Some of the best high schools in New York City are deficient when it comes to enrolling black and Latino students. It’s an issue that has concerned the UFT for some time: In 2012, the union supported the civil rights complaint filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund against the city’s admission process for the eight elite schools and later established its own task force to investigate solutions. Although black and Latino students make up 68 percent of the New York City public school population, they represent only 11 percent of the enrollment at our most prestigious high schools, which include Bronx HS of Science, Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan and Brooklyn Technical HS. These schools base admissions solely on how well students score on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son Dante graduated from Brooklyn Technical HS, announced in May the city’s efforts to address that imbalance: hiring up to five outreach workers to recruit more black and Latino students; offering more after-school tutoring and test prep for middle school students; and offering the admissions test during the school day at five schools this fall. The after-school portion of the program will cost $15 million over four years and will begin this summer to help students take the test in October. 

It’s a start. Outreach should help bring in more black and Latino students to register for the test. Those who do take the test often lack the resources to pay for the test prep and private tutoring that can help them achieve higher scores. Offering after-school tutoring and test prep can begin to level the playing field. And giving the test on a weekday also helps students who may not be able to travel to a test site on the weekend, when the test is usually administered. 

But the city’s effort should not end there. In 2014, the UFT Specialized High School Task Force, led by UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Janella Hinds, proposed more sweeping reforms. Recommendations included revising the test and making it one of several measures for entry; creating a path for admission for the top 8th-grade performer in each of the city’s middle schools; preregistering all 8th-grade students for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test; and bringing back the Discovery Program to all eight high schools to introduce students from lower-income neighborhoods to the schools.

It’s our hope that the city will move more aggressively over time in the direction the task force envisioned. The inequities that have shaped our school system for decades require that level of action and commitment to make meaningful change happen.