The recent release of admissions data for New York City’s specialized high schools has reignited calls to scrap the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Pointing to figures such as Stuyvesant High School’s admission of just three black students for its incoming class, progressive critics label these institutions as “segregated” and argue that discarding the test is the only path to boosting black and Hispanic enrollment.
The criticisms are wrong and run counter to the very goals progressives claim to advance. Far from being engines of exclusion, the specialized high schools and the test that determines entry are engines of opportunity, particularly for Asian Americans and immigrant families. These criticisms are part of a national movement to eliminate merit-based admissions to public high schools, but SHSAT’s history reveals that eschewing objective standards does not promote fairness.
In fact, the exam was established in the 1970s specifically to eliminate bias and favoritism. Prior to the passage of New York’s Hecht-Calandra Act, which mandated a single test as the sole factor for entry, admissions to the specialized high schools relied on subjective criteria, such as interviews and recommendation letters. Critics at the time argued that this framework favored applicants from wealthy families, most of whom were white.
Today, white students are not the most represented group getting these sought-after seats: Asian Americans are, by far. Of the 777 total students admitted to Stuyvesant this year, 534—68.7 percent—were Asian. That’s similar to 2025, when Asian Americans won 60 percent of seats across the specialized high schools, despite comprising just 18.7 percent of the city’s public-school students. At the same time, alongside the three black students admitted to Stuyvesant’s incoming class, the school accepted three Native Americans, 21 Hispanic students, and 133 white students.
Moreover, these Asian students disproportionately are first- or second-generation immigrants and economically disadvantaged. Nearly half of students at Stuyvesant qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. At Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School—which, along with Stuyvesant, are New York City’s original specialized schools—those figures are 52 percent and 60 percent, respectively.
We cannot overlook the troublingly low rates of Native American, Hispanic, and black enrollment. The problem is real, but the solution is not to dismantle the specialized schools or the SHSAT. Instead, the city must address the root cause: the collapse of K-8 educational quality that does a terrible disservice to minority students in particular.
Consider the proficiency rates for New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. Last year, less than half of both black (47 percent) and Hispanic (43.5 percent) students were proficient in reading, compared to 74.9 percent of Asian American and 73.1 percent of white students. In math, the gap was even wider, with only 43 percent of black and 43.1 percent of Hispanic students meeting proficiency. Racial disparities in specialized high school admissions, then, clearly stem from deep-seated gaps in academic preparation and educational quality, not the SHSAT itself.
Higher education recently relearned this lesson. Every Ivy League school has now brought back standardized testing, recognizing that relying on “soft variables” such as essays and extracurriculars in admissions overwhelmingly benefits high-income applicants. Indeed, a 2025 study from economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman found that children from families in the top one percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class students with similar SAT or ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap was driven by higher admission rates for wealthy applicants with comparable test scores. This advantage, in turn, was the result of legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and weight placed on non-academic credentials, including leadership traits and extracurricular activities.
The solution to these racial disparities is not to abandon objective standards, but to double down on merit as a great equalizer. One way New York City could do so is by reviving “tracking” in elementary and middle schools to cultivate high-potential students early on. Popularized in the early twentieth century, this practice groups students according to academic ability. However, it was largely abandoned during the anti-tracking wave of the 1990s, as opponents succeeded in eliminating honors and accelerated programs on the theory that this would close achievement gaps.
Yet, the opposite happened. Robbed of this advancement mechanism, families without the resources to move to the suburbs, enroll in private schools, or hire tutors to fill gaps in academic preparation were left behind. To make matters worse, the city disproportionately cut the very accelerated programs that propel students in low-income neighborhoods across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, citing low enrollment as the reason.
The collapse of New York City’s elementary and middle school pipeline is, in large part, why black and Hispanic enrollment at the specialized high schools has plummeted. In 1984, Brooklyn Tech’s student body was nearly two-thirds black and Hispanic—proof that the SHSAT is no barrier when this pipeline functions properly. Even some progressives have come around. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams—himself a Brooklyn Tech alumnus—has argued that “the most clear failure has been establishing an accessible pipeline” and that “in the past, gifted-and-talented programs have been a reliable pathway.” In 2020, Williams went so far as to propose legislation that would require every public middle school in the city to provide free SHSAT prep.
What starts in Gotham rarely stays there. Across the country, school districts are looking to eliminate selective enrollment high schools in the name of “equity.” Nothing could be more inequitable. Dismantling selective enrollment schools or abandoning standardized testing would hurt minorities. The only path to equal educational opportunity is to ensure that all students are prepared to succeed much earlier in their academic careers. After all, the promise of public education in America was never universal mediocrity, but upward mobility.