I grew up in the Bronx, less than five minutes, by foot, from two of New York City’s specialized public high schools, the tuition-free institutions heralded for their rigor and prestige. I often rode my bike past the entrance to the High School for American Studies, and played Little League in the bumpy Harris Field, across the street from Bronx Science’s sprawling, fenced-off campus. Yet I didn’t know one person from my neighborhood who attended either school. Instead, I watched as mostly white and Asian students unloaded from private buses and nearby trains, shuttling into both schools, and, at the end of the day, disappearing again to other boroughs or suburban counties.

So I was not at all surprised when, earlier this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio cited a statistic about eight of the city’s nine specialized public schools: of the five thousand offers of admission in 2018, only a hundred and seventy-two were given to black students and two hundred and ninety-eight to Latinos. In other words, less than a tenth of the spots in New York’s best public schools went to black or Latino students, although the school system is two-thirds black or Latino over all. “Can anyone defend this?” de Blasio asked.

The blame, in the mayor’s eyes, lies with the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the notoriously difficult exam that is administered, once a year, to middle schoolers across the city, to determine who will be accepted to these schools. (The city’s ninth specialized school, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, does not use the test.) The SHSAT, according to de Blasio, is responsible for locking out talented black and Latino public-school students who are overwhelmingly more likely to attend elementary and middle schools that fail to meet state reading and math requirements, and who lack access to the costly test prep that many students who score well on the exam undergo.

To lessen these disadvantages, de Blasio’s administration plans to expand the Discovery Program, which gives low-income students who score just below the mark needed to attend a specialized high school an opportunity to get in after completing a preparatory summer program. But he said that his ultimate goal is to convince the State Legislature to replace the SHSAT with a new admissions process that assesses candidates based on criteria like school performance and statewide-exam scores, admitting a percentage of students from each of the city’s six hundred middle schools. (Last year, half of the students admitted to specialized high schools came from just twenty-one schools.) De Blasio calls these changes a way of giving black and Latino students a “fair shot.” In a statement sent to me on Wednesday, the Department of Education said that the proposal would increase offers of admission to black and Latino students to forty-five per cent.

But the plan has come under fire from current and former students of specialized schools, and in particular from many members of the city’s Asian community, who represent sixty-two per cent of those enrolled in specialized high schools. These New Yorkers feel that the SHSAT is a fair, objective measure of academic talent, and fear that de Blasio’s proposal amounts to taking precious seats from one disadvantaged group to give to another. In a city of stark economic divisions, where the wealthy often either send their kids to the top public schools or avoid public schools altogether, families from poor and minority neighborhoods have few good options for their children’s educations; a spot at a free high school with top teachers, coveted advanced classes, and a track record of graduating students into the nation’s finest colleges and universities is a vital opportunity that only around five per cent of the city’s high schoolers will attain. Kenneth Chiu, the chairman of the New York City Asian-American Democratic Club and one of many outspoken Asian-Americans in the news media after de Blasio’s proposal, said in a recent interview that the mayor’s plan is effectively “pitting minority against minority.”

The city’s specialized public high schools weren’t always so segregated. In the nineteen-eighties, the three oldest and most prestigious specialized schools had sizable black and Latino populations. (In 1989, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant were sixty-seven, twenty-two, and sixteen per cent black and Latino, respectively; today, those numbers have fallen to fourteen per cent, nine per cent, and three per cent.) Samuel Adewumi, a Brooklyn Tech alumnus who is now a teacher at the school, recalls that when he was growing up in the Bronx, in the late seventies, the borough had well-funded gifted-and-talented programs that served as pipelines for exceptional students. By the sixth grade, Adewumi said, he and his friends had their sights set on getting into a specialized high school. Most of their preparation for the test took place in school. “My teachers already knew what needed to happen for me to be prepared and worked it into the curriculum,” he said.

Things began to change in the early nineties, when New York City eliminated many of its honors programs as “tracking” (separating students based on their abilities) fell out of favor. Then, under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, two billion dollars were cut from the city’s education system. Awilda Ruiz, who helped found the middle-school honors program that I attended, within an underperforming school in the South Bronx, and taught math in the program for nearly thirty years, said that during this period funding for test-prep in the program dried up. By the time I first became aware of the SHSAT, at the beginning of eighth grade, the only resource provided by my school was a thin packet of practice problems. I remember very little about sitting for the test that October, apart from feeling overwhelmed by the material, but I know that I wasn’t surprised or upset to learn that I didn’t score high enough to get into any specialized schools, in part because they never seemed meant for kids like me in the first place.

Pedro Noguera, one of the country’s leading scholars of urban education, believes that the dismal diversity statistics in New York’s specialized high schools prove that the SHSAT is a flawed metric, and that the criteria for admission should be expanded. “There is no college in the country that admits students strictly on the basis of a test,” he told me. “The idea of using a single test is crazy and hard to justify—especially because we know grades are often better predictors of future success than test scores.” (Studies have shown that college students who are accepted to standardized-test-optional schools without submitting SAT or ACT scores perform around as well as those who do.) Noguera, who is a distinguished professor of education at U.C.L.A., and the author of a dozen books on urban education, is an Afro-Latino native of Brooklyn. He attended public schools in the borough and on Long Island, where his family moved when he was in the third grade, and he went on to attend Brown University, even though, as he’s put it, “most students that I went to school with did not go to college.” A big part of the problem with a school like Bronx Science, he said, is that it is overwhelmingly made up of students who don’t even live in the Bronx. “Either you open up Bronx Science to more kids,” he said, “or you create more Bronx Sciences in the Bronx.”