The Case Against the SHSAT

**Brian Lehrer** (0:00)
Listeners, here's an invitation for a few of you who are politically different from each other to participate in a constructive conversation experiment we're planning for next week. Listen for a second and I'll tell you how to apply if you're interested in being in it. Now that the 250th birthday hoo-ha is over, we're launching a series called America 251 The goal will be for more Americans to get to know each other again this year in our very polarized country where we're sorting ourselves into echo chambers via social media and even where we choose to live. But let's not have another civil war. What do you think? Here's how we'll start. We want to match one listener who is really proud of our country right now. We got some like that right after the 4th of July.
And one listener who was really ashamed, we got some like that too. We're not going to have a debate. We're just going to ask about your lives and your feelings and see if we can have a constructive, good faith conversation. Who knows where it might lead. If you want to be considered to participate in this experiment, go to wnyc.org/america251 and let us know. We'll pick two people to come on with us for one segment next week. Again, if you consider yourself really proud to be an American right now, or if you consider yourself really ashamed, fill out the form at wnyc.org/america251.
And we may be in touch to invite you for a constructive conversation experiment on the air.

**Kusha Navadar** (1:37)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian. Now, we'll hear about why Errol Louis says it's time to end the specialized high school admissions test, also called the SHSAT or Shazat. It has to do with this. Stuyvesant High School, considered the most selective of the specialized public schools, admitted 777 students to its incoming freshman class. Only three of those students were black and only 21 were Hispanic. Citywide, about 62 percent of public school students are black and Latino. And Errol Louis, political anchor of Spectrum NY1 News, host of Inside City Hall, and The Big Deal with Errol Louis joins me now.
He also hosts the podcast You Decide and serves as a columnist for New York Magazine. His new column is It's Time to End the Test That's Grotesquely Segregating New York City Schools. Errol, welcome back to the show.

**Errol Louis** (2:34)
Great to be with you.

**Kusha Navadar** (2:36)
Listeners, who agrees and who sees things differently on this topic? Your cases for and against the SHSAT. We're at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.
Call us, text us. Our lines are open. Errol, you write, quote, New Yorkers know a hustle when we see one. Do you want to pick it up from there? What's the hustle?

**Errol Louis** (3:02)
Sure.
The specialized high schools, if you do make it in, you get access at a school like Brunk Science or Stuyvesant to some of the best teachers in the system. You have an amazing learning environment. You have a great experience and you get pretty good consideration when it comes time to apply to college. It's really worth being at these schools. The entrance, however, to get into these schools, is a deeply flawed, under-examined test, meaning there's this thing, this Shsat, and it turns out that year after year after year, the people who make it through the gates using that test into these great learning environments tends to exclude Black and Latino kids. In any other context, that becomes grounds for a civil rights investigation and very possibly a lawsuit, because civil rights law 101 is that it's okay or it's acceptable, it's not unlawful to have a situation where, say, Black and Latinos are excluded from a public resource. But there has to be a reason for it, and you have to demonstrate that there's no better way to do it. We have to do it this way. We went through this as a city with the fire department's entrance exam. It took seven years in court, but in the end, the court looked at the test and said, this test has nothing to do with firefighting. This is not the right way to do it. You can't exclude people based on race if this is the test, and you have to do things differently. They desegregated the fire department and life went on. That happened a little over 10 years ago.
With this test, I think it's painfully obvious, and we can talk about why, but I think it's painfully obvious that the test does not measure what we should be measuring to figure out who should get into these advanced learning environments.