For years, local progressive leaders across the United States have tried to dismantle selective enrollment public schools, which use standardized tests and grades to identify high-achieving students. By providing a rigorous education and other opportunities to gifted children who might otherwise lack access to private school, these institutions serve as engines of upward mobility. They believe that selective schools entrench racial inequality, but the evidence shows the schools promote opportunity.
Selective enrollment public schools are contested by progressives who allege that they admit few, if any, black, Hispanic, or low-income students. In an article for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute last month, I argued that Chicago’s 11 selective enrollment high schools are a powerful counterexample to this claim. Nearly 70 percent of the students enrolled in these schools are black or Hispanic, and low-income students make up at least one-third of each campus. The academic outcomes are equally telling: in the eight selective enrollment high schools that rank among Illinois’s top 25, the black–white, Hispanic–white, and low-income–non-low-income achievement gaps in ACT English and math are considerably smaller than those of the district at large.
In no city has the issue of selective enrollment become more contentious, however, than New York. Gotham is home to nine specialized high schools, eight of which base admission on a student’s score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Under a 1971 state law, known as the Hecht-Calandra Act, admission to the specialized high schools must be determined “solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective, and scholastic achievement examination, which shall be open to each and every child in the city of New York.” The SHSAT serves as that examination.
Upon taking the test, applicants rank their preferred schools in order. These students are then categorized from highest to lowest SHSAT score and assigned, in that order, to the highest-ranked school on their list that has an open seat. The lowest score among admitted students at each school is referred to as that school’s “cutoff.”
New York City progressives have pressured state lawmakers to repeal the Hecht-Calandra Act and eliminate the SHSAT. They argue the test is racially discriminatory, since black and Hispanic students comprise only a fraction of the specialized high schools despite being a majority in the city’s public school system.
Yet, the racial group most represented at these schools is not whites but Asian Americans. While Asians comprised 18.7 percent of New York City public-school students last year, they won roughly 60 percent of seats at the specialized high schools. This concentration was even more pronounced at the three oldest and most prestigious of the schools: Stuyvesant High School (Stuyvesant), Bronx High School of Science (Bronx Science), and Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn Tech). At Stuyvesant, Asians made up 71.8 percent of the student body during the 2024–2025 academic year; at Bronx Science, 60.8 percent; and at Brooklyn Tech, 58.5 percent.
For these Asian students, many of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants and economically disadvantaged, admission to a specialized high school is viewed as a “golden ticket.” Lacking the resources to attend private school or move to the suburbs, they consider these institutions to be the first step to upward mobility, hopefully to be followed by admission to a top college, a well-paying job, and a secure place in the middle class or better. A 2022 New York Times profile, “How It Feels to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School,” captures this urgency through the stories of students like Tausifa Haque.
A Brooklyn Tech student at the time and the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants—a cab driver and a lunchroom attendant—Haque spent three hours every day commuting to and from the specialized high school and her family’s apartment in the Bronx. “This is my great chance,” she told the Times. “It’s my way out.” Her experience is typical of a school where, according to census tract data, over 60 percent of the student body is economically disadvantaged.
The same article profiled Sophia Wing Lum Chok, a Malaysian American graduate of Brooklyn Tech who went on to attend Yale. Reflecting on her upbringing, she noted, “I didn’t have an adult figure in my life who did not work a blue-collar job.” For Chok, as for Haque and many other Asian students, New York City’s specialized high schools provided access to a life her parents could barely imagine.
These stories of social mobility have been largely ignored by the city’s progressive political establishment. So much so that, in 2018, former Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza devised a policy to shift the specialized high schools’ demographics and curb Asian enrollment.
This policy involved changing a longstanding program for low-income applicants. Under the Hecht-Calandra Act, New York City may operate a “Discovery program” to facilitate the admission of high-potential, economically disadvantaged students. Prior to 2018, an applicant qualified for Discovery if she took the SHSAT and scored just below the year’s cutoff; was certified as low-income; was recommended for the program; and successfully completed a summer preparatory course. The act does not prescribe the size of Discovery, and historically, each specialized high school set its own numbers.
On June 3, 2018, de Blasio and Carranza ordered all specialized high schools to increase their share of Discovery students to 20 percent of each incoming class. They also imposed a new eligibility restriction for the program. Going forward, only students attending middle schools with an Economic Need Index (ENI) of 0.6 (60 percent) or higher would qualify for Discovery.
In New York City, a school’s ENI is an estimate of the average level of economic need among its student population. It is the average of the Economic Need Values (ENV) of all students at the school, which are based on factors such as eligibility for public assistance, living in temporary housing, and census-tract poverty data. A student’s ENV and, in turn, a school’s ENI can range from 0.0 (0 percent) to 1.0 (100 percent).
