Get rid of the specialized high schools

The last day of school in New York City is June 26. Congratulations, students and teachers!

When classes start again in September, the city’s elite specialized high schools, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, will welcome 895 and 803 new freshmen, respectively. As nearly everyone who follows local news must already know, at Stuyvesant High School, only seven members (0.78 percent) of the class of 2023 will be black. The Bronx High School of Science will have 12 black ninth-graders. 26 percent of public school students citywide are black.

The numbers above are undeniably abysmal, but Mayor de Blasio’s proposal to increase diversity in the specialized schools – by abandoning the standardized SHSAT exam and instituting a system that would award spots to the top students (by GPA) in every public middle school – remains a source of ceaseless controversy. It has ignited a battle that pits minority groups in New York City against one another: the change would secure significantly more seats for black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, but it would cost Asian-American students their current majority, roughly halving their numbers at the specialized high schools.

Blacks and Latino families, on average, have lower incomes than Asian families in New York City, but that doesn’t mean that Stuyvesant or Bronx Science is a bastion of privilege, and working-class Chinese families in Brooklyn and Queens, whose kids earned their slots at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science by studying hard, bristle at the notion that the SHSAT is elitist. As they see it, it’s the opposite: the SHSAT ensures that admission to Stuyvesant has nothing to do with what you look like or where you come from – all that matters is your test score.

Still, many New Yorkers recognize a problem. They know that black and Latino students are smart, too, and if the SHSAT doesn’t recognize their abilities, the test must be flawed. This, it seems, is how de Blasio sees it. For him, the glitch is undeniable. “Can anyone look the parent of a Latino or black child in the eye and tell them their precious daughter or son has an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools?” he asked last year.

Amid all the debate provoked by that question, the assumption that New York City should have a set of “best high schools” has gone largely unquestioned, even as the phrase openly repudiates the central promise of public education, which is that everyone gets the same quality of education. Americans know it hasn’t worked out that way, but in New York City, the inequality is built-in: it predesignates a particular group of schools as superior and then allows students from around the city to compete to enter them. Compared to the basic affront to equality that this system represents, the particular mechanism by which “gifted” students qualify for their elite educations seems relatively insignificant.

The very obvious solution to the specialized high schools’ diversity conundrum is here: get rid of the specialized high schools. They’re an ugly, embarrassing testament to America’s insistence upon inserting hierarchy into all things, including public services for children. What is the point of them? What, exactly, are we trying to accomplish here?

For the New York City Department of Education, the covert purpose of the specialized high schools is to buy the acquiescence of ambitious families in underserved areas: these parents believe that huge swaths of the outer boroughs have no decent facilities for their kids, but the inadequacy of the school in their own neighborhood doesn’t trouble them so much because they’re focused on getting their child into Stuyvesant instead. For New Yorkers on the whole, the existence of Stuyvesant makes the perceived mediocrity of the zoned high schools conscionable: as long as every student has a fair chance to earn an escape, we can allow those who don’t to languish.

Those who do escape receive the privilege of joining a hothouse of frantic academic competition, with its concomitant mental health crises. There’s little room for creativity or joy in learning. When students enter, they already tend to suffer from an undue focus on grades and test scores and the need to succeed at all costs (that’s how they got in), and thenceforth their universally like-minded peer group compounds the problem in an atmosphere of nonstop stress.

There are other ways of looking at the world, other ways of perceiving life’s meaning, but Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are designed to ensure that their students are unlikely to encounter them. Proponents of diversity at the specialized high schools will never acknowledge that the specialized high schools inherently constitute a form of segregation, regardless of their racial demographics.

For the ruling class, the racial diversity of the specialized high schools matters for reasons of public relations. The schools operate in the fashion of scholarship programs at top universities. Their function is to isolate and retrain the (supposedly) most talented kids from low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in order to make them eligible for high-level positions within America’s fake meritocracy, which uses the “diversity” generated by their compliant presence to make a case for its own legitimacy.

What if we let the “smart” kids actually spend some time around the “normal” kids, even around the “dumb” kids? What if they learned to value solidarity instead of individual advancement? What if they came to understand that their entire communities matter, not just themselves?

Defenders of the specialized high schools would argue that New York’s brightest kids won’t reach their full potential if they have to share an educational environment with slower pupils. To a certain degree, this may be true: an institution of real diversity – meaning a student body possessed of a wide variety of abilities, interests, and worldviews – might not incite in its pupils the same all-consuming drive toward a very particular kind of excellence that Stuyvesant does. But so what?

