State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt and Assemblyman William Colton (D-Brooklyn) are calling on parents to prepare to mobilize as the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is under attack yet again.

In a recent op-ed, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, Brooklyn Democratic Party chair, proposed to eliminate the SHSAT as the sole admission criterion for the city’s specialized high schools because standardized tests are, she wrote, racist.

Of course, standardized tests are not racist. They are objective and anonymously scored.

And as for content, most blacks at least get to take them in their native language, whereas many Asians learned English just recently and lack cultural familiarity about America — yet outperform whites and blacks in math and verbal sections.

Bichotte Hermelyn gives scant support for her claim: some personal anecdotes, some fake history, but mainly that most colleges, post-pandemic, made standardized tests optional.

But savvy families know “optional” tests are optional only for blacks and Hispanics; whites and especially Asians better take those tests and score high: It is precisely because standardized tests work that top-tier colleges want them from Asians and whites and, for their now-illegal affirmative action, not from blacks and Hispanics.

MIT notably ended its test-optional charade; it just couldn’t maintain rigorous standards anymore.

To give affirmative action life-support, meanwhile, Harvard created extra-slow courses like Math MA (most students start math with numbered courses) and Expository Studio 10 (most take Expos 20), and Princeton devised MAT 100, which, amazingly for a top-tier school, starts with high-school review.

Against Bichotte Hermelyn’s slim evidence stands a wealth of rigorous research supporting standardized testing.

To name just some: World-renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s classic New Republic article demonstrates how the SAT doesn’t just “test for wealth,” as some claim, but predicts “a vast range of intellectual, practical, and artistic accomplishments.” 

The University of California faculty’s Standardized Testing Task Force recommends, after a year-long, sober study, the school continue using standardized tests for admission. 

A Peter Arcidiacono paper shows that among black students who entered Duke University to study engineering, those with low SATs disproportionately quit for easier humanities majors while those few with high SATs completed engineering programs at similar rates as whites and Asians with similar SATs.

My own study specifically on the SHSAT confirms the significant academic superiority of students admitted with higher SHSATs over students admitted with lower SHSATs.

No surprise, then, that using the SHSAT to assemble entering classes based only on meritocratic peerage of exceptional academic abilities produced an astounding 14 Nobel Prize science winners, recipients of the Fields Medal, Abel Prize, Turing Award and other honors and many National Academy of Sciences members.

The Department of Education, in 400+ high schools and 700+ programs, couldn’t match such distinction with any other admission scheme.

Bichotte Hermelyn says she can. She vaguely proposes using a “top percentage of every school” scheme, plus grades, essays and other even more subjective criteria.

Something is immediately suspect: She wants her high schools not to operate alongside, but to replace, the specialized high schools.

The specialized schools, serving about 5% of DOE’s high-school students, are already admired worldwide; if Bichotte Hermelyn’s proposal can produce excellent schools for another 5%, why not keep both, for outstanding education to serve 10% of DOE’s students — if she is indeed interested in excellent high schools for city kids?

Or does she know her proposal is not better and needs to destroy the evidence?

Is her real agenda excellent schools for city kids or just racial politics?

Bichotte Hermelyn’s use of grades, as well as “top percentage of every school,” which relies on grades, make her proposal absurd outright because grades in DOE schools are not only incomparable and inflated but massively fraudulent.

Instead of scapegoating the SHSAT for political points, how about doing the hard work to fix schools and make grades honest again?

Bichotte Hermelyn also wants essays, which received inordinate attention after Justice John Roberts mentioned them in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Essays are even worse than grades; they are open invitations to lie.

Will DOE verify 28,000 tear-jerkers like “I wasn’t born yet when my father died of heat in a human-smuggler’s truck in Arizona. My mother told me this when I was 8 years old, after I got beaten again by white kids in school. On that day, I became a different person.”

Then there’s rampant out-and-out lying on race, which 34% of white college applicants already do!

A resounding “No” to application essays.

We can have a constructive discussion about excellent schools — but we must be honest about standardized tests, which are valid measures, versus grades, essays and “top percentage of every school,” which are not.

One hundred percent of students cannot be in the top 5%; nor do all kids want that.

For those who don’t, there must be honorable pathways, but for those who do, here’s an idea: Study harder.

The Brookings Institution found that on average, Asian students spend twice as much time doing homework as white kids and four times as much as black students.

Bichotte Hermelyn should ponder this finding before complaining again that Stuyvesant has too many Asians and not enough blacks.

Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.