Opponents of the de Blasio–Carranza plan at the time argued that it “limited eligibility for Discovery not simply to poor students, but to poor students who attend particular middle schools.” Indeed, under the plan’s criteria, an eighth-grader facing significant economic hardship would be ineligible for the program if her school’s ENI fell below 0.6. Despite these criticisms, the de Blasio–Carranza version of Discovery has continued under the leadership of former mayor Eric Adams and his successor, Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
On April 23, Yi Fang Chen, a Chinese immigrant, filed a lawsuit on behalf of her eighth-grade son in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit alleges that the Discovery program, as redesigned by de Blasio and Carranza and maintained by both the Adams and Mamdani administrations, is discriminatory in intent and effect. Chen contends that the new policy was designed to boost black and Hispanic enrollment at the expense of Asian students like her son, who attends Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented (I.S. 239) in Brooklyn. I.S. 239 has an ENI below 0.6, which means that Chen’s son and his peers do not qualify for Discovery, regardless of their individual economic circumstances.
Public comments made by city officials seem to support Chen’s claims. For example, in a 2018 interview with New York’s Fox affiliate WNYW, Carranza, in discussing the high percentage of Asian students enrolled in the specialized high schools, said, “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions to these schools.”
Internal documents from the Department of Education and Mayor’s office also suggest that the de Blasio–Carranza plan was racially motivated. ENI calculations for the year in which the plan was announced showed that students at 11 of New York’s 24 majority-Asian middle schools would lose program eligibility, compared to just 20 of the 191 majority-black schools and only nine of the 243 majority-Hispanic schools. Worse still, emails from Nadiya Chadha, Director of Research and Policy, revealed that the 0.6 ENI threshold was chosen precisely because lower benchmarks failed to produce a significant reduction in Asian enrollment.
New York is not the only city to target the demographics of its selective public high schools, nor is Chen’s lawsuit the first of its kind. In December 2020, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia directed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Alexandria to overhaul its admissions process. FCPS’s stated goal, as well as that of TJ principal Ann Bonitatibus, was to ensure that the school’s student body “more closely aligns” with the racial makeup of northern Virginia. The new process—which, among other changes, no longer includes an entrance exam—had an immediate negative impact on Asian enrollment. Whereas the Class of 2024—the last one admitted under the old policy—was 73 percent Asian, 17.7 percent white, 3.3 percent Hispanic, and one percent black, the Class of 2025 (the first admitted under the new one) was 54.36 percent Asian, 22.36 percent white, 11.27 percent Hispanic, and 7.9 percent black.
Around the same time, Boston Public Schools (BPS) decided to change the admissions process for its three selective public high schools: Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and John O’Bryant School for Mathematics and Science. Like FCPS, BPS was concerned that black and Hispanic students comprise 75 percent of the district, yet only 40 percent of these schools’ enrollees. To bridge this gap, the district eliminated standardized testing requirements and implemented a zip-code-based quota system designed to redistribute enrollment. The impact was, as at TJ, immediate: For fall 2021, white student enrollment fell from 33 percent to 24 percent, and Asian enrollment fell from 21 percent to 16 percent.
In both instances, the parents of the affected students sued. Two major challenges—Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board and Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence v. Boston School Committee—eventually reached the Supreme Court in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The Court, however, declined to grant certiorari in either case. One reason might be that some of the justices believed these petitions were filed too soon after Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 landmark decision that struck down the use of affirmative action in university admissions for its discriminatory impact on Asian-American applicants.
Chen’s lawsuit may provide the Court with another opportunity to revisit this issue, mainly because the Students for Fair Admissions ruling left a significant question unanswered. The decision did not address admissions policies that, while race-neutral on their face, are discriminatory in effect, which is the issue at the center of the selective public school debate. Moreover, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas appear to have a strong interest in this issue. After the Court declined to hear the TJ case, the pair wrote a scathing dissent. In that dissent, Alito and Thomas stressed how selective enrollment public schools are bastions of opportunity, particularly for disadvantaged students: “Public magnet schools with competitive admissions based on standardized tests have served as engines of social mobility by providing unique opportunities for minorities and the children of immigrants, and these students’ subsequent careers have in turn richly contributed to our nation’s success.”
Rather than seek to dismantle or racially gerrymander selective enrollment public schools, policymakers in America’s major cities should focus on building more of them. History offers a blueprint: The number of selective enrollment high schools in Chicago increased under the mayoralties of Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, largely at the request of black, Hispanic, and low-income families. Alternatively, districts that already have such schools could create programs like Discovery in New York. As Chen’s April 2026 lawsuit against the Mamdani administration points out, requiring the specialized high schools to maintain a 20 percent seat reservation for students admitted through this program while removing the arbitrary ENI threshold would expand access for economically disadvantaged children without systematically penalizing Asian Americans.
A cornerstone of public education in the United States has long been the promise of upward mobility: that success should be determined by talent and hard work instead of means or ancestry. In cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, selective enrollment public schools are fulfilling this mission by providing a lifeline for gifted students who would otherwise be trapped in failing districts. Ultimately, these institutions should be viewed as a critical part of the greater school choice movement, which recognizes that true educational opportunity is found not in a one-size-fits-all model, but in a range of options tailored to the individual needs of each student.