The public schools in New York State are the most segregated in the country, according to a 2014 study from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. That’s largely driven by New York City.
The selective high schools are by no means the only places where inequality exists in the system, but they are the most visible, the easiest apple to pick. The black enrollment at Stuyvesant peaked in 1975, according to state records highlighted in a 2012 profile in the Times, when there were 303 black students out of 2,536 total.
Author: siteadmin
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New York City High Schools’ Endless Segregation Problem
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What NYC should do with the Specialized High School Admissions Test
Now, we’re turning to the experts. In this week’s “Ask the Experts” feature, we reached out to Syed Ali, a professor of sociology at Long Island University-Brooklyn; Zakiyah Ansari, the advocacy director for the Alliance for Quality Education; David Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College; and Soo Kim, president of the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association.
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Schools Chancellor Says SHSAT Results Show the Opportunity Gap Facing Black and Latino Students
Manhattan Councilwoman Margaret Chin called for reevaluating the admissions policy but said the city has an obligation to showcase other great high schools and improve lagging schools.
“We have to make sure all our high schools also have specialized programs in there that attract students. They’ll stay in the neighborhood, don’t have to travel acouple hours to go to a high school,” Chin said.
Advocates of the chancellor’s plan say changing the admissions policy for specialized high schools would also help diversify some city neighborhoods because families would want to give their children the best shot at being in the top percent of theireighth grade class. -
I’m an Asian American graduate of Brooklyn Tech. Please don’t use me as a wedge in your education lawsuit
The lawsuit, brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation ostensibly to contest alleged discrimination against Asian American students, targets changes to the city’s expanding Discovery Program. It allows students attending low-income middle schools to receive an offer to one of the city’s elite high schools if they score just below the admissions cut-off on the Specialized High School Admissions Test.
Fortunately, a district judge ruled Feb. 25 that the preliminary injunction the plaintiffs sought to halt the plan was not warranted. But the Pacific Legal Foundation appears prepared to take its case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — whose composition and majority have recently shifted rightward, threatening the civil rights that many have fought so hard to achieve.
To me, this suit is as an affront to who I am as a lawyer, as an Asian American, and as a graduate of New York City’s public school system. It’s also one to which I feel a strange personal connection. -
Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots
Lawmakers considering Mr. de Blasio’s proposal have faced a backlash from the specialized schools’ alumni organizations and from Asian-American groups who believe discarding the test would water down the schools’ rigorous academics and discriminate against the mostly low-income Asian students who make up the majority of the schools’ student bodies. (At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of current students are Asian-American.) The push to get rid of the test, which requires approval from the State Legislature, appears all but dead.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/nyregion/black-students-nyc-high-schools.html
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How private tutoring makes an unequal education system even less fair
Studies show that almost every student can improve their grades with private tutoring. But when only the rich can afford it — in New York the average cost of private tutoring is $64 an hour, though rates can easily approach and even exceed $100 — it’s no surprise their children are overrepresented in elite high schools and colleges, at the expense of everyone else.
In fact, in New York there is a dedicated tutoring industry just for the Specialized High School Admissions Test, the now-infamous admissions test that is the sole criteria for admission to elite — and wildly racially imbalanced — high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Prep programs for those schools, which are considered a feeder to the Ivy League and top liberal arts colleges, can cost thousands of dollars. -
A Summer of Test Prep Means More Asians in the City’s Elite Schools
Those involved in the tutoring business believe the deck is stacked because too many smart kids don’t even know about the importance of test prep.
While certain Asian immigrants have created a pipeline of tutoring centers, educators say black and Latino students often don’t have the same networks in their communities.https://www.wnyc.org/story/certain-immigrants-tutoring-key-specialized-high-schools-test/
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Op-Ed: NYC High School Admissions Creates Winners And Losers. I Lost.
You would never guess that Victory Collegiate is located in one of the most diverse and wealthy cities in the world: my school was 90 percent black, 7 percent Hispanic, and had a few Arab and South Asian kids. Most of us qualified for free lunch.
