What Progressives Get Wrong About the Elite High School Debate

An elite New York City high school sparks renewed discussion about admissions.

Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

New York City operates a network of elite public high schools which go on to graduate students who fill the ranks of Ivy League universities and other top colleges and arenas of higher education.

Every year, thousands of students compete to get into these high schools; the city publicly releases demographic data to reveal to residents who was admitted.

That data was just released, and a number of media outlets have covered the results. This is the education-focused publication Chalkbeat:

About 3.5% of the roughly 4,000 offers in total went to Black students, edging up slightly from last year’s 3%. About 6.5% of offers went to Latino students, down slightly from 6.9% the year before.

Overall, Black students made up 19.3% of students this year; Latino students made up 42.3% of the nation’s largest school system. About 17% of the students who took the SHSAT last year are Black, while 25% are Latino.

The number of offers to Asian American students at specialized high schools ticked up to 56.5% from 54% the year before. Offers to white students fell slightly to 23.5% from about 26%. Asian American students make up 18.7% of students citywide; white students make up 16.1%.

The publication goes on to note that “for years, integration advocates have called to change the testing admissions system to these prestigious schools,” calling attention to the racial disparity at these schools.

The New York City elite public high school system and others around the country — think Thomas Jefferson in Northern Virginia or Lowell in San Francisco — have frequently come under this critique. The schools are, relative to the general population, disproportionately filled by the ranks of South and East Asian kids, often the children of first-generation immigrants. Proportional to population, black kids are typically the most underrepresented. White kids, meanwhile, are increasingly facing stiff competition from the children of Asian migrants.

The main avenue of criticism is to excoriate these schools for basing admissions on testing. In New York City, this test takes the form of the Secialized High Schools Admissions Test, or SHSAT. Critics argue that a more holistic admissions process would account for the broader qualities of the student and result racial disparities.

The problem with this argument is that a well-designed test tends to be the most objective measure we have for predicting student success. And when universities started going test-optional, they actually hurt the chances of disadvantaged students in admissions.

But there is a larger fallacy at work here. A few years ago, I spoke to some researchers who had studied specialized high schools. What they found is that these schools appear to succeed through what is called selection bias. For folks who haven’t had a graduate-level statistics training, let me explain with a simple analogy.

Imagine there’s a town where only people who are six feet or taller are allowed to live.

(I’m not sure if this would be illegal or unconstitutional, but that’s the great thing about analogies, you’re allowed to be as fanciful as you want!)

If you made a ranking of the tallest towns in America, that town would always be at the very top. Someone who is not familiar with the requirement might even think to themselves, “Wow, I should go and have kids in this town. They’ll end up being 6’5”. Maybe they can even play in the NBA!”

But the reason the actual the town is so tall is because they don’t even admit anyone who is short.

This is how specialized high schools work. Their rigorous admissions standards ensure that the students who attend are academically gifted and appropriately placed. Admitting students who are not would not necessarily benefit those students — they’re not being correctly matched to a curriculum that meets their needs. Lowering standards at these schools will ensure that the students who graduate are not as well-prepared for the future as they currently are.

If you admitted a student who had, say, 20 percent worse performance on the SHSAT than the current admitted students, that student would not automatically be as successful as the current ones. They may even find themselves falling behind in courses that are far more demanding than are appropriate for them.

So what’s the solution?

I think first we have to acknowledge the purpose of education. I have been a tutor and part-time educator for half a dozen years. My goal is not to turn every student into a Harvard grad. I try to figure out what my students are struggling at and help them improve. They all end up in different places, but I know I’ve done my job if they’re doing better than they did before.

The goal of the education system shouldn’t be to pretend that everyone is going to end up in the same place. It’s to improve things for everyone. Many of the Asian American students who fill the ranks of specialized high schools around the country have parents who push them extremely hard in academics. I remember one Indian American child I tutored whose mom made him do half a dozen sports (this is actually overkill, do not ask your child to do this!).

You can protest that even students who don’t have parents like this should be filling the ranks of Stuyvesant or Harvard. But that’s just not reality. Those schools are made for the top-performing students to bring out their potential.

That isn’t to say that students who aren’t as academically gifted or driven should just be discarded. The better approach is for us to make sure there are plenty of paths for success in American life — trade schools for non-college graduates, for instance, are amongst the most important engines of mobility.

I think a lot of the progressives who engage in these debates are surrounded by people who went not only to college but to elite prep schools; the idea that someone can succeed without doing that is alien to them.

Progressives are right that everyone should have a shot at a decent life. But the solution is not to lower standards and try to force a square peg into a round hole. The current specialized school system does well cultivating talent amongst students who are appropriate. What we need to work on is not changing these schools but improving things for everyone else.