DominAsian continues at city’s elite schools

Asian students again dominated the city’s specialized high-school admissions this year, accounting for 51.1 percent of all offers, the Department of Education announced Monday.

A total of 27,521 applicants took the admissions exam for the elite high schools, with 4,798 scoring high enough to secure a seat.

Asian students accounted for 2,450 of those coveted offers. At 28.5 percent, white applicants had the next-highest share of specialized high school seats, with 1,368.

Hispanic kids received 316 offers for a 6.6 percent share, and black students got 190 spots for a 4 percent share.

Those racial proportions were largely unchanged from last year, according to the Department of Education.

While Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza congratulated those who were admitted this year, he pointedly reiterated his opposition to the current single-test ad- missions structure Monday.

“I share the excitement of students and families receiving high school offers today,” Carranza said in a statement accompanying the new figures.

But Carranza then noted the low acceptance rates for black and Latino kids — and demanded changes to the admissions process.

“We’re also once again confronted by an unacceptable status quo at our specialized high schools,” his statement continued. “We need to eliminate the single test for specialized high school admissions now.”

While the figures released Monday largely mirrored prior years, the total number of offers decreased by several hundred.

That’s because of the DOE’s expansion of its Discovery program, which gives offers to low-income kids who score just below the testscore cutoff for admission.

There were 5,067 specialized high-school offers in the first round of offers last year, compared with 4,798 this year.

The DOE said that it expects to extend roughly 500 offers through the Discovery program this year — roughly 250 more than in 2018. The exact figures will be revealed in the coming weeks.

The initiative is part of a larger City Hall campaign to increase the number of black and Latino kids at the specialized schools.

Mayor de Blasio and Carranza want eventually to boost the share of Discovery program admissions to 20 percent and hope to scrap the entrance exam altogether.