How New York?s Elite Public Schools Lost Their Black and Hispanic Students

“I couldn’t speak,” said Ms. Lennon, now 51 and a lawyer.Four years later, she graduated from Stuyvesant — then one of the city’s three specialized high schools — alongside Dianne Morales, who said it “was a diamond in the middle of the desert” for students like her.Ms. Morales, who is Puerto Rican and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, crammed for exams and completed hours of homework each night, sometimes on long commutes, alongside classmates from every corner of the city.“All of New York City was new to me,” she said, remembering that she was exposed to loft parties in SoHo and friends’ luxurious apartments near Washington Square Park’s grand marble arch. At the same time, many accelerated academic programs in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods have closed as Asian immigrants have embraced the specialized high schools as tickets out of poverty.And in a school system that remains severely racially segregated, many black and Hispanic students have been left in struggling middle schools that sometimes do not even notify them that the elite schools exist.Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to scrap the decades-old admissions test has sparked an intense backlash and a renewed fight over how to integrate the city’s deeply divided school system.Stuyvesant has had the smallest percentage of black and Hispanic students of any city high school in recent years.The mayor’s proposal would replace the exam — currently the sole means of gaining admission to the schools — with a system that offers seats to the top-performing students from every city middle school. As test prep has become all but a prerequisite over the last decade, advanced academic classes have evaporated for many black and Hispanic students.When Ademola Oyefeso saw that only a tiny number of black and Hispanic students were admitted to the specialized schools this year, he said he was “twice mad.” Mr. Oyefeso, 41, who now works in politics, graduated from Brooklyn Tech in 1995.“I was upset for those kids, because that’s not the experience I had,” he said.