One of the best high schools in the country is on the edge of Manhattan, just a few blocks from where the World Trade Center is now.

Stuyvesant.

I think that there's a feeling of, there's a sense that it's a special place.

Marigay writes about the city and the city schools for the New York Times

editorial board. It just gives a sense of importance of being elite. Four Nobel laureates have

gone to Stuyvesant. So was Attorney General Eric Holder and jazz musician, the Loneous Monk.

Before Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize, he taught English here.

I mean, you walk in and you can kind of feel the, especially the entrance, has this soaring entrance in Tribeca.

And there's a sense that people there are going places, that there's kind of competition in the air, excitement.

This competition, it's part of what's become controversial

about this school, because it's a competition that seems to have filtered out whole classes of people.

Just seven black students were admitted to Stuyvesant's incoming freshman class for next year.

That's out of nearly 900 kids. When this news broke last week,

the Times tracked down a few of the black and brown students who go to Stuyvesant. They talked

about the excitement and dread of getting into a selective school. One boy said his mother

warned him. He was going to have to put on his armor every day.

It was heartbreaking. It was devastating. I think as a adult who is biracial, who has been through similar experiences, I read that and it brought me to tears, just thinking about how lonely it

must be for these kids.

Mara still remembers what it feels like to be lonely in this way.

She says white college classmates would ask her what her SAT scores were.

And it felt like she was being asked to prove something. And I was thinking about that today with these kids,

just reading them, hearing them, almost speaking from the page, talking about not just what it's

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