Desegregate these schools

Mayor de Blasio’s long-overdue plan to desegregate the city’s top high schools is disappointingly timid and politically so illtimed that it almost seems intended to fail. But even a botched attempt at progress is worth cheering, and the plan is a welcome opportunity to talk about how to end the disgraceful, deliberate exclusion of black and Latino students from our elite public academies.

The worst-kept secret in New York parenting is that the entry process for our elite high schools is being gamed every single day by those willing to buy shortcuts to success.

Yes, there are kids who are simply very bright, and more or less ace the SHSAT after little or no preparation. I met some of these ferociously brilliant kids as a student at Harvard and Yale, and have no doubt they would have succeeded no matter where they went to school.

But that was decades ago. The brave new world of the SHSAT is a great deal tougher and considerably less connected to anything that could fairly be called natural talent.

I once casually asked a friend (AsianAmerican) what his son was doing for the summer, and was startled to learn the boy spent every summer vacation — and every weekend — doing test prep. This went on for the better part of a decade, and was all intended to culminate with a high SHSAT score and entry to Stuyvesant (which is indeed what happened).

Another friend (white and liberal) told me about the year of afterschool prep he bought for his child — at the going rate of $50 an hour — along with two hours per night of test practice, in order to get ready for the SHSAT. The first of his kids ended up at Bronx Science.

The kind of dramatic, expensive, multiyear planning done by so many parents makes a mockery of the phony test-prep schemes being advanced by the alumni associations of the elite high schools. A couple weeks of test prep for poor kids will never, ever place them on a level playing field with kids whose families have poured tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of prep hours into preparing for a single, oneday, high-stakes test.

The alumni associations know this full well. A similar air of false promise clings to the mayor’s plan, which calls for granting admission to a tiny handful of kids who almost hit the test-score cutoff.

How did we get here? New Yorkers prides themselves on being tolerant, progressive and dedicated to opportunity for all. But that noble sentiment goes out the window when access to a good school is at stake.

When the future of one child’s education is on the table, the quaint notion of knowledge being its own reward gets treated by many parents as sentimental drivel. More often, New York parents treat a high-quality education as a precious form of personal property, to be hunted like a buried treasure — and once discovered, to be seized, hoarded and jealously guarded.

This tendency is ugly but understandable. The top public and private high schools do, indeed, offer a better chance at the ultimate prize: acceptance at the best colleges and universities, where a child’s future career prospects, intellectual development and personal networks can flourish.

With so much at stake, many of us who can afford to purchase a great education outright either move to the suburbs or enroll our kids in private schools (my wife and I chose the latter course). Those who seek private-school outcomes without the big tuition bills are chasing the scarcest commodity of all.

A distressingly large number of New York parents appear perfectly comfortable with a strict rationing of access to that prize along racial lines, which is appalling. Nor has any credible educational expert explained why, whether or how a top-scoring student’s education would be harmed by the presence in class of somebody who didn’t score quite as high.

A fair and logical path forward would be to examine the SHSAT test closely; some reports suggest that the test includes topics not taught in most schools. After verifying the usefulness of the test, we should strike a test score cutoff level in the 85% range and place every kid who scores above that level in a lottery.

Another reasonable strategy would be to admit the top 5% to 7% of all high school students to the elite schools.

Above all, let’s do away with the badfaith claim that it’s fair or acceptable to keep the elite schools racially segregated.