, but we did learn how to get along. Although, it wasn’t until I started teaching in SC that I encountered large numbers of non-international minority students with interest in and strong backgrounds in STEM.