Issue #9
May 2002
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New Exam Schools by Gerry Krownstein The Chancellor of the New York City school system, Harold Levy, has announced an intention to create three new elite high schools to absorb some of the talented students that did not make it into Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech. These schools will be located in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens; two will focus on science and engineering, while the remaining one will be devoted to a history and social science curriculum. Is this a good idea?
A little history is in order here. New York City has had superior schools using competitive examinations to select students for almost a century. Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan, was founded in 1904, and is heavily science-oriented, although it, like the other exam schools, offers a full roster of well-taught liberal arts courses. The Bronx High School of Science, as its name suggests, is also science-intensive, and was the first of the exam schools to be co-ed. Brooklyn Technical High School offers an engineering and science curriculum that features hands-on labs and shops, as well as all the other courses needed for a Regents (college-prep) diploma. LaGuardia, formed by the merger of The High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, is near Lincoln center and offers a curriculum grounded in music, dance, acting and the visual arts. Its entrance procedure requires a portfolio or audition in addition to a written test. These schools, threatened during a period of budget cutbacks and anti-elitism agitation, had their status codified into law by the state legislature. Queens and Staten Island have no exam schools in their boroughs. In addition to these four schools, the Board Of Higher Education has run "lab" schools for their Schools of Education that also require a competitive examination for entrance. Hunter College High School is the only remaining one of these; Townsend Harris (City College's lab school) was closed long ago, but has reopened in Queens recently as a non-exam high school.
About 11,000 students attend the four exam schools. Many times that number sit for the entrance exams, and several times the number accepted (about 2,600 per year) score close to the cut-off. Most students attending these schools travel long distances to get there; being city-wide in nature, each of the schools serves students from all of the boroughs.
Two arguments have been raised against the creation of the new exam schools, both arguments of scarcity. One is that, in a time of proposed drastic budget cuts for the school system as a whole, the construction, creation and staffing of these schools would be a further drain on already insufficient resources, shifting funds from neighborhood high schools serving a broad student population to schools serving only the elite. The second is the argument that skimming more of the cream (good students) from struggling local high schools would further deprive average and poor students of the stimulation to be gained from mixing with good students.
Proponents of the new schools counter that with a school system of almost half a million high school students, shifting an additional 7,000 or so into elite schools would scarcely impact the pool of talent available for local high schools. And they point out that most of the costs of educating these students would be incurred regardless of the school they were in.
If you start with the assumption that bright students deserve as much attention, stimulation and resources as troubled, non-English speaking or handicapped children, and that society as a whole will benefit from improving the education of those most likely to make substantial contributions, the question of whether more elite schools should be created has only one answer - Yes. Enlarging the geographical distribution of these schools is also beneficial. It is the focus of these schools, however, that needs to be rethought. Two of the proposed schools will emphasize science, math and engineering. The third, according to current plans, will emphasize social studies.
Three of four current exam schools are science schools, but many of the students attending have only minimal interest in math, science and engineering. They are there because they can do the work and there is no equivalent school for them to attend if their real interest is literature, foreign languages or the social sciences, and only one other school to look to if their interest is in music or fine art. A fourth science school (perhaps with a heavier tilt towards the biological sciences than is evident in the current science schools) is probably a good idea, given the role that science and technology plays in our lives and our economy. But a fifth one? Rather than that, the Board of Education should consider an exam school emphasizing foreign languages, history and literature, areas in which the American public is woefully deficient. A school with that focus could be the breeding ground for a generation of statesmen, business leaders and scholars able to cope with globalization. The concept of one of the new schools emphasizing social studies and the social sciences should probably be retained as well, perhaps with a strong sub-component of music and fine arts. The new schools would then not only add to the geographic diversity of our finest high schools, but to the intellectual diversity as well.
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