“Equity” and Excellence, Four Years Later

Four years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed that New York City’s renowned specialized high schools didn’t “look like” the city and declared war on their meritocratic admissions processes. In his announcement, de Blasio cited the familiar woke mantra that achieving the all-important goal of “equity” would not compromise excellence. Four years later, how has excellence fared? Thanks to data recently obtained by parents who used Freedom of Information requests on perhaps the two best-known specialized high schools—Bronx Science and Stuyvesant—we now have answers.

New York State’s 1971 Hecht-Calandra law established that the specialized high schools must admit all the highest-scoring students (and only these) from a blind-graded entrance exam, the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT). To many progressives, such meritocratic admissions violate equity. De Blasio couldn’t persuade the state legislature to repeal Hecht-Calandra, however, in part because Asian parents mounted a passionate grassroots fight. Thwarted, the mayor mandated a workaround of Hecht-Calandra by abusing Discovery programs—backdoors for admission to participating specialized high schools, permitted under Hecht-Calandra. Under Discovery, a disadvantaged student who missed the SHSAT score cutoff at all specialized high schools could still enter one by securing a teacher recommendation and completing a summer catch-up program at that school.

Hecht-Calandra clearly intended the SHSAT to be the main entrance into the specialized high schools, but it didn’t explicitly limit the size of the Discovery exceptions. De Blasio exploited this apparent loophole by throwing wide open the Discovery backdoor, expanding it to one-fifth of every specialized high school, at the expense of the meritocratic SHSAT. But this is where a key protective proviso in Hecht-Calandra kicks in. Section 1, 12(d) of Hecht-Calandra states that Discovery programs must be run “without in any manner interfering with the academic level of these schools.” In any manner is very strong language; it leaves no wiggle room to compromise academic levels or negotiate interpretations. To comply with this requirement, Discovery admits must perform academically at least as well as SHSAT admits.