New York City’s Specialized High Schools

Source for 2026: New York City Department of Education, Fall 2026 SHSAT and Discovery Summary on InfoHub (not yet on NYC Open Data). Earlier years: Specialized High Schools Admissions Overall Summary, via NYC Open Data. Series runs 2014–2026. In 2026 admissions, 795 more students were invited to the summer Discovery program, which can lead to a seat in September.

Those offers do not come evenly from across the city. In 2026 admissions, the 20 middle schools whose students received the most offers accounted for 1,602 of the 4,023 (39.8%), and only 111 public middle schools had more than five students offered a seat. To see the count for your child’s school, search SHSAT results by middle school: eighth graders, testers and offers for 735 middle schools since 2022.

Specialized high schools ranked by 2026 cutoff

The eight testing schools, ranked from the highest to the lowest score that received a 9th grade offer in 2026 admissions.

A score on this table is the end of a year of work. For the year itself, read our guide on how to prepare for the SHSAT, month by month.

Ranking the eight in MySchools, by October 30

The table above is the list your child will rank. SHSAT registration runs in MySchools until Friday, October 30, 2026, and the ranking is part of it: during registration you put the eight testing schools in your child’s order of preference. It is the one step on this page that has a deadline.

How the city uses that order. Offers are made in descending order of SHSAT score, against each student’s own list. The highest scorer receives their first choice, then the next highest, and so on; a student whose first choice is already full is considered for their second, then their third. A student is never considered for a school that is not on their list.

So rank by real preference. Putting a school lower does not improve your child’s chances anywhere else: when your child’s turn comes, the seats left at each school depend only on the students who scored higher, never on where your child placed that school. Listing a “safer” school first only means your child may be sent there instead of a school they wanted more. And a school left off the list is a school your child cannot be offered, whatever the score.

The part only a parent can do. A MySchools account is created by a parent or legal guardian, with your child’s Student ID (OSIS number) and an account creation code from a school counselor or a Family Welcome Center. The ranking is entered in that account, so it is a decision to make with your child before you submit.

The ninth school, which has no SHSAT

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts is a specialized high school, and it is the reason the count is nine rather than eight. It admits on an audition: New York City Public Schools states that LaGuardia reviews and scores each student’s audition and admits on that basis. No SHSAT score is involved, so it has no offer line in the SHSAT dataset and no row in the qualifying-score tables.

For reference, LaGuardia’s most recent average SAT score is 1195 (2024) — see the full series. It sits below the eight testing schools, which is what you would expect of a school that selects on artistic audition rather than on a mathematics and English exam.

Why one school’s number is lower than another’s

The city runs a single ordered pass. The highest scorer gets their first choice; the next highest gets theirs; this continues down the score order until a school’s seats are full, at which point the next student is considered for their second choice, then their third, and so on. A school’s published number is therefore just the score of the last student who fitted — a joint product of how many seats it has and how many children ranked it highly.

That is why Brooklyn Tech makes the most offers by a wide margin — 1,393 in 2026 — while sitting near the bottom of the score column: it is simply much larger. A smaller school with the same demand will always publish a higher number.

Two practical consequences. A student is only ever considered for schools they actually listed on their registration, so the ranking your child submits is a real decision, not a formality. And a score that would have received an offer last year is evidence about last year, nothing more — which is the whole reason we print the phrase “lowest score that received an offer last year — not a cutoff or a prediction” above the table.

The only way to read those eight numbers against your own child is to have a score of your own to put beside them. All four official DOE practice tests, online and as printable PDFs are free, and each carries the city’s own answer explanations.

Preparing for a particular school

The exam is the same for all eight, so there is no school-specific syllabus to study. What differs is the margin you are working against. These are the schools families ask us about most: