After benediction one Sunday at my church in New York City, my mother trotted toward the other moms as they herded their children. Her hand held an envelope — its side jagged.
I tiptoed past to dodge the drawn-out small talk and niceties. But I felt a firm grip on my shoulder as my mother pulled out the letter.
“My son was chosen to receive tutoring for the Specialized High School Admissions Test because he’s a great student,” she announced to the moms, smirking.
This was news to me, too. As she turned to me, her smirk morphed into a pointed look.
“And Daniel will attend a specialized high school because he’ll be studying for the test this entire summer,” she said.
That also was news to me. My mother had somehow managed to brag and stymie what she knew would be my protests by announcing my summer plans to a crowd.
New York City’s complicated public school system has been a national spotlight because of an essay by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times, which chronicles her own experiences navigating the system as a parent. The article has provoked a passionate debate about the difficult decisions faced by parents and students like Hannah-Jones’s daughter.
But as someone who went through the New York City schools not too long ago, I disagree with one of her Hannah-Jones conclusions: that academic tracking, either within schools or within districts, is somehow damaging to students, in particular Black and Latino students.
That day, my mother had received an invitation for my participation in a free, city-run summer and afterschool tutoring program for lower-income, high-achieving 7th graders.
The test is a high-stakes exam for middle schoolers vying for admission at one of New York City’s eight specialized high schools. Admittees join a network of Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners, and captains of industry. Students can also apply to other “screened” schools, which can require a standardized test, essay, transcript, portfolio, or a combination of the four.
To Hannah-Jones, academic tracking and the existence of screened schools is the reason “Black children remain the most segregated” in a school system with “no racial majority among its student body.” She says the “systemic sorting of worthy and unworthy children is justified by saying our ‘brightest’ students deserve and demand more rigor.” To Hannah-Jones, they enforce racial segregation because white and Asian students outnumber minorities at these selective schools.
For me, my frustration at waking early to attend summer school turned into gratitude when I attended Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the specialized schools, the following fall.
The school has a different curriculum than other high schools in New York City, with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math. (I took a physics class in 9th grade instead of 12th, for example.) And students are required to “major” in subjects from Aerospace Engineering to Law and Society. I selected the latter.
The idea that these schools discriminate against Black and Latino students is far fetched. Studies have shown that advanced classes improve literacy and math, especially for Black and Hispanic high-achievers.
Wealthy white students do not represent the student bodies of these schools. First-generation Asian students, whose parents came from Bangladesh to China, make up the majority. About 60 percent of Brooklyn Tech students are economically disadvantaged, a figure that is mirrored across almost all eight merit-based schools.
The student demographics of specialized high schools conjure a difficult question: When adjusting for family income, why are Asian students out-attending other minority students? Hannah-Jones argues discrimination. But specialized high schools had a strong Black plurality from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, after the New York legislature enshrined the entrance exam into law in 1971.
When these gaps appear in academic tracking, we should not upend a vector of upward mobility. Instead, we should ask whether there are resources we could provide to low-income students to attend gifted tracks and schools, such as the free test-prep class that my mother sent me to. Integrating classrooms and ending merit-based schools because we’re uncomfortable with the demographic effect can harm educational outcomes for all students.
My mother had never considered race a barrier to an exceptional education. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn Tech was my birthright, granted I worked hard. The lesson from Hannah-Jones’s piece is that we should prepare Black students with more zeal, rather than eliminate the opportunities students such as her daughter desperately wanted.
Daniel Idfresne can be reached at daniel.idfresne@globe.com.