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Derek Sandoval seemed like a good candidate for Discovery, a program created to boost the numbers of disadvantaged kids in New York City’s elite public high schools.
Derek and his parents arrived from Venezuela in the summer of 2022 with little English and no housing. They moved into a homeless shelter in midtown Manhattan, and the city assigned Derek, then a seventh grader, to a public middle school in Greenwich Village while his parents found work as a cleaner and in a car repair shop.
In his eighth grade year, Derek, then 13, set his sights on the city’s coveted specialized high schools, which admit students on the basis of a single test offered only in English. With dreams of becoming a doctor one day, he decided those schools could help secure his future.
“I saw if you were in the specialized high schools, you would have more readiness … to go to college and get a scholarship,” said Derek, who’s now 14.
With weeks to prepare and no access to paid tutors, Derek took the test. His score, a 457, was below that year’s threshold of 491 for an automatic offer but high enough to qualify for Discovery, which provides spots in specialized high schools for disadvantaged students who score close enough to the cutoff and complete summer coursework. The city determines whether kids are disadvantaged in three different ways, and Derek met all three criteria: He lived in a homeless shelter, was learning English, and his family was economically disadvantaged.
But a change made to the program six years ago rendered Derek ineligible for Discovery. Under the 2018 eligibility change, students must attend a school where at least 60% of their classmates are economically disadvantaged.
At Derek’s school, 59% of students fell into that category last year.
The change – part of a broader effort under former Mayor Bill de Blasio to boost the notoriously tiny share of Black and Latino students at the specialized high schools – was designed to ensure Discovery offers go to the “most disadvantaged” applicants, city officials have said. But cases like Derek’s raise questions about whether, in some instances, the eligibility rules may be excluding those very students.
Fewer than 55 of the nearly 16,000 students enrolled across the eight specialized high schools, or under 0.3%, lived in a homeless shelter in 2022-23, according to city data.
Just four students attending specialized high schools last year were English learners.
Derek, who learned about the Discovery program and school criteria only after he received his test results, felt frustrated and confused.
“They should qualify the conditions of the kid who’s applying for the program, not the zone where he lives, or the school where he studies,” Derek said.
Discovery Changes Have Drawn Controversy
The city’s eight specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science, enroll about 16,000 students, or 5% of the city’s high school population. But they command outsize attention because of their long track record of vaulting students into elite colleges and careers, their powerful alumni bases, and their considerable resources.
The same 1971 state law that mandated the schools admit students based on their score on a single exam also established the Discovery program. Each specialized school administers its own Discovery program and has a different test score cutoff. Students who qualify must complete a summer academy before enrolling.
For years, city officials left Discovery open to any student citywide who qualified as economically disadvantaged and scored high enough on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT. But that system led to a Discovery program with racial demographics similar to the specialized high schools overall, which are a combined 84% white and Asian American. In 2017, Discovery reached about 200 students, and fewer than 20% of offers went to Black and Latino students, though those students make up more than 60% of the school system.
In 2018, as part of a broader effort to diversify the specialized high schools, de Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza significantly expanded the size of Discovery and added the school-level poverty criteria. The program now serves nearly 800 students.
While the school poverty criteria measure has excluded some students like Derek, it has significantly increased the overall share of Discovery offers going to Black and Latino students, who are more likely than white and Asian American students to attend higher-poverty schools in the city’s segregated system. Since city officials added the school-level criteria, the share of Discovery offers to Black and Latino students rose from under 20% to 33% last year, according to city data. In addition to improving racial diversity, the changes to Discovery were designed to boost geographic and socioeconomic diversity, officials said.
Students applying to specialized schools from private and parochial middle schools, which don’t use the same school-level poverty measurements as public schools, must live in a neighborhood where at least 60% of families are below the poverty line in order to qualify for Discovery.
City officials say the school-level poverty criteria helps ensure Discovery reaches the “most disadvantaged” students. And there’s evidence that attending a high-poverty school is indeed a disadvantage in its own right, independent of a student’s individual circumstances. A 2022 Independent Budget Office analysis found that city students attending the highest-poverty schools performed worse on math and English tests than those in wealthier schools, even when they came from neighborhoods with similar poverty levels.
But the school-level poverty criteria has also drawn significant pushback, particularly from Asian American families.
Some of those families worked with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group, to file a lawsuit in 2019 arguing that the school-level poverty rule discriminates against Asian American students from low-income households.
A judge initially dismissed the suit, ruling that the plaintiffs had failed to show that the Discovery policy led to an overall decrease in Asian American enrollment at the specialized high schools. But last month, an appeals court reversed that decision, allowing the case to proceed.
The city isn’t currently considering any changes to the Discovery program criteria, said Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the Education Department. Lyle said there are hundreds of schools throughout the city “with dedicated educators and enriching programming.”
Under Mayor Eric Adams, the city hasn’t made any major efforts to reform admissions requirements at the city’s selective public schools, instead adding more screened schools in neighborhoods that historically lacked them.
Bethany Thorne, the chief of staff at Project Rousseau, an organization that supports immigrant students applying to high school, said she understands the rationale for using school poverty as a criteria for Discovery.
But Thorne argued there should be exceptions for students from groups that are severely underrepresented in the specialized high schools — including homeless students, those in foster care, and English learners — who attend schools that don’t meet the poverty criteria. She believes that the number of such students has likely grown in recent years due to an influx of migrant students placed in homeless shelters in neighborhoods like midtown Manhattan and assigned to nearby schools.
“Discovery has been game changing in so many ways,” Thorne said. “However there will always be some exceptions of students with extreme situations, whether it’s students in temporary housing or foster care who, through no choice of their own, may end up in a different environment.”
A Determined Student Faces Long Odds
Derek knew nothing about the specialized high schools or the admissions test when he began school in New York City in seventh grade. In early conversations about his high school options, he said school staffers steered him toward international schools, which specialize in supporting older students still learning English.
Instead, Derek found out about the specialized schools in the fall of his eighth grade year after he overheard classmates talking about their test prep.
He was immediately captivated. But he knew he faced long odds.
Some of his classmates had been preparing for the test for years, often with the aid of private tutors, a system Derek described as “pay to win.”
But Derek’s biggest disadvantage was that he was still learning English.
The SHSAT, unlike many of the state-mandated Regents exams that students must pass to graduate high school, is offered only in English, though English learners get glossaries with translations of key terms and extra time on the test.
A city Education Department spokesperson said translating the SHSAT to other languages would likely put the city out of compliance with the state law governing admission to the specialized high schools.
With weeks to prepare, Derek threw himself into studying, asking his school librarian for past copies of the SHSAT and looking up tutorials on YouTube. He also asked for help from Project Rousseau, which was helping his mom with pro bono legal support on her immigration case.
When his score arrived in March, he was disappointed he didn’t make the cut but proud of his effort. Thorne said it was the highest score she’d ever seen from such a recently arrived immigrant student.
“I didn’t pass, but I tried my best,” Derek said. “I was happy at the end also because I had like one week, and I wasn’t too low in score.”
Derek got into the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem, but when his parents saw a chance to move into stable housing in New Jersey over the summer, they jumped on it. Derek started his school year in New Jersey.
And while Derek understands his family’s decision, he thinks they might have made another choice if things had turned out differently in his high school application process.
“I think if I got into a specialized high school, we would have stayed in New York,” Derek said. “My mom, she cares more about my education, my future.”
