On a cold, wet weekend in October 2005, over 27,000 eighth graders lined up outside Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and other testing grounds to take the ominous SHSAT. They had to wait until February for the results—four months of stress and uncertainty—and just as they had managed to almost forget, the letters arrived. Most of them were disappointed. Only 5,500 kids were accepted to the specialized high schools. Twenty-two thousand, five hundred students were rejected.
In 2004, Principal Stanley Teitel reduced the class size for the class of 2008 from 800 to 700 (Stuy relies on 15 percent of the students accepted to choose to attend other schools). At the time, Stuy’s new building was already too small for its population. Most classes were reaching the legal limit of 34 students and there was simply no space for more classes. More classes necessitate more teachers. And all of this going on with the city instituting massive budget cuts. How would Stuy pay for necessary new textbooks, supplies, and teachers?
But parents of students who had just barely missed the cut-off furiously lobbied the Department of Education (DOE) to change that policy; the resultant policy overcompensated with regard to future classes. The class size of next year’s freshman class will be the biggest Stuyvesant has ever seen: 975, as opposed the normal 770.
Increasing the class size at Stuy will help some students but still will not solve the real problem of limited educational opportunities. Two hundred more seats will still leave 22,300 students rejected and disappointed. There is simply not enough room in the Chambers Street building for Stuy to keep increasing its class size. Thousands of New York City high school students are not getting the opportunities at a good education that they deserve.
There is another solution, which will not further strain the bulging and sagging walls of Stuy’s state-of-the-art home. It will even satisfy some of the critics who worry that Stuy is going down as its population goes up. It is to open more good schools. The DOE has created new high-level high schools such as those at Lehman, City and York colleges, which opened in 2002, and Brooklyn Latin, which opened in 2006. Most Stuy students probably do not recognize these names, but there are five other schools that use the SHSAT as the admissions test. Lehman, City, York and Brooklyn Latin doubled the number of specialized high schools. Soon, the number will double again as new specialized high schools open at colleges around the city. These schools will offer more resources to their students than the average local public high school, since they will have the use of their associated colleges’ resources.
These schools will be essential to improving the quality of public education in the city. Most students do not have a choice on what high school to attend; they go to their local schools. These new schools will start to change that. Interestingly, the intention behind the creation of these schools is to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the Specialized High School system. The number, which was always small, has steadily decreased over the past decade—black students now make up only 15 percent of Brooklyn Tech, five percent of Bronx Science and two percent of Stuyvesant.
By contrast, Lehman is 23 percent black. The Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering is located in Harlem and also has a middle school, whose students must live above 96 Street (and thus in predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhoods) with the hopes of matching the citywide breakdown of 35 percent black and 37 percent Hispanic. The incoming sixth grade class (the high school, which will be chosen by the SHSAT, is not yet open) is 55 percent Hispanic and 15 percent black. Black and Hispanic students tend to come from poorer neighborhoods, thus giving them a disadvantage from the beginning. Those who do not are more likely to go to private school. The new schools will help level the playing field for all students; instead of tackling the whole problem at once, they are first providing opportunities for the students who are worst off.
Some people seem to miss the point of the new specialized high schools. They do not want any more schools joining the elite ranks of schools such as Stuy and Bronx Science, because they are afraid that the original specialized high schools will no longer be unique. But with or without the new schools, older high schools such as ours will remain the same. Besides, it is undoubtedly worth damaging a few students’ and parents’ self-esteem to give a better education to less fortunate students.
