THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 15
COMMENT
THIS ISA TEST
T
he New York City Department of
Education, the sprawling bureau-
cracy headquartered at 52 Chambers
Street, in lower Manhattan, has stew-
ardship of more than a million stu-
dents—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 ex-
tensive 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. For-
ty-three per cent of the city’s popula-
tion is white, but white students account
for only fifteen per cent of the pub-
lic-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 endur-
ing 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 Legis-
lature, but de Blasio has the authority
to remove five of the schools from the
entrance-exam requirement.
Then, late last month, the School Di-
versity Advisory Group, which de Bla-
sio had created to address the problem
of integrating schools, released a report
suggesting that the city rethink its en-
tire approach to identifying and edu-
cating high-achieving children. The re-
ductive 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 nineti-
eth percentile to qualify—offer a more
rigorous curriculum to advanced learn-
ers. More accurately, the advisory group
criticized the racial and socioeconomic
bias of the test, and recommended re-
placing the programs with new initia-
tives, modelled on those in San Anto-
nio, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and
Montgomery County, Maryland, which
challenge precocious children without
relying on a test or academic tracking.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
But the alarmist headlines, follow-
ing 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 Dem-
ocratic Presidential polls, his adminis-
tration had declared war on smart chil-
dren. The ensuing uproar recalls some
of the most fraught moments in the
recent history of the system: the bat-
tles 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 ques-
tions of race and equity.
The proposed changes to the spe-
cialized-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 Stuyve-
sant High School, the most selective in
the system; Latino students got thirty-
three. Black and Latino students to-
gether 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 Depart-
ment 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 spe-
cialized high schools and was intended
to help increase black and Latino en-
rollment. The Pacific Legal Founda-
tion, representing community groups
