Brooklyn Technical High School

Overview

Admission

Admission to Brooklyn Tech is based exclusively on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), open to all eighth-grade and first-time ninth-grade New York City students. The test has math (word problems and computation) and verbal (reading comprehension and grammar) sections.

Graduation requirements

Per the New York State graduation requirements, students can earn a local diploma, a Regents diploma, or an advanced Regents diploma.

To earn a Brooklyn Tech diploma, students must meet the following requirements in addition to the Advanced Regents Diploma requirements.

Pass 2 semesters of Design & Drafting for Production

Pass 2 semesters of AP Principles of Computer Science

Pass Chemistry & Physics and their corresponding Regents exams

Pass all courses required for their specific major

A minimum of 50 hours of community service outside of the school or through specified club activities.

Participation in at least one club, sport, or school-run activity.

Reputation

Brooklyn Tech has been considered a prestigious high school in the United States. Together with Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science, it is one of the three original Specialized High Schools of New York City, operated by the New York City Department of Education, all three of which The Washington Post cited in 2006 as among the country's best magnet schools (a category the school is often placed in, though its founding predates the concept of a "magnet school", whose intended purpose was not the same). Admission is by competitive examination. As a public school, Brooklyn Tech has no tuition fee, but only students who reside in New York City are allowed to attend, as per the Hecht-Calandra Act.

Brooklyn Tech ranked 7th in New York State on the 2024 U.S. News & World Report "Best High Schools" list. In 2008, Newsweek listed it among five public high schools that were not in the magazine's 13 "Public Elite" ranking, explaining, "Newsweek's Challenge Index is designed to recognize schools that challenge average students, and not magnet or charter schools that draw only the best students in their areas. These [...] were excluded from the list of top high schools because [...] their sky-high SAT and ACT scores indicate they have few or no average students".

History

In 1918, Dr. Albert L. Colston, chair of the Math Department at Manual Training High School, recommended establishing a technical high school for Brooklyn boys. His plan envisioned a heavy concentration of math, science, and drafting courses with parallel paths leading either to college or to a technical career in industry. By 1922, Dr. Colston's concept was approved by the Board of Education, and Brooklyn Technical High School opened in a converted warehouse at 49 Flatbush Avenue Extension, with 2,400 students. This location, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, is the reason the school seal bears that bridge's image, rather than the more obvious symbol for the borough, the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn Tech would occupy one more location before settling into its site at 29 Fort Greene Place, for which the groundbreaking was held in 1930.

Early years

Atypical for American high schools, Brooklyn Tech uses a system of college-style majors. The curriculum consists of two years of general studies with a technical and engineering emphasis, followed by two years of a student-chosen major.

The curriculum remained largely unchanged until the end of Dr. Colston's 20-year term as principal in 1942. Upon his retirement, Tech was led briefly by acting principal Ralph Breiling, who was succeeded by Principal Harold Taylor in 1944. Tech's modernization would come under Principal William Pabst, who assumed stewardship in 1946 after serving as chair of the Electrical Department. Pabst created new majors and refined older ones, allowing students to select science and engineering preparatory majors including Aeronautical, Architecture, Chemical, Civil, Electrical (later including Electronics and Broadcast), Industrial Design, Mechanical, Structural, and Arts and Sciences. A general College Preparatory curriculum was added later.

Principal Pabst retired in 1964. A railroad club was established by the late Vincent Gorman, a social studies teacher, and students attended fan trips, tours of rail repair facilities and participated in the restoration of steam engine #103 and a historic rail passenger car at the former Empire State Railroad Museum. In August 1965, a ten-year-old boy named Carl Johnson drowned in the swimming pool at Brooklyn Tech while swimming with his day-camp group. The next year, more than 30 graduating Seniors in the school (including many student leaders) complained that Tech's curriculum was old and outdated. Their primary complaint was that the curriculum was geared toward the small minority of students who were not planning on attending college. In 1967, the schools of New York City got to view television in the classrooms for the first time, thanks to the 420-foot WNYE-TV tower atop Brooklyn Tech.

For the school year beginning in the last half of 1970, young women began attending; all three NYC specialized and test-required science high schools were now coeducational.

Incorporation into specialized high school system and later years

In 1972, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant High School, and High School for Performing Arts become incorporated by the New York State Legislature as specialized high schools of New York City. The act called for a uniform exam to be administered for admission to Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. The exam would become known as the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) and tested students in Math and English. With its statewide recognition, the school had to become co-educational. Previous to this, Brooklyn Tech was All Boys, and had a sister school, Bay Ridge High School which was all girls.

