MANHATTAN — The city’s top public schools have seen a 10 percent drop in the enrollment of black students since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the school system in 2002, the New York Daily News reported.
Public records showed that there are fewer black students at all but one of the city’s eight schools that require an admissions tests for admittance. The number of black students dropped from 1,160 during the 2002-03 school year to 1,042 this year, the News said.
A former student at Brooklyn Technical High School told the News she was not surprised that the percentage of black students there dropped from 18 to 12 percent.
"There's a self-esteem factor in terms of not believing that you can succeed," Beatrice Lors, who graduated from the school in 2005 and mentors black students there, said to the News. "I think black students have it in them, they just don't know they do. ... I think there's not sufficient support."
At Bard High School and Eleanor Roosevelt High School — both in Manhattan — the percentage of black students was almost halved, the News reported.
But education department officials said that several new small schools were enrolling a large percentage of black students, citing Benjamin Banneker Academy and Bedford Academy in Brooklyn where over 80 percent of the student populations are black, according to the News.
"Graduation rates and test scores for black students have risen in the last eight years," DOE spokesman David Cantor said to the paper.
