Fewer Black and Latino students were offered seats at New York City’s specialized high schools for this fall, potentially deepening segregation at some of the city’s most coveted campuses.

Just 3% of offers at eight of the city’s specialized schools went to Black students, down from 4.5% last school year, according to Education Department data released Thursday. Meanwhile, 6.9% of offers went to Latino students compared with 7.6% a year ago. Across the city’s public schools, nearly two-thirds of students are Black or Latino.

Asian American students received nearly 54% of the offers, a slight increase. The proportion of offers that went to white students, about 26%, was flat. Nearly 17% of public school students are Asian American and about 15% are white.

Specialized high schools command outsized attention because they are widely considered to be some of the most prestigious public schools in the country, even as they only enroll about 5% of the city’s public high school students. They also contribute to the city’s status as one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.

Admission to eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools depends entirely on a student’s score on a single standardized exam. Five of the eight specialized schools that rely on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT, admitted 10 or fewer Black students this year. Out of 781 offers to Stuyvesant High School, the most selective of the specialized schools, just 8 went to Black students.

Overall, nearly 26,000 eighth graders took the SHSAT, and 4,000 were offered a seat based on their score, according to the data.

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately comment on the decline in offers to Black and Latino students. Nor did they address questions about the timing of the release.

For at least a decade, the Education Department has released the high school admissions statistics by mid-June, raising questions about whether officials delayed the release deeper into the summer to draw less attention to the issue. After Chalkbeat published a story on Thursday about the delay, officials released the data.

Read the full article about segregation at specialized high schools by Alex Zimmerman at Chalkbeat.