A New York City issue. Who gets into the toughest high schools to get into? According to state law, admission to eight New York City Schools must be based on the SHSAT test. The best known of these schools are Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, Bronx Science High School, and Brooklyn Tech.
About 30,000 mostly 8th great students take the SHSAT every year. Embarrassingly, based on the test, only seven African American students were admitted to Stuyvesant High school for the Fall of 2019. That was a bad result at a time when there is increased pressure for integration in the highly segregated New York City Schools. Is Stuyvesant a diverse school? About 70% of the students there are Asian.
The basis for admission is a scaled score on the SHSAT calculated, somewhat mysteriously, from the number of right answers. The scale is from 200 to 800. Students rank the schools in order of where they want to attend. The internal process follows: Student results are listed from highest to lowest score. Starting from the highest student score, students are admitted to their preferred ranked school that has seats remaining. This process continues until there are no schools left with seats available.
Using this system, the lowest score of a student admitted to a school is that school’s cutoff score. Tomorrow: a proposal to get more diversity and a look at recent scores.