Lennox Thomas was one of the top students in his middle school in Brooklyn. But despite his high grades, in 2015 and again in 2016 he failed the test to enter one of the city’s nine elite public high schools, which for many low income children in New York have traditionally acted as a gateway to prosperity. “I felt defeated,” says Mr Thomas, “and lost confidence in my academic abilities. I was robbed of receiving the best free education that the city has to offer.”
He was just 13. Shortly afterwards he joined Teens Take Charge, a student-led organisation campaigning for an end to the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) which, the group argues, contributes to racial segregation in the city’s schools. It is an argument that is receiving increased attention: the number of black and Hispanic students attending these schools has plummeted since the 1990s.
It has now also become a political battle in the city pitting Bill de Blasio, the mayor and one-time Democrat presidential hopeful for 2020, against wealthy philanthropists determined to maintain the system.
“I realised that it’s not just me: it’s systemic. There are larger forces at play,” says Mr Thomas, who is black. “Parents who have money can afford to give their kids the best tutoring and as a result their children are going to do better on these standardised tests because they have been preparing for years.”
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The specialised high school test in maths and English serves as the sole gatekeeper to eight, out of the nine, of New York City’s tuitionfree elite public high schools. Around 30,000 students take the test each year, and the 5,000 who score high enough are granted access to the best free education available in New York, one that often opens doors to top colleges.
Of the most recent intake — for the 2019/20 academic year — only one in 10 of the students offered a place was black or Hispanic, despite comprising nearly 70 per cent of the public school student population in the city. At Stuyvesant High School, ranked the second best in New York state, only seven out of 895 places were offered to black students. Around 50 per cent of offers to the nine specialised schools were made to Asian students, with white pupils the next largest group.
New York schools are among the most racially segregated in America, according to The Civil Rights Project at UCLA. The situation is blamed on a lack of integration in general across the city, where the poorest neighbourhoods and middle schools tend to have higher numbers of black and Hispanic students.
Advocates of scrapping the test say the New York case is symptomatic of a broader struggle across the US over how to reduce racial segregation and discrimination in schools more than six decades after the Supreme Court ruled to end the separation of students by race in the landmark Brown v Board of Education case in 1954. The test has taken on fresh significance amid rising anti-immigration rhetoric in Donald Trump’s America.
Vivian Sanchez, who moved to the US from the Dominican Republic in 1993, says that her daughter, Valentina, also a top student at a middle school in Queens, a largely immigrant borough of New York, suffered the same fate as Mr Thomas nearly a decade ago. “The test is not designed for us. It’s not designed for black or Latino people . . . it’s designed to exclude us,” she says.
Mr de Blasio appears to agree. Last year, the New York City mayor unveiled a plan to scrap the test, triggering a bruising political fight with wealthy philanthropists over how to improve the opportunities for the city’s poorest kids.
The frustration expressed by Mr Thomas and Ms Sanchez is felt across the city. More than 75 per cent of black and Hispanic voters are in favour of changing the admissions system, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released in April. In the same survey, more than half of white voters agreed.
The de Blasio plan would see the test replaced with a scheme to admit the top 7 per cent of students — based on their course grades and state test scores — across all public schools. The SHSAT test takes neither factor into account. If adopted, the overall number of black and Hispanic students at specialised schools would rise from 10 per cent a year to about 45 per cent, according to New York’s independent budget office.
Describing the current situation as a “monumental injustice” on Chalkbeat, an educationfocused website, Mr de Blasio last year said: “A single, high-stakes exam is unfair to students whose families cannot afford, or may not even know about, the availability of test preparation tutors and courses.”
Opponents — including some in the black community — argue that scrapping the test would dilute the academic quality of the specialised schools. A group of wealthy New Yorkers, including the billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder and former Citigroup chairman Richard Parsons, launched the Education Equity campaign to counter the de Blasio plans. Mr Lauder, who in 1989 ran against Rudy Giuliani in the Republican party’s New York mayoral primary race and is close to members of the Trump administration, wants to keep the test. He argues that if more public money was spent on offering free SHSAT tutoring the schools would be more inclusive.
