Hunter College High School is a public academic magnet secondary school located in the Carnegie Hill section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is administered and funded by Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and no tuition is charged. According to Hunter, its 1,200 "students represent the top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores."
History 19th century Hunter was established in 1869 as "The Female Normal and High School", a private school to prepare young women to become teachers. The original school was composed of an elementary and a high school. A kindergarten was added in 1887, and in 1888, the school was incorporated into a college.
20th and 21st centuries The high school was separated from what would become Hunter College in 1903. In 1914, both schools were named after the Female Normal School's first president, Thomas Hunter. The school was almost closed by Hunter College President Jacqueline Wexler in the early 1970s.
Hunter was an all-girls school for its first 105 years, with the official name "Hunter College High School for Intellectually Gifted Young Ladies". The prototypical Hunter girl was the subject of the song Sarah Maria Jones, who, the lyrics told, had "Hunter in her bones." In 1878, Harper's Magazine published an approving article about the then-new school: The first thing to excite our wonder and admiration was the number – there were 1,542 pupils; the second thing was the earnestness of the discipline; and the third was the suggestiveness of so many girls at work in assembly, with their own education as the primary aim, and the education of countless thousands of others as the final aim, of their toil. Girls all the way from fourteen to twenty years of age, from the farther edge of childhood to the farther limit of maidenhood; girls with every shade of complexion and degree of beauty; girls in such variety that it was amazing to contemplate the reduction of their individuality to the simple uniformity of their well-drilled movements. The catholicity and toleration crystallized in the country's Constitution prevail in the college: about two hundred of the students are Jewesses, and a black face, framed in curly African hair, may occasionally be seen. The aim of the entire course through which the Normal students pass is not so much to burden the mind with facts as it is to develop intellectual power, cultivate judgment, and enable the graduates to take trained ability into the world with them.
The school began admitting boys in 1974 as a result of a lawsuit by Hunter College Elementary School parents, a development which was described in the New York Daily News with the headline "Girlie High Gets 1st Freshboys." In January 1982, the school was featured in a New York Magazine article entitled "The Joyful Elite." Hunter was the subject of the 1992 book Hunter College Campus Schools for the Gifted: The Challenge of Equity and Excellence published by Teachers' College Press.
The high school has occupied a number of buildings throughout its history, including one at the East 68th Street campus of the college (1940–1970). For several years in the 1970s, it was housed on the 13th and 14th floors of an office building at 466 Lexington Avenue (at East 46th Street), the current location of what is now known as the Park Avenue Atrium.
Since 1977, the school has occupied the former site of the Madison Avenue Armory at East 94th Street between Park and Madison Avenues on the Upper East Side. Although most of the armory building was demolished, the armory's façade, including two empty towers, was left partly standing on Madison Avenue. The school building itself, which faces Park Avenue, was constructed to resemble the armory. Because of its unusual design, including many classrooms without windows and the rest with only narrow windows, Hunter is called "The Brick Prison." The building contains both the high school (grades 7–12) and the elementary school (K-6), which are collectively known as the Hunter College Campus Schools.
Admissions Admission to Hunter College High School is selective, only being open to seventh-grade students, with the admission process consisting of two steps. Students from the five boroughs of New York City with high scores on their fifth-grade standardized tests are eligible to take the entrance exam during their sixth-grade school year. To qualify, public school students must score in the 90th percentile or above on both the New York State reading and math tests, while private and parochial school students must score in the 90th percentile or above (in both reading and math) compared to all private school students nationwide. This results in approximately 2,500– or fewer than 4%— of New York City's 65,000 fifth graders being eligible to take the test. From those, around 182 to 185 students are offered admission, representing "the top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores."
The only other pathway to the High School is through the elementary school, to which 50 students are admitted to kindergarten after taking an IQ test and being interviewed. The kindergarten admission process is the sole entrance route to the elementary school. Approximately 45 students from Hunter College Elementary School enter the seventh-grade class each year. Starting from the 2010–2011 school year, elementary school students must demonstrate "satisfactory progress" by fifth grade in order to gain admission to the high school, whereas previously, they were guaranteed admission.
In total, an entering 7th grade class contains approximately 225 students, known as "Hunterites," about 200 of whom will graduate from the school. The total enrollment from grades 7 through 12 is approximately 1,200 students.
