I went to one of the NYC special high schools, and it’s true that in general a lot of the students were actually from very well-off families that could have afforded to send them to private schools, and that therefore these students had the advantage of private coaching, etc. for the exams and throughout their pre-high school educational careers. But that’s just how it is.
There are certainly many in the black upper middle class now in NYC who can do the same, but I suspect that a lot of them send their children to private school as a status thing, and therefore this reduces the number of available black students. Many of the brighter Hispanic students probably attend one of the good Catholic high schools (based on my casual observation).
So that leaves a pool of less well prepared minority students (thanks to a combination of some lousy NYC public schools and parents who don’t care). However, that said, I think there are also teachers in some of NYC’s junior high schools that have large minority populations who never encourage the kids to aim for one of these schools or even to take a chance and apply. NYC schools are full of burned-out union hacks who do nothing to inspire or encourage the kids.
If they were serious about this disparity, they should look at preparation or lack thereof in the lower grades; they should also look at encouragement and information given by the teachers regarding the special high schools. Unfortunately, I think what they really want to do is lower the standards for the schools. That’s what they did to City College, once a school considered comparable to the Ivies academically and after a few years of “open enrollment,” a joke that nobody even wanted to claim as their alma mater.
There has been a study done of black male students in Prince George’s Co (bastion of the black “bourgoisie”) which showed that these black males from upper middle class two-parent families (often both parents holding higer degrees) still have lower SAT scores, higher drop-out rates, and higher crime rates than white male students from lower SES families. So the so-called “white privilege” (the alleged extra tutors, etc) is not the factor making a difference in scores or drop-out rates. But we can’t discuss other possibilities, we have to just continue to lower standards and throw money down the black hole. Kansas City SD blew literally billions of court-ordered dollars to achieve exactly nothing except, in the end, the closing of schools, and no narrowing of the “achievement gap”. Well, quite a few “administrators” got their shot at the trough, so there’s that.