No one becomes a great scientist or engineer at age 16. Is it so important to be the best as a teenager? Do we expect the future discoverer of the cure for cancer or the next world-class poet to be a high school valedictorian? No, not really, but the grotesque stratification of American society – the vast disparity between the top and bottom – creates an anxiety that prompts early action: parents’ horror at the prospect of their children spending their lives at the bottom of our cruel economic food chain convinces them of the necessity of putting their kids on the “right track” from the beginning. If their kindergarten doesn’t have STEM programming, will Google ever hire them?

As adults, we all sort of remember deep down that, most of the time, adolescent hormones don’t allow teenagers to absorb complex academic subject matter on any meaningful level, no matter how fine the instruction. Basic social interactions are hard enough. What really matters at that age, in a long-term sense, is building emotional health, curiosity, compassion, and the capacity for creativity – all the stuff that doesn’t especially appeal to the corporate interests that increasingly dictate our schools’ curricula.

The irony of the frenzy surrounding specialized high school admissions is that Stuyvesant and Bronx Science don’t really matter that much even within the terms that their supporters value. Kids who go to Stuyvesant aren’t successful in school because they go to Stuyvesant; they’re successful because they’re the sort of kids who could get into Stuyvesant – that is, they have probably at least a tiny bit of inborn scholastic aptitude, but more importantly, they have parents who cared enough about their academic fate to make sure that they prepared well enough for the SHSAT to get a high score. That concern would still exist if Stuyvesant didn’t, and in most cases it would guide them to success regardless of which school they might attend.

This isn’t to deny the differences between public schools in New York City, or to gloss over problems of underfunding or overcrowding. But these differences probably account for a much smaller part of the discrepancy in outcomes between kids who go to “good” schools and kids who go to “bad” schools than most people would like to admit. Why are most “bad” schools bad? Because the children they serve are poor, and poverty hampers kids’ ability to learn in all sorts of ways. School reform is usually a cover story for a refusal to make other reforms. In other words, it’s a lot easier to blame teachers, or to build charter schools, or even to concoct an “innovative” new method of pedagogy than it is to end poverty.

Desegregating schools hasn’t been easy at all – the United States hasn’t made any progress in decades – but to most it still feels like a more achievable goal than desegregating neighborhoods (which would desegregate the schools as a secondary effect, in addition to solving a host of other problems). Personally, I’m in favor of always saying what we really want, not the thing we’ve been told we can have, and creating diversity in every part of New York wouldn’t be so hard – we could build public housing on the Upper East Side if we felt like it – but hardly anyone expects it to happen.

For this reason, if New York City ended the practice of having eighth-graders apply to high schools and instead simply sent them to schools in their areas (as one would do in any society that wasn’t fundamentally broken in some other fashion), outrage at the segregational effect of this revision would surely arise in place of any insistence upon remedying the underlying problem: we take for granted that black and white New Yorkers will always live mostly separately, but at least we can create some contact through busing. The city’s zoned schools, on the other hand, have very little diversity.

Of course, that’s at least partly by design: why, for example, does the catchment area for PS 67 consist exclusively of the Walt Whitman Houses and the Ingersoll Houses, instead of linking these NYCHA developments to the adjacent brownstones of Fort Greene? Racial segregation by neighborhood is real, but in the dense urban fabric of New York City, one can often cross the boundaries easily on foot; without straying far from home, many schoolchildren could too, if the politicians let them. In a city of 1,700 public schools, the specialized high schools are a high-profile, almost symbolic issue: there is a lot of other work to be done that Bill de Blasio will never bother to attempt.

Why, then, am I writing about the specialized high schools? Well, symbols matter sometimes. A rejection of Stuyvesant is a rejection of hierarchy and unnecessary competition. Let’s have the courage to build schools that reflect the society we want, instead of schools that submit to the society we have. I want diverse communities (with diverse teachers), where everyone matters, where everyone lives and learns together – and they do it largely for fun, not out of terror of an uncertain future.

The end of the specialized high schools isn’t the only demise I want in the realm of education. I want us to get rid of Gifted and Talented programs, standardized testing, charter schools (obviously), private schools (of course) – why not? – and the list goes on. But we’ve got to begin somewhere.