“Chicago has a much smaller, but academically comparable, system of public magnet high schools. But the schools reflect the makeup of the city better because admission takes into account middle school grades and census tracts, not just the test score.”
The main difference really is the income based census tracking. Almost every student taking the test has straight As. Being from an upper income area mean there are schools (Walter Payton for sure) where you must get an almost perfect score ( greater than 99 percent I believe from what my friends dealing with selective enrollment this year tell me that if a kid got more than one wrong this year it knocked you out of contention for Payton) where student In the lowest income track could score about an 80 percent and get in. The issue in NYC is that there are tons of ( Asian) students from low income families just scoring very very high. Chicago’s structure is less likely to work.