Outrage, Applause Greets de Blasio's Bid to Reform Elite High Schools

A proposal outlined by Mayor Bill de Blasio to increase racial diversity at the city’s specialized high schools has been met with both fierce outrage and waves of support.

In his announcement Sunday, de Blasio called the present system, in which admission to eight elite public schools is determined by a single test, “a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence.” He has backed a state bill that would eventually replace the policy with one that would give admissions offers to students based on their class rank and state test scores.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza expressed similar concerns, and told WNYC Monday that a single test “just doesn’t make sense anymore.”

“Either you believe that black and Latino students can't perform and don't have a role in these schools, or the system is somehow not set up to capture the full array of talent in our school system,” he said. Right now, only 9 percent of specialized high school students are black or Latino.

Though such a change in admissions policy would have to be approved by state lawmakers, de Blasio has also proposed other reforms.

He has called for expanding the Discovery program, which offers seats at specialized high schools to low-income students who miss the cut-off score on those exams by just a few points. Currently, 4 percent of the schools' total seats are reserved for Discovery students; de Blasio wants to increase that number to 20 percent. The city projects that change alone will nearly double the percentage of black and Latino students.

The mayor would also add another criteria for Discovery students. Instead of just factoring in family income, his proposal would also consider the economic needs of students’ middle schools.

Carranza called the proposed changes to the Discovery program “a much more enlightened way to provide opportunity for students.”

But the move could threaten Asian students, who not only make up the majority of students in specialized high schools, but who were also the biggest beneficiaries of the Discovery program last year. According the city education officials, more than two-thirds of students who received offers to the elite schools through the Discovery program were Asian. Only 13 percent of those offers went to Hispanic students and about 7 percent of offers went to black students.

Lulu Zhou, director of A+ Academy, a test prep company, said the new policy would hurt Asian-Americans twice — by decreasing the number of seats available for non-Discovery students, and by reducing their chances of qualifying for the Discovery program.

"It actually very much negatively affects our community, because our community is a heavily Asian immigrant community — very, very poor,” Zhou said.

A coalition of alumni groups and education companies protested the proposed reforms to specialized high school admissions policy at a rally in Brooklyn Monday.

Ivan Khan, chief executive of Khan's Tutorial, another test prep company, called the mayor’s proposal an “anti-Asian policy.” He questioned why the mayor is trying to diversify the handful of specialized high schools rather than the hundreds of other public schools.

Zhou went to Stuyvesant and Khan attended to Bronx Science. Other alumni expressed concern that ending the test-based policy would make it so there’s nothing special about specialized high schools.

“The education quality of these schools will go down,” said Stanley Ng is a Brooklyn Tech alumnus and the father of three children who all graduated from specialized high schools. If students are admitted without having cleared the high bar of the specialized high school test, he said they'll be left to “sink or swim” in tough academic environments and often very large schools.

But Christine Montera doesn’t see it that way. She teaches 11th grade at East Bronx Academy for the Future, a school that is comprised mainly of black and Latino students.

“There’s no reason that my top students, given the opportunity, would not be able to reach that same level,” she said.