Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Friday major changes to the way hundreds of New York City’s selective middle and high schools admit their students, a move intended to address long-simmering concerns that admissions policies have discriminated against Black and Latino students and exacerbated segregation in the country’s largest school district. Black and Latino students are significantly underrepresented in selective middle and high schools, though they represent nearly 70 percent of the district’s 1.1 million students. The alterations, however, will not affect admissions at the city’s most elite selective high schools, like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science. When schools shuttered in the spring, grading systems and standardized tests used by the city to admit students to its selective schools were altered or paused. That has made it next to impossible for most selective schools to sort students by academic performance as they have in previous years.

Source: New York Times December 18, 2020 14:30 UTC