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it's not a matter of "lowering standards". Bard, ICE, Millennium - these school don't have "lowered standards" for admissions nor for their already admitted students, but they still manage more than 4% black and Hispanic students. That's 4% total at Stuy, not 4% of each of those racial/ethnic groups.
And while I don't know what the situation is at those other schools, I can tell you now that I'm hardly the only person I know who attended a specialized science high school and either left or was basically counseled out due to a. undiagnosed invisible disability b. undiagnosed/untreated/undertreated mental health issues c. hitting the academic wall in one or more subjects and not having the experience to know how to move past it. I'm not going to say that this is how those schools keep their high academic stats (I think the fact that they stack the deck has got to be a larger part of it) but I did have a surprising number of teachers who seemed to expect self-teaching students. Has this changed? Maybe. It's now been nigh on 20 years. But I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think change is going to come to any of those schools without a lot of enforced, very public self-reflection first.
And while I don't know what the situation is at those other schools, I can tell you now that I'm hardly the only person I know who attended a specialized science high school and either left or was basically counseled out due to a. undiagnosed invisible disability b. undiagnosed/untreated/undertreated mental health issues c. hitting the academic wall in one or more subjects and not having the experience to know how to move past it. I'm not going to say that this is how those schools keep their high academic stats (I think the fact that they stack the deck has got to be a larger part of it) but I did have a surprising number of teachers who seemed to expect self-teaching students. Has this changed? Maybe. It's now been nigh on 20 years. But I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think change is going to come to any of those schools without a lot of enforced, very public self-reflection first.
