Three Black students won offers to Stuyvesant High School this year. The incoming class is 777.
Across all eight of New York City’s specialized high schools, Black students received 140 of 4,023 offers, or 3.5%, according to city admissions data reported by the Amsterdam News and the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Black children are 19% of the city’s public school students (2024-25). Asian students got more than half of the offers, white students 23% and Latino students 6.5%.
On Tuesday, David Banks, the city’s former schools chancellor, and Sheena Wright, a former deputy mayor, took that record to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. They hosted a community forum on repealing the 1971 state law that makes one test the way in.
“We’re the only city in the nation that has one single test for admission to specialized schools,” Banks said. “This is a system right now that doesn’t even care about your grades.”
The law is the Hecht-Calandra Act. It requires the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) for admission to Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Technical High School and the Bronx High School of Science. Only the Legislature in Albany can change it, which is why the fight keeps returning to state lawmakers rather than the city.
The test drew 26,123 eighth graders this year, and 4,504 of them (17.2%) were Black. Of those Black test-takers, 140 got an offer.
Stuyvesant’s numbers have been low for years. The school offered seats to eight Black students in 2025 and 10 in 2024, the Amsterdam News reported, against three this year. Black students were 0.39% of Stuyvesant’s offers.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, NAACP New York State Conference President L. Joy Williams, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson were among the officials at the forum, along with City Council members Lincoln Restler, Nantasha Williams and Rita Joseph and Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman.
City Council Member Althea Stevens has argued against leaving the exam as the only measure. “Our Black and Brown students are just as smart as anyone else…and it should not be taken off the table just because there are other options,” she said, as the Amsterdam News reported in August.
Repeal has been demanded before. In 2021, then-Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter called on Albany to repeal the law after Black and Latino students together received 9% of offers. A repeal bill needs the Legislature, which returns to Albany in January.
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