You can't diversify the finish line

The war on standardized tests is shooting the messenger

Proposals to eliminate New York City’s specialized high school entrance exam have been met with fierce opposition by the city’s Asian populations, who now account for a majority of the student body at these schools. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

My grandmother — whose family fled Austria in 1939, when she was three — grew up in New York City. When she was in middle school, she passed the extremely selective test to attend Bronx Science, one of New York City’s specialized public high schools. From there, she went to Barnard and then to law school in an era when very few women did.

So while I live on the opposite coast these days — much to her consternation — I have always had a special place in my heart for New York City’s competitive specialized high school system, an engine of immigrant mobility and opportunity. Admission to these schools doesn’t require an essay or an interview, nor does it consider any facts about who you are. You just take a test and prove what you can do.

These are some of the best public schools in America — and right now they’re at the center of the same type of debate that is playing out at public schools all over the country: If a program has unequal benefits for children, should we destroy it?

The most competitive of NYC’s specialized high schools is Stuyvesant. If the thing you want from high school is the opportunity to take the most challenging courses available alongside peers who are extremely smart and hardworking, Stuyvesant is probably the best school out there: It offers not only 30 or so AP classes but also several years of undergraduate mathematics courses.

And in the 2026-27 admitted class of 777 Stuyvesant students, only 21 are Latino and only three are Black.

City Councilman Lincoln Restler responded to these results with a call to end fully exam-based admissions: “We urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process,” he wrote.

Restler is hardly the first to call for the exam-based schools to go; Bill de Blasio, while serving as New York City mayor in 2018, proposed replacing test-based admissions with admitting the top 7% of each middle school. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who himself attended Bronx Science, had entertained SHSAT abolition during his campaign for state Assembly, but this week he took a much smarter approach, calling for more work to ensure that all middle schoolers are well prepared for the SHSAT.