It is not a coincidence that Mayor Bill de Blasio is picking this moment to call for specialized high school admissions reform. | Getty Reform plan for specialized high schools signals new battle for de Blasio

In the sixth month of his fifth year as mayor, Bill de Blasio embarked on what may be the most politically contentious, racially delicate education initiative of his tenure. On Sunday, at a press conference at a middle school in East New York, the mayor gave the strongest signal yet that he is willing to take on one of the most fraught components of integrating America’s most segregated public school system.

“If you can fix this problem, you can fix anything,” de Blasio said, referring to his newly announced plan to reform admissions to the city’s eight specialized high schools, and ultimately to make the deeply segregated schools look more like New York City itself. “Changing them sends a message that everything is going to change.”


It was a new and striking message from a mayor who has studiously avoided use of the word “segregation” for the last several years, as grassroots support for desegregation has coalesced into the dominant advocacy issue in New York City education politics. The mayor's message on Sunday was indirect, but it was perhaps the closest de Blasio has come to calling for a citywide school integration plan.

It is not a coincidence that de Blasio is picking this moment to call for specialized high school admissions reform, an issue that has caused intense debate between pro-integration advocates and specialized school alumni for decades.

The new schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, is considerably more willing, and perhaps eager, to tackle the questions of race, class and fairness inherent in the debate over school segregation. And the mayor said he’s more confident now than ever that Albany lawmakers will repeal the 1971 state law that mandates the use of a standardized exam as the sole means of admissions in some of the schools now, since it’s possible Democrats will gain control of the state Senate. It doesn’t take much extrapolation to recognize that de Blasio may be more comfortable prioritizing desegregation now, considering he is term-limited and interested in being seen as a leader of the national progressive movement.

The mayor has made his distaste for the specialized high school exam clear since 2013, when he called for the elimination of the admissions exam as part of his mayoral campaign. (The mayor’s son, Dante, attended Brooklyn Technical High School. His daughter, Chiara, also got into Brooklyn Tech, but decided to attend Beacon, another extremely popular and high-performing high school, instead.) POLITICO reported earlier this year that the mayor has the legal authority to change admissions at five of the eight specialized schools, but the mayor has thus far declined to take that option. Asked Sunday whether forcing change at some of the schools might expedite reform in Albany, de Blasio said, “the best way to win is to change the law. It’s as simple as that.”

Alhough de Blasio has styled himself as an education mayor, his schools agenda has not been particularly contentious. De Blasio’s universal pre-K program was implemented to wide praise, and he’s now expanding the program to 3-year-olds. His less successful program, the Renewal initiative for struggling schools, has been pedagogically disappointing but has not become much of a political obstacle for City Hall. The mayor’s focus on community schools and his criticism of high-stakes testing have also been catnip for much of his base. And he has not introduced much new education policy for the last two years.

De Blasio acknowledged Sunday that he is entering a new phase of his strategy to improve the city’s 1,800 schools. “I see this as a leading edge,” he said of his specialized high school reform proposal.

The immediate next step requires decidedly small-ball political maneuvering, in order to push Albany to repeal the Hecht-Calandra law and replace it with a system based on the University of Texas top 10 percent model of admissions, in which the top students at the city’s middle schools are guaranteed spots at the specialized schools.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, vowed to lobby the union’s allies in Albany for change. The UFT’s ground game in Albany is considerably more impactful than City Hall’s. State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia expressed her support for de Blasio’s plan on Twitter, and Brooklyn Assemblyman Charles Barron is planning to lead the legislative charge to repeal the bill.

But even a Democratic state Senate would not guarantee smooth sailing for any admissions reform bill. The heads of the schools’ alumni organizations have been consistently opposed to any change that would require eliminating the test, and some have already come out against the mayor’s proposal. Those well-established alumni groups present perhaps the biggest obstacle to the plan, since they galvanize involved and influential alumni, and have ties to many state legislators.

Some of those alumni organizations point to the fact that Asian students, many of them poor first-generation immigrants or children of immigrants, make up the majority of some specialized schools and therefore have the most to lose if the test is eliminated. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” the mayor said. He argued that plenty of qualified Asian students are still being shut out of the schools if they don’t excel on standardized tests. It is, however, true that black and Latino students gaining more seats could lead to white and Asian students having fewer seats. The mayor and others have pointed out that the city’s schools are 70 percent black and Latino, and 30 percent combined white and Asian.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo represents great unknown in this debate. His endorsement of the mayor's initiative would greatly improve its chances of success in Albany, and the governor’s support would help his case with the progressive Democrats he so desperately needs to win over before Election Day. Asked about the proposal at the Celebrate Israel Parade earlier on Sunday, Cuomo said, “I think the question of equity in education is very important.” Bucking the mayor, he used the term “segregation,” but did not say whether he’ll support the plan to eliminate the test.

In the potential absence of action from Albany on this bill, the schools’ makeup would change more modestly. The city is planning to set aside 20 percent of seats in the schools for students from the Discovery program, an initiative that helps low-income students who barely miss the cutoff for admission gain entrance into the schools. The city is projecting that the increase in set-asides for students in that program would double the makeup of Latino students in the schools, but that would still mean that Latino students would only comprise 16 percent of the schools’ populations, whereas they represent 40 percent of the total public school population.

So the mayor finds himself again looking to Albany to satisfy his sweeping education initiatives. Pre-K was funded only when Cuomo took up the issue, mayoral control of city schools has been extended only through a complex web of tertiary political deals, and now the mayor is looking upstate for hundreds of millions of dollars to make his 3-K program universal. But de Blasio insisted that now is the time to add specialized high school reform to the list.

“The stars have aligned for us,” he said.