Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his fellow progressives and socialists at City Hall, who often promise to change our politics and improve society, should direct some of that idealistic energy toward attacking the shameful, entrenched segregation of New York’s public schools. Specifically, they should end the use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test as the sole criteria for admission to Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Tech, and the Bronx High School of Science.

New Yorkers know a hustle when we see one, and the recent news that Stuyvesant offered admission to only three Black students this year is the latest example of a grotesquely obvious hijacking of public benefits, cynically disguised as a fair, merit-based outcome.

“We are being locked out. This is segregation,” Queens borough president (and pissed-off parent) Donovan Richards told me. “We often will say, ‘Let’s not perpetuate the same policy that we see Donald Trump doing at a federal level as he attacks diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ And yet here in New York City, three Black students out of 777 were accepted to Stuyvesant High School. Something is wrong. The laws of statistics even say something is wrong with this, and we need to fix it.”

An obvious solution would be to have educational professionals evaluate whether the SHSAT, which is not used by any other school district, is the best or only way to measure student ability. The multiple-choice test is enshrined as the sole basis for admission to Stuyvesant, Tech, and Bronx Science under a state law passed in 1971, which includes a vaguely worded requirement that a “scholastic examination” be used for admissions.

Pretending that the SHSAT is a solid, irreplaceably reliable standardized test is where the hustle starts. Defenders of the test often confuse and conflate the largely unvalidated SHSAT with the similar-sounding but entirely different, deeply researched Scholastic Aptitude Test used for college........

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