Some students get extra time to take elite high school exam

(The Upshot): NEW YORK — Every fall, tens of thousands of New York City students sit for a high-pressure exam that determines their admission into the city’s most selective public high schools. Those students have three hours, a race against the clock to answer questions on subjects like trigonometry and to analyze reading passages.

But a few hundred students have double the time to take the exam, and there appears to be a racial disparity in who is receiving this special accommodation, which is covered under a federal designation known as a 504. The designation is meant to give students with mental and physical disabilities — whether attention deficit disorder or a broken arm — a fair shot in public education.

White students in New York City are 10 times as likely as Asian students to have a 504 designation that allows extra time on the specialized high school entrance exams. White students are also twice as likely as their black and Hispanic peers to have the designation. Students in poverty are much less likely to have a 504 for extra time.

And students who have this extra-time provision are about twice as likely to receive offers from specialized high schools, according to a New York Times analysis of newly released city data.

Last year, there were just 24 black students overall at Stuyvesant High School, which has more than 3,300 students and is the most selective of the specialized schools. At the same time, 63 white students with a 504 extra-time allowance received offers to a specialized high school.

The number of students with the designation is quite small compared with the total number of test-takers: 323 students had the extra-time allowance last year, while more than 27,000 students took the exam.

But the data underscores what testing experts have long emphasized: Income, race and privilege can influence testing in the nation’s largest school system, particularly when those factors collide with a high-stakes exam.

The data could further complicate the debate over the future of the specialized school entrance exam, which has for years produced mostly Asian and white student bodies that do not reflect the city’s mostly black and Hispanic school system. This year, only seven black students received an offer to Stuyvesant, out of 895 seats.

The question of how to enroll more black and Hispanic students in the city’s elite high schools has set off a fraught local fight, at times divided across racial lines. Some Asian, black and Hispanic families have accused one another of racism and of trying to block their children’s access to a specialized school, which many believe is a golden ticket.

White students make up about 24% of the elite schools — larger than their 15% share of the public school system — but have not played a large role in that clash. Whites have made up about a 42% share of those using a 504 in recent years.

Students with 504s make up a small percentage of all students who took the specialized school exam with more time. Most students granted extra time are served under laws for students with severe disabilities. Using extra time, students with 504s — and therefore less severe disabilities — performed better than the median test-taker, while students with more severe disabilities performed worse.

It sometimes falls to families to request 504s, which are typically granted after an often expensive consultation with a professional.

Doug Cohen, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said the city had “clear protocols” to review and approve testing accommodations for the specialized high school exam. There is no evidence that students are inventing or exaggerating disabilities in order to acquire extra time, he said.

Many students who receive extra time on the specialized high school exam attend some of the city’s most prestigious public middle schools.

One school, Booker T. Washington on the Upper West Side, had 55 students over the past three years with additional time on the exam under a 504. About two-thirds of those students received an offer to a specialized school. More than half the students at Booker T., which has long been a feeder into the specialized schools, are white.

Over the past three years, 102 students in District 3 — which covers mostly white and middle-class neighborhoods in Manhattan — had extra time under a 504 allowance, and 59 were accepted to a specialized high school.

Students in District 3 were nearly five times as likely as students in the rest of the city’s 31 school districts to have this provision.

By comparison, District 7, which includes mostly Hispanic and low-income neighborhoods in the South Bronx, had five or fewer students who had extra time under a 504 over the past three years.

As the number of students using 504s has ballooned nationally over the past decade, experts have questioned whether the practice has become another way for parents to game standardized tests, including the SAT and ACT.

The recent college admissions bribery scandal has raised fresh questions about how white and wealthy students have maintained their access to prized colleges and universities — some say at the expense of equally talented but less privileged Asian, black and Hispanic students. The city data indicates that the same patterns that have made 504 designations controversial nationally apply in the often cutthroat world of New York’s high school admissions.

The specialized high school exam is the sole means of admission into New York’s elite public schools.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.