NPR – Gene Demby
“New York City’s public school system is vast, with more than a million students spread across thousands of schools. And like the city itself, it’s remarkably diverse — about 15 percent Asian, just under 30 percent black, about 40 percent Latino, and about 15 percent white, with all sorts of finer shadings of ethnicity, nationality and language in that mix. The city also boasts nine elite “specialized” public high schools — of which the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School, and Stuyvesant High School are the most difficult to get into. They’re largely considered the school system’s crown jewels, regularly sending students to top-tier universities. The demographics at those schools look a lot different. Blacks and Latinos make up around 70 percent of all the kids in the city’s public school system, but just a tiny share of the kids at those three schools. At Stuyvesant, generally considered the best school in the city, they made up less than 4 percent of the total student body — 113 out of 3,296 kids — this school year.”(more)