Don’t Blame the Test

Critics of the test for admission to the city’s top high schools claimed vindication Monday when the racial mix for the latest test-passers was ... basically unchanged from the 2018 numbers.

The biggest change went unremarked: Fewer kids in total won admission via the test, because Mayor de Blasio reserved 11 percent of seats in the new freshman class for the Discovery program, up from 5 percent, in hopes of boosting black and Hispanic admissions. (Results may be unknown until fall.)

No one’s happy that only seven black kids (so far) qualified for an admission offer from Stuyvesant HS. But why blame the test?

Three of those seven, plus one Hispanic future classmate, used the Khan Tutorial testprep program. Another 20 Khan black or Hispanic grads also earned elite-school slots.

Ivan Khan, who heads the service, charac- terizes test-prep as helping “kids finish the race.” But “preparation began years ago in elementary school and in the home,” he told The Post. Vital to success, he says, is maintaining a rigorous academic pipeline.

Yet far too many city elementary and secondary schools that enroll mainly black and Hispanic kids are . . . terrible. After all, the Department of Education doesn’t even dare enforce basic disciplinary standards.

Which means that too many bright and academically deserving minority kids are blocked, not boosted, by a system that traps them in chaotic, dysfunctional classrooms.

Doing away with the elite-school exam, or racially re-engineering the admissions process, won’t change that. If the mayor wanted real transformation, he’d get busy creating new high-performing schools in the neighborhoods that most need them.