The late Al Shanker, the legendary leader of the United Federation of Teachers, must be rolling over in his grave: The union’s delegate assembly voted last month to support a lawsuit that would destroy New York City’s top academic high schools.
The suit by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund aims to throw out the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, which it claims discriminates against Hispanic and black students.
The test is the sole benchmark for admission into eight city high schools: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, Staten Island Tech, Brooklyn Latin, Queens HS for Sciences, HS of American Studies and HS for Math, Science and Engineering.
Shanker, a Stuyvesant grad, fought hard against racialist nonsense that harmed education. Yet now the union he built is joining in.
Before the vote, according to the UFT’s New York Teacher, Janella Hinds, the union’s new vice president for academic high schools, “argued that fewer than 10 percent of the students admitted to these schools are black or Latino.”
In fact, during the 2010-11 school year, 2,043 of the 13,988 students at the eight high schools — or 15 percent — were black or Hispanic. Even the lawsuit, filed last September with the US Department of Education, cites that stat.
The suit does raise a distressing issue: Black enrollment has fallen at the “Big Three” schools since the 1990s. In the 2010-11 school year, it was down to 3 percent at Bronx Science, 1 percent at Stuyvesant and 10 percent at Brooklyn Tech.
But this tells us that the Legal Defense Fund’s gripe isn’t really with the test — the LDF had no problem with it nearly two decades ago, when black and Hispanic students were succeeding on it. It’s only now, after Asian New Yorkers have come to trounce their black, Hispanic and white peers, that the LDF imagines bias in the test.
For the record, in the 2010-11 school year, these eight schools had 8,240 Asian students (59 percent), 3,675 whites (26 percent), 1,065 Hispanics (8 percent) and 978 blacks (7 percent). (For comparison, the public-school system had 985,000 students — 40 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black and 15 percent each white and Asian.)
But at five of the schools, the black-Hispanic share was pretty good, ranging from 19 percent at Brooklyn Tech to 51 percent at Brooklyn Latin. The gripe is really just with Stuyvesant (4 percent), Staten Island Tech (7 percent) and Bronx Science (11 percent).
But what to do about the “underrepresentation” of black and Hispanic students at these three schools?
I don’t think the problem is the test. My decades of teaching in the city schools tell me that a big reason Asian kids are doing so well is family support (and “Tiger Mom”-style pressure). The answer is to provide more support to black and Hispanic kids in the years before they take the test.
Why doesn’t the LDF (and the main NAACP, for that matter), perhaps with UFT volunteers, look to set up a tutoring program to help these kids be ready to take the admissions test?
This private program could draw on the tens of thousands of successful minority graduates of the city’s public schools — people like Gen. Colin Powell, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), writer-actress Esmeralda Santiago, Essence Communications CEO Edward Lewis, federal Judge Dora Irizarry, Harvard Law’s Lani Guinier, Baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew and Neil de Grasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium.
Tutoring programs in all five boroughs would start preparing minority fourth-graders for the test. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Asian and white fourth-graders in the city’s public schools are two years ahead of their black and Hispanic classmates in reading and math. By eighth grade, these gaps are even larger.
The Big Three specialized high schools — Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science — have been educating the city’s brightest teens for a collective 275 years. For the UFT’s current leadership to so cavalierly discard this unrivaled success demonstrates educational malpractice that Al Shanker would have certainly not allowed if he were still directing the union’s affairs.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City public-school teacher.