Mayor Bill de Blasio charged Friday that the city’s specialized high schools practice “massive segregation” as the controversy grows over admissions criteria to the elite institutions.
“That’s why we’re doing something bold here, and we’re saying we’re not going to live by this old system that has perpetuated massive segregation — not just segregation, massive segregation,” de Blasio said on WNYC radio.
The mayor’s comment came as just seven black students were accepted to the new freshman class at Stuyvesant HS, considered the leader of the specialized schools.
“We are having a really good and honest conversation in New York City about structural racism, about the history that has led to segregation in so many aspects of our society,” de Blasio continued.
In the latest competition, Asian applicants won 51.7 percent of the spots to the specialized schools, whites 28.5 percent, Hispanics 6.6 percent and blacks 4 percent.
De Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza hope to enroll more black and Hispanic kids by revamping the current single-test admissions system.
They want to eventually abolish the exam and offer spots to the top 7 percent of kids at every city middle school.
Backers of the plan argue that the single test is too narrow a metric to capture a wider range of talented kids and has failed to afford opportunities to blacks and Hispanics.
“It’s arcane, how on Earth are we making such an important decision in kids’ lives with a single test in a city where people are saying almost to a one that high stakes testing has been the wrong way to go?” de Blasio said.
But supporters of the status quo counter that the system serves as a raw and unbiased measure of student preparation and merit and has produced some of the top performing high schools in the nation for decades.