The New York City Department of Education, the sprawling bureaucracy headquartered at 52 Chambers Street, in lower Manhattan, has stewardship of more than a million students—a number larger than the total population of San Francisco, Boston, or Denver. Public education in the five boroughs encompasses not only schools divided by grade but also vocational schools, specialized schools, charter schools, alternative schools, and an extensive array of programming within the schools. The temptation is to speak of the system itself in the plural, and to a lot of people that is exactly what it is—a system of many unequal parts. Three-quarters of the children in the city’s schools are poor, and more than seventy per cent of black and Latino children attend schools in which most of the students live in poverty. Forty-three per cent of the city’s population is white, but white students account for only fifteen per cent of the public-school population.
This school year was met by two particularly contentious reform issues. One began in June of 2018, when, as part of an effort to combat the enduring problem of segregation, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his intention to discontinue the testing requirement for admission to the city’s eight selective “élite” high schools, which have long been the capstones of the system. A bill that would have eliminated the tests failed to pass in the State Legislature, but de Blasio has the authority to remove five of the schools from the entrance-exam requirement.
Then, late last month, the School Diversity Advisory Group, which de Blasio had created to address the problem of integrating schools, released a report suggesting that the city rethink its entire approach to identifying and educating high-achieving children. The reductive discussion of the report described it as a plan to eliminate initiatives for these children. The gifted-and-talented programs, in which admission is based on a single test given to four-year-olds—they must score in at least the ninetieth percentile to qualify—offer a more rigorous curriculum to advanced learners. More accurately, the advisory group criticized the racial and socioeconomic bias of the test, and recommended replacing the programs with new initiatives, modelled on those in San Antonio, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Montgomery County, Maryland, which challenge precocious children without relying on a test or academic tracking.
But the alarmist headlines, following on the plan for the specialized high schools, seemed to indicate that, as the Mayor waged a lonely crusade in Iowa to rise above one per cent in the Democratic Presidential polls, his administration had declared war on smart children. The ensuing uproar recalls some of the most fraught moments in the recent history of the system: the battles over integration, in the nineteen-fifties; local control of schools, in the sixties; busing, in the seventies; and school closures during the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg. The current clashes, too, are shot through with questions of race and equity.
The proposed changes to the specialized-high-school admissions came in response to the declining numbers of black and Latino students enrolled in them: this year, African-American students qualified for just seven of the nearly nine hundred places at Stuyvesant High School, the most selective in the system; Latino students got thirty-three. Black and Latino students together make up almost seventy per cent of the public-school population but just ten per cent of the population of the specialized high schools.
There was further controversy in August of last year, after the Department of Education announced that it would expand its Discovery program, which provides additional resources and coursework for students who fall just short of the test-score cutoff for specialized high schools and was intended to help increase black and Latino enrollment. The Pacific Legal Foundation, representing community groups and Asian-American parents who feared that the expansion would disadvantage their children, filed a lawsuit to block it. Asian-American students account for sixteen per cent of the over-all school population but sixty-two per cent of the enrollment at specialized high schools. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the expansion could proceed.
The allure of testing lies in its apparent neutrality—its democratic indifference to a student’s background and wealth. But this is not how the current system functions. Success correlates closely to socioeconomic advantages and access to test preparation. Pricey services offer tutoring to ever younger children. (There is a niche industry of consultants who help two-year-olds ace their preschool admissions assessments.) Yet many defenders of testing believe that more subjective forms of evaluation present their own unfairness. As the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit, filed against Harvard University in 2014, has demonstrated, Asian-American students tend to receive lower scores on the most subjective parts of college admissions evaluations—often in ways that correspond to personality stereotypes attached to Asian-Americans.
It’s not clear what the result of the current debate will be. The Mayor has not yet eliminated the entrance exam for any of the specialized high schools, and, last week, the schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, indicated that no changes will be made to the gifted-and-talented programs this year. One thing, however, is certain: the competition for slots at New York’s élite schools is driven, in part, by a lack of faith in the quality of education in other parts of the system. Outside the neutral language of policy reports, the issue of testing is debated in a context of winners and losers, of model minorities and problematic ones. A less primitive view sees the conflict as being between different groups fighting for a system in which their children are the least likely to be hampered by discrimination. Because discrimination functions in different ways across lines of race and ethnicity, the issue is not simply the fairness of testing; it’s that people on either side of the question can reasonably describe their position as an attempt to fight against discrimination.
The success of Asian-American students, some from low-income families, doesn’t imply that the system is fair; it suggests that unfairness can be mitigated by extraordinary effort. There is a vast difference between an equal system and one in which it is possible to succeed. Rather than commit the tremendous resources, time, and will that would be required to create a fair education system, we have settled on one in which success is possible, in which the obstacles are sizable but also surmountable, and one that, provided you don’t look very hard, passes for actual democracy. ♦
