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Offers of admission by borough. Data from the Department of Education

More than 6,000 eighth- and ninth-graders got good news today: offers of admission to one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.

For the 23,000 other students who took the Specialized High School Admission Test last October, the wait to find out about what school they’ll attend this fall will continue until the end of next month. They’ll find out where they’ve been accepted at the same time as the tens of thousands of eighth graders who did not try to get into one of the city’s most elite schools.

At eight city schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, admission is based on students’ scores on the ultracompetitive Specialized High Schools Admission Test, which 29,000 eighth- and ninth-graders took last October. Admission to the ninth school, LaGuardia, depends on music or art auditions and grades.

More than 100 more students were offered spots at LaGuardia this year, 1,041 compared to 936 last year. The school is graduating a larger-than-normal class this June and so extended more offers of admission than it has in the past, according to Andrew Jacob, a Department of Education spokesman. (more…)

The Chicago Public Schools employee in charge of running a Web site for the district’s alumni recently created an iTunes mix featuring music by Bo Diddley, Kanye West, and other famous CPS grads.

And the person who started the playlist is issuing a “playful challenge” to New York and Los Angeles to come up with comparable mixes, the Chicago Tribune reports.

What would a New York City public schools iTunes mix sound like? I didn’t actually create one, but I did come up with some musicians who got their starts attending the city’s public schools:

Barbra Streisand, Erasmus Hall '59

• Tony Bennett, Art and Design
• Harry Chapin, Brooklyn Tech
• The Cleftones, Jamaica HS
• Bobby Darin, Hunter College High School
• Al Kooper, Martin van Buren HS
• Thelonious Monk, Stuyvesant
• Barbra Streisand, Erasmus Hall HS
• Suzanne Vega, LaGuardia

What big names am I missing? A Stuyvesant alum compiled a list of albums by Stuy grads on Amazon.com, but does some enterprising soul want to curate an actual playlist for download? You’ll have to do it on your own, because the closest thing the DOE has to an alumni office is the Fund for Public Schools, and all it appears to offer alums are links to a handful of individual high schools’ alumni groups.