As regular readers of this thread know, NYS is at the forefront of the war to destroy the last vestige of any standards in education.  They recently abandoned the Regents Examinations which used to be required to receive an Academic HS Diploma and now hand out some kind of global multicultural lipstick on a pig that certifies you survived 12 years of public school and possibly can add 2+2 if you are given a calculator.

Until now however, the Special HS for Science & Math, Bronx HS of Science, Brooklyn Technical HS and my Alma Mater Stuyvesant stood as shining beacons demonstrating at least some public schools could deliver a first class education to 1% of the HS students in each year's graduating class.

The way this was accomplished as to sieve off the creme de la creme of students with an entrance exam given in 8th Grade and your score on that test got you in, nothing else matters.  Your grades in elementary school, your attendance records, how much time you spent in detention in JHS all are irrelevant, you start with a clean slate.

However, as is true with all standardized tests of this type, poor kids from the slums do poorly on them, particularly black and hispanic kids.  This because what the scores most closely correlate to is the socioeconomic status of the father, just like the SAT and IQ tests.

So, despite the fact more than 45% of the kids who take the test are black or hispanic, only around 12% of the kids who score high enough to get in have that racial/ethnic profile.  Thus this is seen by affirmative action types as discrimination, and so now they are likely to screw with this system also with racial quotas to balance out the distribution.

This probably won't change the quality of the education that much, anymore than Affirmative Action changed the quality of education at Harvard very much.  Putting a few minorities to the head of the line doesn't change things overall since there are always enough who can do well if they get in.  What it does though is screw some White and Chinese kids who got better test scores out of their spots.  Not the highest scoring ones, the very top scorers still get in.  The ones who lose their spots are in the lower half of the draw of who gets accepted.  That's where they will pluck out a white kid who scored 680 and replace with a black kid who scored 650.  All the kids who scored over 700 still get in.  All the kids who score 500 still get rejected.

I suspect though that the culture in the schools will change and there will be quite a bit of resentment from kids who don't get in, or more accurately from their parents.  Getting in to BHSoSc is the difference between the kid eventually getting into MIT or ending up at APEX Technical College with a 2 year certificate for HVAC maintenance.

That's actually the good result in this situation.  The bad result is the decide to get rid of the test completely and develop some politically correct multicultural evaluation in its place.  In that case, the lack of a standard will end with these schools becoming the same kind of mish mash as the regular schools, and the teachers will have to start dumbing down the curriculum.

Fortunately, I was born before collapse had really taken hold in the public education system.  It is beyond help now.

https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/12/11/nyc-parents-sound-off-on-entrance-exam-for-specialized-high-schools-ahead-of-high-profile-vote/

RE