Rules for corona cases a mystery
State lawmakers and advocates are mounting a new legislative push to repeal a 1971 law making a single standardized test the sole admissions metric at the city’s specialized high schools — hoping recent antiracism protests will propel a stalled effort.
“There is a level of urgency in the sense that we want to see what happens with the whole Black Lives Matter movement,” said Assemblyman Walter Mosley (D-Brooklyn), sponsor of a bill introduced Wednesday in the state Assembly to repeal the testing requirement, and to let city officials set admissions policies at the selective public schools.
“Black lives matter ... in our classrooms and our educational system. And they damn well matter in our specialized high schools, but unfortunately our current public policy has shown us otherwise,” Mosley added.
The new effort, spearheaded by the advocacy group Teens Take Charge, comes on the heels of sweeping protests against racial injustice that advocates hope will shine new light on segregation in city schools.
“The recent protests really did show all of us racism is a really big issue and that we need to do better in improving integration in this city,” said William Diep, a 16-year-old Teens Take Charge member, and senior at Brooklyn Latin, one of the city’s specialized schools.
Black and Latino students make up a combined 9% of enrollment at the city’s eight specialized high schools, even though they represent 67% of city students. At Stuyvesant High School, the most selective of the group, 10 black and 20 Latino students got admissions offers this year.
Critics of the system, including Mayor de Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, have argued the schools should admit the students with the highest grades from each city middle school to increase racial diversity.
But past efforts to change the state law have stalled, meeting fierce resistance from defenders of the test, who say the Education Department should instead focus its efforts on improving the quality of elementary and middle schools and expanding test preparation.
John Liu, the chair of the State Senate’s committee on
New York City education, has called de Blasio’s proposal a “non-starter.”
State legislators will be busy with a host of legislative proposals related to the coronavirus pandemic when they return to session July 20. But State Sen. Julia Salazar (DBrooklyn), who introduced the specialized high school bill in the Senate Tuesday morning, believes the reform is “no less important.”
Salazar conceded she doesn’t yet have a sense of how the bill will be received in the state Senate, but said the idea of removing the state from decisions about city school admissions policies “shouldn’t be controversial.”
“The majority of our members are outside of New York City,” she said. “They don’t have stakes in it and are not willing to address the issue.”
The bill would remove the testing requirement effective January 2022 — leaving the decision over how to proceed with admissions at the specialized schools in the hands of the city’s next mayor.
The city has yet to figure out what to do if a student or staffer tests positive for coronavirus once schools reopen.
“We are determining right now what those testing protocols should be,” Mayor de Blasio said Thursday when asked about handling possible coronavirus cases at schools. “We don’t have a final answer for you.”
The mayor’s handling of schools during the early days of the outbreak, when confusion reigned amid reports of cases among students and faculty, was widely criticized by parents and educators at the time.
De Blasio was also reluctant to shut down schools as the virus spread, creating a delay that may have cost lives, though schools were eventually closed in mid-March.
The mayor noted the city now has resources, including extensive COVID-19 testing, that it lacked in the spring.
“I don’t want you to assume it’s the same standards or same approach as in March,” he said, though he declined to go into detail.