In 1973, Tech celebrated its 50th anniversary with a dinner-dance at the Waldorf Astoria. To further commemorate the anniversary, a monument was erected, with a time capsule beneath it, in the north courtyard. The monument has eight panels, each with a unique design representing each of Tech's eight majors at that point.

In 1983, Matt Mandery's appointment as principal made him the first Tech alumnus to hold that position. The same year, Tech received the Excellence in Education award from the U.S. Department of Education. The Alumni Association was formally created during this time, and coalitions were formed with the New York City Department of Transportation. Mandery oversaw the addition of a Bio-Medical major to the curriculum. John Tobin followed as principal in 1987, abolished the Materials Science department, and closed the seventh-floor foundry.

In the mid-1980s, a violent street gang known as the Decepticons were founded at Brooklyn Tech. As well, in 2000, the city issued a special report concerning the lack of notification to law enforcement during a string of robberies within the high school, including armed robbery with knives and stun guns.

Recent years

In March 1998, an alumni group led by Leonard Riggio, class of 1958, announced plans for a fund-raising campaign to raise $10 million to support their alma mater financially through facilities upgrades, the establishment of curriculum enhancements, faculty training, and a university-type endowment. The endowment fundraiser, the first of its kind for an American public school, received front-page attention in The New York Times and sparked a friendly competition amongst the specialized high schools, with both Bronx Science and Stuyvesant announcing their own $10 million campaigns within weeks of the Brooklyn Tech announcement. In November 2005, the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Association announced the completion of the fundraising phase of what they had termed the Campaign for Brooklyn Tech. In April 2008, the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation launched a second endowment campaign.

Sixteen alumni died in the September 11 attacks in 2001. They are Dennis Cross '59, Ronald F. Orsini '60, Joel Miller '63, Sheldon R. Kanter '66, Stephen Johnson '75, Danny Libretti '76, Dominick E. Calia '79, Dipti Patel '81, Andre Fletcher '82, Courtney W. Walcott '82, Gerard Jean Baptiste '83, Wai C. Chung '84, Paul Innella '85, Michael McDonnell '85, Thomas Tong '87, and Paul Ortiz '98.

Since 2001, Brooklyn Tech has undergone refurbishing such as the renovation of the school's William L. Mack Library entrance, located on the fifth-floor center section. As well, two computer labs were added. The school also reinstated a class devoted to the study of Shakespeare, which students can elect to take in their senior year.

Dr. Lee D. McCaskill, the appointed principal in 1992, served for 14 years, during which Tech saw the installation of more computer classrooms and the switch from the traditional mechanical drawing by hand to teaching the use of computer-aided design programs.

In 2000, the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the NYC School District wrote a report condemning Brooklyn Technical High School administrators for failing to report several armed robberies that took place in the bathrooms and stairwells.

In 2003, The New York Times published an investigative article that noted "longstanding tensions" between the faculty and Principal McCaskill, "spilled into the open in October, with news reports that several teachers accused him of repeatedly sending sexually explicit e-mail messages from his school computer to staff members." While the article praised him for his addition of music and sports programs, it mostly described the principal as autocratic, controlling the school "largely through fear and intimidation," and documented acts of personal vindictiveness toward teachers; severe censorship of the student newspaper and of assigned English texts, including the refusal to let the Pulitzer Prize-finalist novel Continental Drift by Russell Banks be used for a class; and of bureaucratic mismanagement. A follow-up column in 2004 found that there was increased teacher exodus, specifically documenting Principal McCaskill's campaign against Alice Alcala, who described as one of the city's leading Shakespeare teachers. Alcala had won Brooklyn Tech a $10,000 grant and brought in the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain for student workshops, but after Alcala had done so, McCaskill repeatedly denied her access to the auditorium and gave her low performance rankings. Shortly after, Alcala left for Manhattan's Murry Bergtraum High School, where she brought in $1,800 in grants for Shakespeare education; meanwhile, at Brooklyn Tech, there was no longer any course solely devoted to Shakespeare, according to the column.

Building and facilities

The school, built on its present site in 1932 at a cost of $6 million, is 12 stories high, and covers over half a city block. Brooklyn Technical High School is directly across the street from Fort Greene Park. Facilities at Brooklyn Tech include:

Gymnasia on the first and eighth floors, with a mezzanine running track above the larger first floor gym and a weight room in the third floor boys locker room. The eighth floor gym had a bowling alley lane and an adjacent wire-mesh enclosed rooftop sometimes used for handball, golf and for tennis practice.

25-yard swimming pool in the basement

Wood, machine, sheet metal and other specialized shops. A program involves a shop where an actual house is built and framed by students. Most have been converted into normal classrooms or computer labs, except for a few robotics shops, such as the Ike Heller Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics Center.

