Thread by @elizashapiro

NEW: After the news broke that only 7 black students got into NYC's elite Stuyvesant High, I heard the same question over and over: how did this happen? The famed specialized schools once looked much more like the mostly black/Hispanic school system
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

The loss of black/Hispanic students has been especially dramatic over the last decade. To figure out why, @kkrebeccalai + I looked at changes in NYC's immigration patterns + loss of gifted/talented classes. One of the biggest changes was test prep.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

I interviewed a dozen black/Hispanic alum from the 70s-90s who barely prepped for the test. Now, it's rare to hear of any student who got in and didn't prep. A local prep industry has grown around that change
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

To get a feel of what it means that NYC's best high schools have lost nearly all of their black + Hispanic students, I pored over old yearbooks. What I found was remarkable. Here is Stuyvesant's black student union in 1975, then the school's largest "ethnic group"

...And here's Stuy's black student group in 2018 -- so few students that they teamed up with the Hispanic student club for their yearbook photo.

I'm so grateful that this story was edited by two black alumni of Bronx Science, who both attended the school when it had many more black students -- @dodaistewart and @aroyalbox. Here's Dodai on her own years at Bronx Sci:
nytimes.com/2019/06/03/rea…

If you are interested in this subject, I really hope you spend some time with the data to help understand why so many Twitter talking points about the schools' changing demographics aren't borne out by the facts.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…