UFT President Michael Mulgrew, joined by state lawmakers, announced new bipartisan state legislation to increase the diversity of the student body at the city’s eight specialized high schools by not basing admissions exclusively on the performance on an entrance exam.

“What a child does over his or her entire educational career is just as important — and as a teacher I would make the argument even more important — as their performance on a single day’s test,” said Mulgrew at a June 9 press conference at union headquarters.

The bill was based in large measure on the proposals put forward earlier this spring by a UFT task force composed of teachers from the specialized high schools.

Mulgrew noted that the country’s elite universities use a range of criteria in making their admissions decisions. “If it is good enough for Harvard and Yale, it should be good enough for New York City,” he said.

State law governs entrance requirements to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical high schools. The five other specialized high schools have traditionally followed the lead of those three.

Of the 952 students admitted to Stuyvesant HS in the fall, just seven were African-American and 21 were Latino, the lowest number ever. Staten Island Technical HS did not offer admission to a single black student, according to city Department of Education statistics released earlier this spring.

Overall, just 4 percent of blacks and 5 percent of Hispanics who took the test were offered spots, compared to 28 percent of white students and 33 percent of Asian students. About 70 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school students are black or Latino.

In addition to the score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, the bill calls for the admissions process to include a student’s grade point average, state exam scores and attendance record, Mulgrew said. The bill, whose prime sponsors are state Sen. Simcha Felder and state Sen. Adriano Espaillat, would also require the city Department of Education to do more to inform all students about the admissions exam; expand access to free test preparation; and reinvigorate the Discovery Program, which provides summer tutoring to students who scored just below the cutoff for admissions.

Espaillat said that providing free test preparation would balance the playing field between poorer students and those with access to private tutoring.

“If you don’t have the money to take these very important courses, you won’t be able to get in,” Espaillat said.

Assemblyman Ron Kim said admissions should reward students’ tenacity and grit, important qualities that a high-stakes test does not measure.

Assemblyman Karim Camara said the current admissions policy does a disservice not only to capable students who don’t score high enough on the test, but also to the students who do pass the test “but are not prepared for the rigors of the academic challenges once they are in the schools.”

DOE officials praised the legislation, saying in a statement that it “represents a real opportunity to attract excellence and achieve a more diverse student body in our city’s specialized high schools.” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in March that he supports moving away from a single-test admissions policy.

The legislation was spurred by a 2012 federal civil rights complaint filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenging the specialized high schools admissions process.

“This new approach to admissions won’t reduce standards,” said UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Janella Hinds, who chaired the UFT task force. “On the contrary, we believe that it will draw students who excel not only at test-taking, but exhibit other measures of excellence, intelligence and determination.”

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Department of Education