One day, in my AP Biology class, a bullet flew into the classroom, lodging itself in the whiteboard, missing our heads by inches. The teacher was so traumatized that she never returned. But we, the students, were back in the same room two days later. A rotation of substitutes, unqualified to teach the course, monitored us the rest of the year. None of us passed the end-of-year exam.
As the son of two poor immigrants, neither of whom are fluent in English, I already had obstacles in my path, but by that point, I knew that my educational environment had become one, too.
My story is not unique. New York City has at least 124 small high schools where fewer than 1 in 5 students enters the school having passed the 8th grade state English exam. At Victory Collegiate, that number was 1 in 20. At some schools the number is zero. These schools are, on average, 92% black and Hispanic.http://gothamist.com/2019/03/19/op-ed_nyc_high_school_admissions.php
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Demolish the meritocracy myth: No, the specialized high school exam is not a fair admissions screen; it’s discriminatory
And for others, paid school consultants, tutors and prep courses, some starting as early as kindergarten, give students with means, or those with parents in the know, a leg up. That includes poor Asian families who spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars prepping for the exam.
The same can be said for gifted and talented admissions, where disparities are equally abysmal. Or SAT and ACT results. There is an entire economy set up around test prep for a reason.
We have a system that is profoundly unfair — against the poor, against immigrants, against black and brown students, and against Asian Americans — and we call it a meritocracy. -
High-Stakes Standardized Testing Supporter: John Liu
Name: John Liu
Senate Link: https://www.nysenate.gov/senators/john-c-liu
Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/John_Liu
Phone: 718-765-6675Senator John Liu is a supporter of keeping the SHSAT exam as the SOLE measure of merit for
ad missions to Specialized High Schools.Senator Liu leads the Democrat Senate NYC Education committee. Which means he gets to decide what NYC education bills are brought to the Senate floor.
So we can pretty much confirm at this point that the mayor’s SHSAT proposal is dead as long as Senator Liu leads this committee.
Here’s Senator Liu arguing for keeping the SHSAT.
There are many inaccurate statements in this conversation. But the strangest part of all of this is that Senator Liu was at one point very pro-SHSAT reform.
We can even use the old John Liu to refute the new one…
Wow, what a difference 5 years makes!
Finally, here’s Senator Liu’s statement of support of the NAACP’s federal complaint.
Liu-Statement-FinalAs a past Liu supporter, his 180-degree turn on high-stakes testing is very disappointing. Maybe because it’s clear Senator Liu understands using a single
3 hour multiple-choice test is wrong, as he says in his previous interview.Here are a few quotes from Senator Liu’s Huffington Post article which go directly against his current position.
The Specialized High schools are the equivalent of New York City’s Ivy League. Admittance to these schools is a ticket to success. They bring an almost certain guarantee of high school graduation, in a city where the graduation rate is 65 percent, and an almost certain guarantee of college acceptance. More than a quarter of the graduates of Stuyvesant and Bronx Science go on to university in the real Ivy Leagues, at Harvard, and Yale, and Brown, or other top tier colleges.
John Liu, May 30th 2012Many educational experts have long decried this admissions method and some good ideas have been proposed to change it.
John Liu, May 30th 2012
Assemblyman Karim Camara, from the 43rd Assembly District in Brooklyn, and State Senator Adriano Espaillat, of the 31st Senate District representing parts of the Upper West Side and the Bronx, are sponsoring legislation on the state level to change the admissions criteria for the Specialized High Schools to include grade point averages and other factors, such as interviews, personal statements, and portfolios, as well as an entrance exam. Their model is, in fact, similar to the same broad admissions process used by most colleges and universities in the U.S.https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-c-liu/nyc-specialized-high-schools_b_1391712.html
2019-04-03: Senator John Liu of Queens now calls the Mayor’s race-neutral SHSAT reform plan “racist”:
http://video.sinovision.net/?id=49614