No Ethnic Group Owns Stuyvesant. All New Yorkers Do.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan would destroy the best high school in New York City.
By Boaz Weinstein
Mr. Weinstein is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School and is on its board. He also founded two New York City charter schools.
- June 13, 2018
Like many alumni of Stuyvesant, the city’s premier public specialized high school, I believe that admission to the school was one of the seminal events of my life. I came from a public middle school; my father was an insurance broker on Coney Island Avenue and my mother was an immigrant who worked as a translator. On weekends, I walked around Brooklyn placing fliers advertising my father’s business under the windshield wipers of cars.
The facilities and the teachers at Stuyvesant were not materially different from any other New York City public school. I quickly learned that the magic of the place, then as now, was its cohort of incredibly bright kids encouraged by camaraderie and competition to push themselves to succeed. I got to sit next to Omar Jadwat in metal shop, Gary Shteyngartin homeroom, Naval Ravikant in history, and Ruvim Breydo in physics, and that made all the difference.
Admission to Stuyvesant was and remains determined by a single test available to all middle school students in the city. There are no soft criteria for admission: no interviews, no favoritism for legacies, no strings to be pulled. It’s all about whether you do well on the test, which best determines whether or not you can do the academic work.
This month, the mayor said he would seek legislation that would eliminate the test completely. Instead, he’d guarantee automatic admission to Stuyvesant — and the seven other specialized high schools in the city — for the top students at every middle school, regardless of their abilities.
The mayor says he is trying to address what is undoubtedly a heartbreaking problem: the gross underrepresentation of black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and schools like it. In 2016 black and Latino students constituted 44 percent of the kids who took the test (and 65 percent of the New York City school population). Yet they make up just 4 percent of Stuyvesant students and 15 percent of students at the specialized high schools overall.
But the mayor’s solution is no solution at all.
For one thing, his plan seems purposely oblivious to his administration’s utter failure to prepare students across the city for the admissions test — and for a school as challenging as Stuyvesant. In nearly one quarter of the city’s public middle schools, zero seventh graders scored at the advanced level on the annual New York State Mathematics Exam in 2017. Mr. de Blasio would send the top 7 percent of students at every middle school to the specialized high schools, but at 80 middle schools — or one out of every six — not even 7 percent of seventh graders passed the state math exam.
These students have been in the mayor’s charge since they were 9 years old. Instead of complaining, as he has, that the admissions test invites so-called gaming in the form of preparing for it after school and during summers, we should be demanding answers from him as to why middle schools themselves are not teaching the basic math and reading skills that are its subject.
The mayor says he is worried about poor students’ lack of access to Stuyvesant. (His interim plan, as a stopgap before he gets the legislative change he wants, is to expand an existing program so that 20 percent of seats will be set aside for low-income students from high-poverty schools who just missed the test’s cutoff score.) But already, according to the Department of Education’s own measure of poverty, 44 percent of Stuyvesant students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch or are eligible for Human Resources Administration benefits. The school is diverse in other ways, too: 36 percent of Stuyvesant students self-report speaking a language other than English at home.
The issue, of course, is sufficient racial diversity. Asians make up 75 percent of Stuyvesant students and 62 percent of specialized high school students overall. Last week Richard Carranza, the mayor’s new schools chancellor, put it this way: “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”
There is so much that is disheartening about that sentence. It pits minority groups in our city against one another. It imagines a cabal. And by describing the majority populations of these schools as “one ethnic group,” it fails to appreciate the socio-economic and other diversity among these students and internal to Asian communities. It’s no surprise that Asian alumni, students and activists have protested that the mayor’s plan is punitive toward them and are angry and demoralized by the way they are being described.
It is hard to talk about why some communities have resorted to self-help in the face of the lousy education their children get in the city’s public schools, where they should be learning the reading and math that the test — and life — requires. (The test is similar to the SAT, which is so critical for college admissions.)
Rather than lead us through that difficult conversation, the chancellor’s response is to build a straw man because no ethnic or racial group could possibly claim entitlement to Stuyvesant. Not even the school’s biggest critics can seriously allege that the admissions test is racially or ethnically biased, or that it calls for special knowledge better known to some groups.
What the protesters stand for — and I stand with them — is the universal principle that talent and hard work should be rewarded. I wish that more children across the city had the opportunities they deserve to demonstrate their talent and hard work. It is worth fighting for this principle — in our public schools perhaps most of all.
Boaz Weinstein (@boazweinstein), a graduate of Stuyvesant, sits on the board of the high school. He is the chief investment officer of Saba Capital Management. He also founded Success Academy Harlem 6 and Success Academy Bensonhurst.
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