The Story Is Asian American Dominance
What you need to understand about the SHSAT
Every year, there is more handwringing about New York’s Specialized High School Admissions Test. The SHSAT, as it’s known, is the sole means for determining whether a New York City eighth grader can enter one of nine specialized public high schools. Three of them are very well-known to New Yorkers: Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. All of them boast a dazzling roster of alumni, including Nobel Prize winners. Plenty of future politicians have passed through their halls, including Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor. When I was an adolescent, the SHSAT schools had no real political valence. You either took the test or you didn’t. I never did because my bar mitzvah fell on the test day and my parents were sending me to the local private school anyway. I had many friends and acquaintances who went to SHSAT schools—Brooklyn Tech in particular—and plenty who attended other public schools. No one much cared, either way.
In the 2010s, that began to shift. It was becoming obvious SHSAT schools were not demographically representative of the city. The number of Black and Latino students admitted into Stuyvesant, Tech, and the others continued to shrink. Bill de Blasio, the progressive Democratic mayor, fretted over this status quo, and announced his intentions to abolish the test and introduce new criteria. This sparked intense backlash among Asian American parents, who prized the schools, and they began to leave the Democratic Party. De Blasio never did scrap the SHSAT or add new criteria, like GPA or extracurriculars, to decide who entered the specialized schools. His successor, Eric Adams, left the SHSAT alone, and despite his own opposition to the test, Mamdani has also not taken any action. His progressive allies, though, are restless. After it was announced just three Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School’s incoming class of 777, a city councilman close to Mamdani, Lincoln Restler, declared that “we urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process.” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who is Black, said there “needs to be a real, independent investigation into the admissions process for NYC specialized high schools.”
Every headline about the new SHSAT numbers focused on the dearth of Black and Latino students (just 21 heading to Stuyvesant) admitted, and the fact that, in a city where they make up about half of all residents, this is wholly unrepresentative. But does that make it racist? What progressive critics always miss about the SHSAT is that it is hardly creating a swell of white students in the specialized high schools. At best, they’ll match the demographics of the city in a given year, but even that number is deceptive. Anyone who lives in New York knows the “white” Census category is incredibly broad. These are not fifth or sixth generation WASPs, or the children of wealthy lawyers. They’re not kids sprung from a John Hughes film. A white student in a SHSAT school might be the child of Ukrainian immigrants or even Middle Eastern.
The actual story of what’s happening at the SHSAT schools—the only story, really—is that Asian Americans continue to dominate the admissions test. Any change to the test would adversely impact them. All debate must start there or it’s deeply dishonest.
