recent actions by the Trump administration strongly suggest that attempts to increase representation of African American and Latinx students at schools with competitive admissions processes could invite investigation from the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice. It is safer just to eliminate competitive processes wherever possible.
Author: siteadmin
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CityViews: Equitable Admission to High Schools Must Start with Middle School
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Asian Test-Prep Centers Offer Parents Exactly What They Want: ‘Results’
At GPS, as with its competitors, one of the most popular courses focuses on New York City’s Specialized High School Admissions Test, an entrance requirement for eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools. (LaGuardia High, a performing-arts school, has an audition system.) Less than 20 percent of eighth graders who take the exam clear the minimum score needed to get into a specialized school, including — at the most competitive end — Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. A typical summer class for this test at GPS lasts three hours a day, every weekday, and can cost around $1,400. But Yan says virtually all his students get into a specialized high school. He knows this because he hands out Visa gift cards once results come out: $50 for Stuyvesant, $30 for Bronx Science, $20 for the others.
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Wallack Declaration – Christa McAuliffe I.S 187 vs NYC
Case 1:18-cv-11657-ER Document 50 Filed 01/17/19
Some interesting sections from the full declaration.
Christa_McAuliffe_Intermediate_v_De_Blasio_et_al__nysdce-18-11657__0050.0Notes…
Deputy Chancellor for Early Childhood Education and Student Enrollment in the New York City Department of Education (“DOE”). As such, the DOE Office of Student Enrollment, which among other things is responsible for enrollment in the Specialized High Schools, reports to me
The Chancellor, the decision-making group, and I were in no way motivated by a desire to harm Asian-American students or to limit the enrollment of Asian American students in the eight Specialized High Schools. Instead, the Chancellor, the decision making group, and I were trying to increase the ethnic, racial, geographic, and socio-economic diversity of the student bodies of those high schools, which we believe will be beneficial to all students enrolled in those schools
The Specialized High Schools have consistently provided rigorous instruction to academically gifted students in a challenging environment
Specialized high schools should not be referred to as “Gifted and Talented” or schools for the “academically gifted”. These schools do not measure or seek to measure “giftedness”.
It is my understanding that in the late 1960s, the Specialized High Schools were offering admission based upon the scores of an entrance examination and a Discovery Program that extended offers of admission to disadvantaged students who showed potential for success at the Specialized High Schools.
In 1977, New York enacted legislation, the Hecht-Calandra Act, to codify the requirement that a competitive achievement examination be the main criterion for admission to the Specialized High Schools but expressly provided for a Discovery Program that was unlimited in size to admit disadvantaged students with great potential to the Specialized High Schools.
See Laws of 1971, chap.1212, Roberts Dec. at Ex. 1 (Dkt. no. 48-1)
Enactment of the Hecht-Calandra Act did not end
debate about the
fairness of the use of a single test for admission to the Specialized High Schools. ln 1977 the federal Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether the single test as an admission standard constituted a form of discrimination against members of minority groups and females. See Marcia Chambers, U.S. Inquiry Into Bias Is Opposed At Prestigious New York Schools, N.Y. TIMES, November 7, 1971, available at
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/07/archives/us-inquiry-into-bias-is-opposed-at-prestigious-new-york-schools-us.html (last visited January 12,2019). According to that news article, Board of Education data from the 1975-1976 school year showed that 23 percent of the students then enrolled at the Specialized High Schools were African-American, 9 percent Latino, l2 percent Asian-Arnerican, and 56 percent White. The Board of Education and the Office of Civil Rights reached an agreement that did not change the admissions criteria. See Ari Goldman, On The
Right Track, N.Y. TIMES, June 77, 1978, available at
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/17/archives/on-the-right-track.html (last visited .Ianuary 12, 2019)Despite all these efforts to increase diversity, only 30 of the approximately 650 intermediate schools provided 50% of the students admitted to the Specialized High Schools, and the combined percentage of African-American and Latino students enrolled in the Specialized High Schools continued to decline
The ENI is a measure of economic need that DOE has created and which it utilizes in many contexts to measure economic disadvantage. DOE has found the ENI to be a more effective measure of economic disadvantage in many contexts than other measures of poverty. A school’s ENI estimates the percentage of students facing economic hardship and is based upon the average of the Economic Need Values (“ENV”) of the students attending the school.
