What are the solutions for reducing disparity?

The main focus is on the test. With the stroke of a pen, Mayor Bill de Blasio could change the admission criteria for the five elite schools created by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Stuyvesant is not one of them).

Mr. de Blasio said that option would create a confusing two-tiered system. He wants state lawmakers to change the rules for all the elite high schools. But that path is all but dead in Albany, where the focus is on more popular progressive issues.

Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, previously said his conference had not raised the matter because it was divisive: The schools’ alumni organizations and Asian-American families had argued that any change would undermine academics or discriminate against the low-income Asian-Americans who attend the specialized schools in large numbers.

(On Tuesday evening, Mr. Heastie wrote on Twitter that the Assembly might hold hearings on the issue in May.)

Is “just fix the K-8 schools” a possibility?

This is what every leader in New York City has tried to do for the last 70 years. It’s not as if the city isn’t trying to improve all schools. That’s the explicit goal of the Department of Education. That is the work that is going on every hour of every day. “Fix the education system” is not the whole story.

What would any changes to admissions criteria be trying to achieve?

More racial diversity at elite high schools. This is a question about who deserves the scarcity of these excellent seats, and how you determine that.

And whatever changes are made, Asian-Americans stand to lose a large number of the seats they hold.

Might this be an issue in the 2021 mayoral election?