Concerns about admission policies
Author and alumnus Chris Hayes stated in Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy that the school's sole reliance on the one test for admissions reproduces societal inequalities – that students whose families cannot afford intensive test prep courses are less likely to earn competitive scores on the entrance exam. In recent years, underrepresentation of African-Americans among students admitted to the school, compared to their numbers in the public school system, has increased. Hayes quotes Hunter College High School's 2010 graduate Justin Hudson's commencement speech: If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford–Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.
Because of its relatively small size, and because the school is run by Hunter College rather than by the city's education department, Hunter has largely avoided being caught up in the debate over diversity at the specialized high schools in New York City. However, some alumni and students have expressed concern about the lack of diversity at the school, where only 6.3 percent of the student body is Hispanic and 2.2 percent African-American (67% of NYC public school children are black or Hispanic). On the other hand, while Asians make up 16.2% of NYC public-school children, they make up 49.4% of the student body at the school, based on New York City Department of Education data.
Academics
The Wall Street Journal ranked Hunter as the top public school in the United States and noted that it is a feeder to Ivy League and other elite colleges. Worth likewise ranked Hunter as the top public school in the country. The New York Times called Hunter "the prestigious Upper East Side school known for its Ivy League-bound students" and "the fast track to law, medicine and academia.""https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/19/nyregion/a-surprise-gift-from-martin-shkreli-who-became-a-hated-ceo.html?_r=0 Publicly available data indicate that Hunter has both the highest average SAT score and the highest average ACT score of any school in the United States, public or private, though complete data is needed to be conclusive.
All Hunter students pursue a six-year program of study. Hunter is a college preparatory high school that provides a liberal arts education. The majority of subjects are accelerated such that high school study begins in the 8th grade and state educational requirements are completed in the 11th. During the 12th grade, students take electives, have the option to attend courses at Hunter College (for transferable credit), undertake independent academic studies, and participate in internships around the city.
Students in grades 7 and 8 are required to take courses in communications and theater (a curriculum that includes drama, storytelling, and theater). Students in grades 7–9 must take both art and music, each for half a year, and then choose one to take in tenth grade. One of the four available foreign language courses (French, Latin, Mandarin, or Spanish) must be taken each year in grades 7–10, and Advanced Placement (AP) language electives are offered through the 12th grade. A year each of biology, chemistry, and physics must be completed in addition to the introductory science classes of life science and physical science in the 7th and 8th grades, respectively. During 7th and 8th grades, students must also participate in the school's science fair; the fair is optional for older students. After the introductory 7th grade social studies course, 4 semesters of global studies (8th-9th grades) and 2 semesters of American history (10th grade) are followed by 2 semesters of 20th century history (11th grade). A series of English and mathematics courses are taught from 7th through 11th grades. (The math curriculum is split into a track of "honors" and a track of "extended honors" classes for students of different strengths after 7th grade, with 8H and 8E classes based on 7th grade math class averages and the placement test taken in 7th grade). Two semesters of physical education are taught each year, including swimming in the 8th grade (held at Hunter College). In 9th grade, students are required to take a CPR course for one semester and a computer science course the other semester. Starting in their junior year, students are allowed to take a limited number of electives and AP courses. The senior year, however, is free of mandated courses except for a year of physical education electives and courses to fulfill leftover educational requirements.
Hunter's English Department incorporates reading novels and writing analytical papers beginning in the 7th grade. Students have historically graduated with strong writing and reading comprehension skills, reflected by the school's high average SAT scores in critical reading and writing, and by the number of students who have earned recognition by the Scholastic Writing Awards.
Upper-level electives and AP courses are offered by all six academic departments. AP courses include: AP Computer Science, AP Calculus AB and BC, AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics, AP European History, AP Chemistry, AP Physics C, AP Biology, AP Statistics, AP Spanish, AP French, AP Mandarin, and AP Latin (Virgil). The English Department previously offered AP English and Literature but has since replaced it with the elective Advanced Essay Writing. Other electives include: Introduction to African-American Studies, "Race, Class, and Gender", International Relations, US Constitutional Law, Classical Mythology, Photography, Astrophysics, Advanced Art History I & II, Organic Chemistry, Creative Writing, Joyce's Ulysses, Shakespeare's Comedies and Romance/Shakespeare's Tragedies and Histories, and Physiology. Hunter's AP offerings are currently being evaluated by the Faculty and Curriculum Committee. The class of 2013 took 366 AP tests (≈1.8 per student) with an average score of 4.5.