Blaz & gov’s diversity duel
Turn elite high school admissions into political spat
Diversifying the city’s specialized high schools is on its way to becoming a game of political hot potato between Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo.
Both leaders pointed at the other on Wednesday as the starting point for changing the admissions process to the elite public schools, which include Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, amid yet another year of shockingly low acceptance rates for black and Hispanic students.
In a radio interview this morning, Cuomo called the admission rates “a really obvious and obnoxious problem” — but said the mayor could unilaterally change admissions at five of the eight schools currently using the tests.
“Five of the the schools, the admission policy can be set by the city, and I think they should set it. Let them set the policy for the five and then say to the Legislature, ‘I know you’re doing hearings, I know you’re going to pass a state law, hopefully, here’s the city’s opinion on what the admission policy should be,’ ” Cuomo said.
But de Blasio has argued all of the schools should be dealt with at once — and once again raised nonspecific legal concerns about moving ahead on some of the schools unilaterally. “We believe that all of the high schools, we believe the way they’re structured, it is better to have a single legislative solution for all of them. We think that’s the best answer,” he said.
Still, de Blasio said the city ought to have the say over how the schools select students — and last year he asked Albany to take up legislation that would end the use of the Specialized High Schools Ad- mission Test and use multiple measures to admit students to the schools.
“I think the City of New York should be able to make its own decisions on the specialized high schools, so I think the best thing would be for Albany to simply defer to the city and let us come up with a policy that’s more fair, like the one that I’ve introduced. But in the end, this is a dialogue that will happen over the next few months in Albany,” de Blasio said.
Only 506 black and Hispanic students got first-round offers this year from the city’s specialized high schools, such as the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, enrollment data released Monday shows.
That’s down from 527 black and Hispanic kids who received offers in 2018, a drop of roughly 4%.
At Manhattan’s famed Stuyvesant High School, just seven of 895 offers went to black kids.