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This week, 26,000 anxious eighth graders will learn their fate: Did they get into one of New York City’s eight specialized high schools?
The admission process couldn’t be more straightforward, thanks to the 1971 New York State Hecht-Calandra Act which mandates that admission to the schools is solely by the academic, objective, competitive Specialized High School Admissions Test.
Applicants rank their top choices, take the test and line up by score for available seats.
The keyword is “available.” Fewer than 5,000 seats — just 5% of the city’s ninth-grade slots — are offered.
Inevitably, the overwhelming majority of applicants face rejection. Thus, the annual battle returns.
On one side are the usual critics, who blame the “racist” SHSAT for denying black students access to specialized high schools and for admitting too many . . . Asians.
To them, standardized testing shows, once again, how capitalists hoard coveted resources with their fear-mongering scarcity mindset.
On the other side are mostly struggling immigrant families.
Logically, these immigrant families should also complain. While most accepted kids are their children, so are most rejected kids — and the rejected far outnumber the accepted.
Instead, they defend these schools fiercely because, as newcomers without wealth, power or influence, all they have for their children is the meritocratic SHSAT.
They ask: What’s wrong with admitting students purely by academic tests, regardless of race or ethnicity, privilege or status?
They ask: if the SHSAT is racist, how could Brooklyn Tech, by far the largest SHS, have had a majority black and Hispanic student body for 20 straight years, from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s?
Both sides are dug in. But there is a solution.
What’s wrong is not the SHSAT, but the completely self-inflicted, unnecessary constraint of too few seats.
The city can expand SHS seats to 26,000 to match demand, so that everyone who takes the SHSAT gets a seat.
The SHS critics would achieve their goal — no more of what they see as capitalist hoarding, artificial scarcity or denial of access to anyone who wants a specialized high-school seat. Plus, the racial demographics of the schools would be exactly that of the students who want to attend these schools.
And immigrant families would get to keep their SHSAT to help achieve the American Dream for their children.
To cynics who say this is like giving every student As just to declare them all top-of-class, rest assured: This is no exercise in Potemkin equity.
Even today, some specialized high schools are already more rigorous than others. There’s no one-size-fits-all “SHS curriculum.”
Using average SAT score as a blunt metric for school excellence, Brooklyn Latin boasts an impressive 1380, but Stuyvesant posts an awesome 1500 — a huge 92nd-to-98th percentile difference and a gap encompassing more than 100,000 students.
Students taking the SHSAT know this. Pretending that everyone is top-of-class is neither what they seek, nor what these schools promised them, which is an academic peer group who shares the ethos to study hard, embrace brutally honest feedback from objective measures — such as the SHSAT — and keep trying harder.
That promise appeals only to certain students (those taking the SHSAT) and that promise would remain true with expansion. Cynics are correct that academic-level differences between specialized high schools will expand, but they miss the point: Kids who want sorting by SHSAT will make the schools as rigorous as they can, with the same determination and self-discipline they applied to preparing for the test.
It’s the magic of peer effect.
Mayor Bloomberg more than doubled the city’s number of specialized high schools, from three to eight. They differ substantially in academic levels, orientations and character, but are all challenging and eagerly sought-after.
This happens when you don’t curate for equal outcomes, real or fraudulent, but reward demonstrated self-discipline in the pursuit of academic excellence. The outcomes will take care of themselves.
As for implementation, the expanded admission process requires no change; just run the city’s current algorithm, but for more students.
Managing physical capacity will require school reconfigurations and phase-in, but that’s not a deal-breaker.
After all, it’s just the same students in the public school system, occupying different seats.
Legally, Mayor Mamdani — who himself benefited from a Bronx Science education over other attractive options his family’s privilege afforded him and surely wouldn’t want to deny others the same — has every authority to implement the expansion, as Hecht-Calandra explicitly allows the city to designate additional specialized schools.
With this expansion, he could even claim that he wiped out the capitalist scarcity of seats with a socialist abundance for everyone who wants one.
The software already runs. No net new seats are needed. Legal authority already exists. It’d be a historic win-win for everyone.
Each year, 26,000 kids wait, Mayor. Make it happen.