Six thousand students flood Brooklyn Technical High School’s labyrinthine halls every morning. Down one corridor, you can hear a symphony of sighs as students pour out of an elevator whose doors have once again opened in apparent resignation — the third breakdown that week. A panicked first-year student parts the sea of bodies in a full sprint toward the staircase.
These fatigued students, hurrying together to class, are the children of the tired, huddled masses who arrived in New York. At home, their parents speak Bengali, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, and Spanish. These students seek social mobility for themselves and their families.
Brooklyn Tech is one of the city’s eight specialized high schools. These elite schools admit students who perform well on the Specialized High Schools Admission Test. For the 2025-26 school year, 25,678 students vied for the selective schools. Only 4,072 of them received offers to schools that have produced Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners, captains of industry, and cultural juggernauts.
The elite eight are a battleground in the conflict between progressives, who see inequality as proof of discrimination, and immigrant families with an insatiable appetite for meritocracy.
The New York Times, Gothamist, and other publications have once again insinuated that Brooklyn Tech and its sister specialized high schools are discriminatory. “An Elite N.Y.C. Public School Admitted 777 Students. Only 3 Were Black,” the New York Times headline read. Chalkbeat reported, “Just 1 Black student gets into Staten Island Tech as racial gaps at specialized high schools persist.”
I attended Brooklyn Tech, and the headlines are misleading. Reports about the vanishing black and Hispanic populations at specialized high schools conjure images of wealthy white students parading through their halls.
Far from it.
About 60% of Brooklyn Tech students are economically disadvantaged. Almost a supermajority are Asian. Their parents live in immigrant enclaves from the South Asians in Jackson Heights to the East Asians in Chinatown. White students, 24%, are hardly generational Americans. Their families fled from the former Soviet Union and now live in Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Staten Island Tech, and other specialized schools mirror Brooklyn Tech’s student body.
Regardless, city leaders such as Councilman Lincoln Restler believe racial disparity in these schools proves the admissions test is racist. He called for modifying the admissions process.
But faculty at the University of California dubbed test-blind admissions a “failed experiment” for elite schools.
The UC Board of Regents abandoned the SAT and ACT in its admissions process to reckon with racism. Five years later, faculty members from both STEM studies and the social sciences wrote letters to the board. They’d like to reinstate the exams.
“In the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold,” STEM faculty wrote. “Moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.”
“Standardized test scores predict important outcomes like college grades and graduation rates,” humanities professors agreed in their own letter. “As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, it is arguably more important than ever for students to be able to think through and compose sound arguments on their own.”
Specialized high schools in New York do not require the SAT for admission. But an internal city Education Department study revealed a significant link between performing well on the SHSAT and high school academic performance.
Test-blind admissions have produced classrooms with divergent skill levels — and slowed down instruction. California’s flagship and New York City’s merit-based schools boast competitive, do-it-yourself environments that punish the unprepared. Administrators undermine faculty and minority students alike when students are admitted to rectify charges of racism.
Progressives such as Restler often are proponents of “holistic” admissions. Ironically, their preferred solution, essay writing, correlates with wealthier households with access to tutors. Extracurriculars select for the very populations — White, Asian American, and private-school applicants — admissions officers have attempted to reduce in the name of equity. The UC social sciences faculty wrote bluntly, “No admissions criterion is uncorrelated with social background.”
Specialized high schools have proven that meritocracy can be diverse. Black and Hispanic students aren’t excluded from the city’s guarantors of social mobility. Rather, the New York Times headline reveals a truth more heartbreaking: New York’s public schools have failed its students years before they fill Scantrons.
Over 40% of New York fourth graders read below grade level. One-third are not on par in math. Scores do not improve by the time students take the SHSAT either. Only a third of eighth graders were proficient in reading and math. Of course, black and Hispanic students struggled more.
“The SHSAT is not causing the racial inequities in academic achievement, it’s just revealing them,” Manhattan Institute fellow Danyela Souza Egorov said. “The problem starts in kindergarten with much higher rates of chronic absenteeism for black and Hispanic students.”
Indeed, one-third of New York public school students were “chronically absent” — a bewildering 300,000. Students should prepare for the SHSAT in the seventh grade. But 37% of black and 35% of Hispanic students were chronically absent during that critical year. Almost half of minority kindergarten students also missed over 10% of the school year. Parents are now opting for higher-quality education elsewhere. Somehow, still, the Education Department grew more, spending the nation’s highest $42,000 per pupil.
YES, CALIFORNIA SHOULD JUNK ITS WOKE ADMISSIONS STANDARDS
Why should the progenitors of America’s elite human capital bear allegations of discrimination for a school system that inadequately prepares its students for world-class curricula?
They should not. The city should not punish the students racing through Brooklyn Tech’s halls because its leaders failed public school children years before they took the SHSAT. Nor should it replace an objective test with “holistic” admissions standards that favor wealthier families. If New York wants more black and Hispanic students in specialized high schools, it should prepare them to walk those halls, not lower the bar and call it a victory.