A foundry on the seventh floor, with a floor of molding sand used for creating sand casting molds and equipped with furnaces, kilns, ovens and ancillary equipment for metal smelting. Students made wooden patterns in pattern making, which were used to make sand molds which were cast in the foundry and machined to specification in the machine shops. It was closed in the late 1980s.

Materials testing lab, used during the basic materials science (Strength of Materials) class. Included industrial capacity Universal Testing Machine and brinell hardness tester and polishing and microscopic examination rooms. During the 1960s, students attended "inspection training shop" and were taught to use x-ray analysis to detect metal fatigue failures, use of vernier measuring instruments, micrometers, and go-no-go gauges.

Aeronautical lab, featuring a large wind tunnel, During the 1960s, a T-6 Texan U.S. Air Force surplus aircraft in the building was used for student aeronautical mechanic instruction.

Radio studio and 18,000 watt transmitter licensed by the Federal Communications Commission as WNYE (FM). The studio has not been used since the 1980s.

Transportation

The New York City Subway's Fulton Street (G train) and Lafayette Avenue (C train) stations are located nearby, as well as more BMT and IRT services at DeKalb Avenue and Atlantic Terminal, which also serves the Long Island Rail Road. Additionally, New York City Bus's B25, B26, B38 and B52 routes stop near Brooklyn Tech. Students residing more than half a mile from the school are provided student OMNY cards for public transportation on their first day of school at Brooklyn Tech, as well as the first day of each school year onward.

Academics

Brooklyn Tech uses a college-style system of majors, unusual for an American high school. Below is the list of majors at Brooklyn Tech.

Students are placed into a major during the second semester of their sophomore year after ranking all the majors in order of preference. These majors include courses, typically Advanced Placement or Project Lead the Way (PLTW) courses, that concentrate in that specific area of interest given to students during their last two years at Tech. Each major has a different formula (PI index) used to rank students according to their ranking preference of the majors and their current averages from freshman and sophomore year. A student with a higher PI index for their second preference if they did not get into their first, will get priority over another student with a lower average on the same major preference.

Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist, wrote in The New York Times that "The success of Brooklyn Tech only casts an unflattering light on every other corner of the public school bureaucracy."

Extracurricular activities

Brooklyn Tech fields 30 junior-varsity and varsity teams in the Public School Athletic League (PSAL). The school's historic team name has been the Engineers. The school colors are navy blue and white. The school's more than 100 organizations include the Brooklyn Tech Amateur Radio Club (club station call sign W2CXN), Civil Air Patrol Brooklyn Tech Cadet Squadron, chess, debate, football, wrestling, forensics (speech), hockey, mock trial, robotics, and rowing teams and clubs, and The Survey, the official school newspaper. Student media at the school also includes Tech News Network (TNN), a student-run multimedia broadcast journalism outlet associated with The Survey that was established in 2025. Tech has a literary art journal, Horizons, for those who want to express themselves through art, poetry, photography, and prose. The school's Model United Nations team (also known as TechMUN) provides students with a venue for discussing foreign affairs and also hosts a conference each year called TechMUNC. Other clubs cater to a wide range of topics such as public transportation (notably Tech Transit Association, the school's first of such clubs since 1964), anime, the Stock Market, Dance Dance Revolution, ultimate Frisbee, politics, quilting, fashion, debate (which offers Parliamentary, Public Forum, Congress and Policy), table tennis and animal rights. The cheerleading squad is named the Enginettes. In 2012, Tech students created a Junior State of America Chapter at their school. Brooklyn Tech has its own student union, to address issues on a student level. Tech has a variety of community service clubs, such as Key Club, Red Cross Club, and BETA. Tech students put on a play each fall, and a musical each spring.

There are two step teams, Lady Dragons and Organized C.H.A.O.S.

The school has several Coordinators of Student Activities (COSA).

Notable alumni

A list of notable alumni of Brooklyn Technical High School is listed below. Brooklyn Technical High School also has a unique Hall of Fame, which lists alumni who have contributed significantly to STEM. Such alumni are noted below.

In popular culture

The Brooklyn Tech Cheerleading Squad appeared in the 1988 Spike Lee film School Daze, and a video for the movie, entitled "Da Butt", was shot at Brooklyn Tech.

Lee also used the first floor gymnasium as a shooting location for Jesus Shuttlesworth's, played by Ray Allen, Sportscenter preview in He Got Game..

School interiors for the pilot episode of the 2013 series The Tomorrow People were filmed in Brooklyn Tech. (Subsequent episodes were filmed in Vancouver rather than New York City.)

Brooklyn Tech was also used to film the FOX series Gotham.

The Netflix series Grand Army is also loosely based on Brooklyn Tech.