Admissions data once again shows that the students being admitted to the city’s specialized high schools do not reflect the demographics of the public school system, with the percentage of seats going to Black and Hispanic students decreasing as compared to a year ago.
Just eight Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School, among the most famous of the schools, which use a single exam to determine entry. That figure is down from 10 the year before.
Black students account for 19.5% of the city’s public school population, but received only 3% of the seats across all eight of the city’s specialized high schools, down from 4.5% a year ago.
And while Hispanic students make up 42.2% of the city’s public school system, they accounted for just 6.9% of students admitted to specialized high schools. That’s down from 7.6% a year ago.
Most of the students admitted to the schools — which include Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science — were Asian or white, with 53.5% of seats being offered to Asian students and 25.9% of seats being offered to white students.
The racial disparities in the admissions to the city’s most prestigious public schools has led some to call for a change in how they admit students, one that would stop using the high-stakes Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, or SHSAT, as the sole criteria for entry. But those efforts have all but died out in recent years, in part due to strong resistance from Asian American communities, who felt targeted by efforts to diversify the schools.