Elena Kagan's Alma Mater, Hunter College High School, Loses Popular Principal Over Lack of Diversity & Controversial Test

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's alma mater, Hunter College High School for intellectually gifted loses popular principal over lack of diversity at school & over continuing outrage over controversial test.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is on the verge of making history, the high school that helped to mold her is in turmoil. Hunter College High School, a New York City public school for the intellectually gifted, has lost its third principal in five years due to a lack of diversity at the school, among the reasons Dr. Eileen Coppola cited as a reason for her resignation. This lack of diversity was the subject of a controversial graduation address the day before by Justin Hudson, one of the school’s few African-American student, according to the New York Times.

Hours after the principal’s address, a committee of Hunter High teachers that included Ms. Kagan’s brother, Irving, read aloud a notice of no confidence to the president of Hunter College, who ultimately oversees the high school, one of the most prestigious public schools in the nation.

The events fanned a long-standing disagreement between much of the high school faculty and the administration of Hunter College over the use of a single, teacher-written test for admission to the school, which has grades 7 through 12. Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work, in part to increase minority enrollment and blunt the impact of the professional test preparation undertaken by many prospective students.

Eliminating the test, which has remained essentially unchanged for decades, is not on the table, said John Rose, the dean for diversity at Hunter College. The test, he said, is an integral part of the success of the school, which has a stellar college admissions profile — about 25 percent of graduates are admitted to Ivy League schools — and outstanding alumni like Ms. Kagan and Ruby Dee.

As has happened at other prestigious city high schools that use only a test for admission, the black and Hispanic population at Hunter has fallen in recent years. In 1995, the entering seventh-grade class was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic, according to state data. This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic. Source: NY Times

These students have been labeled gifted because of a test they took. Is this fair to the other thousands of students in New York City who are just as smart, but were never able to take such a test? These students who passed the test were lucky, but it casts a racist shadow on the state of education in this country. If you are born in the right family and live in areas such as the Upper West Side, Bayside, Flushing, Bronxville, for example, then you are deemed more intelligent than a student coming from Brownsville, Harlem, the Bronx, Jamaica or Flatbush. Why are we allowing the system to tell our children that they can't succeed or be admitted the best schools because of their circumstances? Surely Hunter College High School can rise above such bigotry. How many more Elena Kagans, Thurgood Marshalls, Barack Obamas and Bill Gates do we have living in Bed-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, Mt. Vernon, Bronx and beyond?