A suggestion to make New York City exam schools more diverse:
- Fill the first ten percent of the seats in each school using the existing system.
- Fill the remaining seats in each school from a lottery of students who score above a certain score — 400 or 420 or 440 or 460. Starting from the first student selected in the lottery and continuing in the order of the lottery selection, students would be admitted to the highest ranked choice that has seats left until there are no schools left with seats available.
There are been a little research about the predictive character of these tests. One study suggested that only the very highest scores predicted great success at Stuyvesant. Therefore, the proposed first bullet.
The proposed lottery system should be consistent with the law, would create diversity in each school, and would still bring strong prospective students into each school.
There are enough successful applicants to make Brooklyn Tech a fairly diverse school. I do not have access to know the demographic distribution of scores (or I don’t know how to look). Depending on the selected cut off for participation in the lottery, the exam schools would become more diverse.
Let’s look at the cutoff scores for the eight schools for admission in the fall of 2017 are below (with the school’s highest score in parentheses):
- 555 (704) Stuyvesant
- 516 (545) HS of American Studies at Lehman College
- 515 (704) Staten Island Tech
- 512 (664) Bronx Science
- 507 (607) Queens at York College
- 504 (621) HS of Math, Science, and Engineering at City College
- 486 (588) Brooklyn Tech
- 479 (600) Brooklyn Latin