Bill To Scrap NYC's Elite High School Test Passes Committee

NEW YORK, NY — A plan to scrap the controversial admissions test for New York City's elite specialized high schools survived a state Assembly committee vote Wednesday. The Education Committee voted 16-12 to pass Assemblyman Charles Barron's bill to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test with a system that would admit students to the schools based on their overall academic performance.

"This is a positive step forward for New York City kids," said Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The bill is part of de Blasio's plan to diversify the top-notch but notoriously segregated schools. Black and Latino students were offered 10 percent of the seats for next year despite representing about two thirds of the city's high school population.

Debate over its racial politics and entrenched deadlock in the state Senate give the bill an uncertain future in the Legislature.

The legislation would phase out the exam, currently the sole basis of admission to eight of the nine schools, over three years and eventually give most seats to the top 7 percent of students at every middle school. In the meantime, de Blasio plans to expand a program giving spots to disadvantaged, talented kids who just missed the cutoff score for admission.

Supporters argue getting rid of the test is the only way to truly integrate the schools, as the current system forces students to spend time and money on costly test prep to get an excellent public education.

"We cannot have our finest high schools that are the breeding ground for our future leaders be exclusionary, which is what they are right now," de Blasio said Tuesday at an unrelated news conference.

De Blasio said he's hopeful the Legislature will eventually pass the bill even if it has to wait until next year.

But opponents of the plan worry it will displace Asian students, who got a majority of the offers for specialized school seats this year but still face their own struggles as minorities.

"It is unfair and wrong to pit minorities against one another when the goal is to improve educational outcomes and opportunities for all New Yorkers," Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Manhattan) said in a statement.

Critics also say the plan was also developed without input from stakeholders and fails to address broader issues of school segregation and educational quality.

(Lead image: The New York State Capitol is pictured in Albany. Photo from Shutterstock)