A better way to diversify Stuyvesant

Three years ago, I spoke to a class at my alma mater, Stuyvesant High School. As I walked the halls, it stunned me: I didn’t see any African-American or Latino students. When I later researched this, I learned that the percentage of African-American students at Stuyvesant had plummeted to 1% in the last decade; for Latinos, the figure was a mere 2.5%. This compared with 40% Latinos and 28% African-Americans in the overall public school population.

A few weeks later, on this op-ed page, I wrote the first of three columns on the diversity problem at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. These two schools, jewels of our public system, are among eight specialized high schools that rely solely on an entrance exam taken by 30,000 eighth graders each year.

Now, with a new mayor who says he wants to change the single-test admission policy, the issue is being hotly debated once again. A bill pending in the state Legislature would require a wider range of criteria in addition to the exam, including middle-school grades and attendance.

I agree that something needs to be done to make sure that places like Stuyvesant attract a wide range of gifted students, not just overly prepped strong test takers.

But this reform proposed in the bill is not the solution — not yet. Before we move to a system that risks watering down standards, we should fix the test itself. That wouldn’t require legislation, just leadership.

More than 25 years ago, when I briefly taught at Stuyvesant, I was recruited to teach every Saturday at the Elite Academy, one of the first “cram schools” established in Flushing to prepare fourth grade students for the SHSAT. Four years after I started tutoring 26 young people, 25 of them gained entrance to Stuyvesant.

There is nothing wrong with rewarding hard work and test preparation. But as I heard from the Stuyvesant English department chairman and others who had studied this trend, a growing percentage of the students attending specialized high schools lacked critical writing skills and were merely great test takers, not very strong critical thinkers.

Fixing that while preserving the priceless culture of excellence that still fuels extraordinary achievement at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science must happen deliberately and wisely.

And under Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña, that process can begin today:

1. Make Stuyvesant and Bronx Science reinstate the Discovery Program, which allows each school to accept up to 14% of the class from a pool of disadvantaged students whose test score fell just below the cutoff. This program was arbitrarily dropped at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science around 2000. At Brooklyn Tech, where the Discovery Program still exists, 30 students gained admission through it last year.

2. Add a writing component to the exam , just as the SAT has done in recent years; this will cut down on the advantages of pure test preparation.

3. Change the exam dramatically from year to year so that those who have been tutored for the exam for many years do not have an unfair advantage. This would not require approval by the Legislature.

4. Change admissions policies at the city’s five newer selective high schools. The SHSAT exam is only mandated as the sole criteria for admission to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. The others can move to a multiple criteria admission process immediately if DOE wants to test out a new system.

If those fixes don’t work and we need to change the law, New York should also adopt a pilot program so that each middle school valedictorian in the city, or the top student in eighth grade as designated by the school’s principal, would win admission to the specialized high school of their choice. This would ensure racial and geographic diversity and will also incentivize middle school students to work even harder.

These would smartly put our specialized high schools on a path that makes them accessible to all.

Allon, the president of City & State, NY, is a 1980 graduate of Stuyvesant High School.