Over a five-year period, 60 percent of participants won admission to a specialized high school.  Most successful applicants were black, Latino or female, all members of underrepresented groups at these schools.

The Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation recently released a five-year review of its Middle School Science and Technology STEM Pipeline Program, which recruits participants from Brooklyn middle schools that are underrepresented at Tech.  Co-sponsored by National Grid and Brooklyn Technical High School, since the program began, 40 Percent of participants were black, 30 percent were Latino and 66 percent were female.  Of 151 students completing the program, 91 (60.2 percent) were accepted to a specialized high school.  This compares favorably to the general acceptance rate on the SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test), where only 20 percent of test takers win admission.

The program lasts two years, beginning in the summer after sixth grade and continuing until the SHSAT is taken in eighth grade.   Students attend the program’s classes during both summers and the school year. The focus is on project-based STEM learning opportunities designed to enrich the students’ educational experience as well as instilling strategies for excelling in school.  Free SHSAT test prep is also provided.  With classes taught by Tech faculty, which are held at Brooklyn Tech, and with Tech students serving as assistants, program participants not only see themselves as capable of attending a specialized high school but desire to do so because of a possible future in engineering and science.

The students attending Brooklyn Tech do just as well as those not taking the program.  Students from the first cohort have graduated and are attending Binghamton, Brown, CCNY, Cornell, Howard, Macaulay Honors, Middlebury, Northeastern, Rutgers, SUNY Buffalo, UCLA and Michigan.

“The success of our program proves that students from underrepresented communities can excel if given the right opportunity,” said Larry Cary, the President of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation.  “The demographic disparities of our specialized schools are due, not to having a test, but to the city’s abandonment of enriched learning opportunities for the masses of talented students in the schools serving the black and Latino communities,” said Cary.   Before the city abandoned its enrichment efforts, for twenty years most students at Brooklyn Tech, the city’s largest high school with 6,000 students, were black and Latino.

“This program can serve as a model for the other seven specialized high schools,” said Dr. Matthew Mandery, the Foundation’s Chief Educational Officer and a graduate and former principal of Brooklyn Tech.  “Just imagine what we could accomplish with eight successful programs creating pipelines of excellence from black and Latino communities to our specialized schools,” said Mandery.

Elizabeth Sciabarra, Executive Director of the Foundation, says the organization is dedicated to improving diversity at Tech while preserving merit as the means for selecting students.  “All the specialized high schools, like Brooklyn Tech, serve as transmission belts of opportunity for the children of working, low wage and immigrant families in our city,” said Sciabarra.   “Our pilot program points the way to the future,” she added.

Funding for the program over the past five years has come from the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation, National Grid, the NYC Department of Education, and the State of New York.

Click here to read the full STEM Report.