This is 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 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 on a 200 to 800 scale, from the number of right answers. Students are required to rank the schools in order of the schools 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 schools cutoff score. Tomorrow, a look at recent scores and a proposal to get more diversity.