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Article: Specialized High Schools Admissions Test

... and it's used to determine admission to 8 out of the city's 9 Specialized High Schools. On any given year an average of 25,000 students apply to these specialized schools and only 5,000 are accepted.

The Hecht-Calandra Act
The Hecht-Calandra Act of 1971 codified the SHSAT into state law as the sole consideration for admissions at 3 of the specialized schools, Stuyvesant Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science.

The debate of whether or not the SHSAT and specialized schools are discriminatory dates back to the passing of this act. In the 1970s the chancellor of the New York City public school system Harvey B. Scribner launched a study to investigate allegations that the specialized schools were “culturally biased” against Latino and Black students. In response to the study legislators came together to draft the Hecht-Calandra Act. The minority legislators who were against the bill “accused white colleagues of seeking an exclusionary racial quota at the schools”

In 2018, then Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio proposed changes to the admission process of the Specialized High School. One of the proposed changes was repealing the Hecht-Calandra Act and replacing the SHSAT with a more holistic approach that takes more aspects of a students education into consideration. However the change did not happen. Due to the Hecht-Calandra Act, the city is not allowed to remove the SHSAT and would require a state law to change it.

There is a legal question on whether the city has the power to reclassify the 5 other specialized schools that are not explicitly mentioned in the 1971 bill in order to  change the admission process.

New York State Senate Bill S3087, sponsored in 2021 by State Senator Julia Salazar, seeks to repeal the Hecht-Calandra Act. The bill, as well as previous iterations of it, point to the fact that no other school district in the state of New York is subject to state laws. Furthermore, the bill claims that the 1971 act "help to maintain or increase the racially disparate enrollment in these schools, particularly in regard to Black and Latinx students" and that its purpose was to "further school segregation in NYC". The bill would allow the city to create its own admission process for the specialized schools.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-ny-school-admissions&variant=show&region=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/20/archives/assembly-votes-high-school-curb-limits-city-boards-power-to-ease.html

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/s8847