The gradual expansion of the Discovery Program and the use of the current criteria are race-neutral policies that make no school assignments based upon race and are designed to more effectively identify disadvantaged students than the old criteria, because the
current criteria place an emphasis. upon schools with high ENI scores, while also seeking to advance geographic, socio-economic, racial and ethnic diversity. Students who are both from low-income families and attending schools that have students with higher economic hardship
face more disadvantages than students w1ro are from low-income families but attend schools with higher-income students. See, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/20/is-segregation-back-in-us-public-schools/integrating-rich-and-poor-matters-most.In addition, the ENI factor, more than the previously used Title I measure allows for a more specific assessment of the level of economic hardship at a school. because the ENI factor is on a scale and because the chosen threshold is 0.60 or greater, which includes approximately 50oh of the intermediate schools. (A Title I school is defined by the federal Title I statutory scheme. which provides that at least40Yo of families must be low-income for the school to be eligible for remedial education assistance through Title I. In New York City, more than 50% of the intermediate schools meet the Title I standard.) In other words, using the ENI factor and a 0.60 threshold allows DOE to more precisely target schools where the majority of students are facing economic hardship and the disadvantages that accompany it. The fact that many of the schools with an ENI of 0.60 or above have recently not sent students to the eight Specialized High Schools further speaks to the level of
disadvantage these students face. The gradual expansion of the Discovery Program is designed to increase the diversity of the Specialized High
School across these dimensions – racial, ethnic, geographic and socio-economic – in an orderly fashion, while ensuring that the scholastic achievement of the student bodies at the Specialized High Schools will remain excellent.Moreover, I note that there are many Asian-American students in the intermediate schools with ENIs of 0.60 or greater. I understand that for the class admitted in September 2018, of the students offered admission to a Specialized High School from an intermediate school with an ENI of 0.60 or greater, 70% were Asian-American, and that this constituted 1,060 Asian-American students
Indeed, it was projected that the total enrollment of
Asian-American students in the eight Specialized High Schools would decline by approximately 2.1%, from 53% to 50.9%. The total enrollment of students whose race or ethnicity was unknown to DOE would decline by approximately 1.2%, from 9% to 7.8%. And the total enrollment of White students would decline by approximately 2.5%, from 27.2% to 24.7%. -
Pro-SHSAT Activists have Spent over Quarter Million Dollars Lobbying NY Democrats
Some advocates for keeping the test have decided to invest in lobbyists. The alumni foundation for Bronx High School of Science, one of the elite high schools, signed a $96,000 contract with lobbying firm Bolton-St. John, according to public filings. Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation, which renewed a $120,000 contract with firm Yoswein, has lobbied for the test since at least September 2017, filings show.
Another group called the Scholastic Merit Fund, comprised of more advocates who want to preserve the test, hired Parkside Group LLC for $60,000 to lobby in support of the test.
Sen. Shelley Mayer, a Yonkers Democrat who will chair the Senate education committee, said she has “serious process concerns” about how de Blasio’s office handled the rollout of this plan, but she declined to comment beyond that. She deferred to newly elected Queens senator John Liu, a Democrat who will chair the New York City Senate education subcommittee, who says he acknowledges the city’s segregation problem but feels the Asian community should have been consulted.The lobby groups that have been paid to protect the SHSAT include
- The Parkside Group ( Democrat Campaign Consultant & Lobbyist )
- Bolton-St. John
- Yoswein
How are we supposed to compete against the Parkside Group, who are paid BY Democrats to help them win their seats? This is their homepage…
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The problem with high-stakes testing and women in STEM
Overall, the correlation was a loose one. Test scores predicted only 20 percent of the variation in students’ GPAs. In other words, students with the same test high scores had wildly different GPAs at school the following year. At first glance, the test doesn’t seem very good at discerning A students from B students. Seventh-grade GPAs were twice as likely to predict ninth-grade achievement than test scores.
“People say the SHSAT is objective and that grades are unreliable,” Taylor said. “Schools and teachers have different subjective grading standards and grades are all over the place. The exams were designed to be a uniform metric. It’s ironic that the exams don’t predict as well as grades.”
One might wonder if girls could be taking easier classes or not as many math and science classes once they get to high school and perhaps that is why girls are getting higher grades. But Taylor checked and he found that girls were, in fact, well-represented in math and science classes in ninth grade and doing very well in them.https://hechingerreport.org/the-problem-with-high-stakes-testing-and-women-in-stem/
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My journey shows why specialized high school admissions must change
With a sense of tragic déjà vu, reactionary forces are once again pushing back against any proposed integration of prestigious, but largely segregated, schools. This development is so predictable that it would be comical – were it not for the terrible consequences. Already, several irate New Yorkers have called my district office to voice their displeasure with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to diversify New York City’s elite specialized high schools. Many of these phone calls possess the same overt racial animus of years past, with arguments that had served the same purpose then: to maintain the broken status quo.
For a young black or Latino middle schooler living in Flatbush in the 1980s, the thought of going to one of the crown jewels of New York’s public schools seemed unimaginable. Even though I was ranked third at my middle school and enrolled in a gifted program, I did not for a moment consider taking the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test in order to apply to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or Brooklyn Tech. Left to my own young devices, I determined the SHSAT would be too difficult and too culturally biased for me to perform well on it. Instead, I opted to apply to the fourth specialized high school, LaGuardia. Although the school was the most competitive school of its kind, I based my decision in part on LaGuardia’s different application process, which entails a performance audition and tends to attract more culturally diverse applicants.
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Response: De Blasio’s attempt to reduce the number of Asian-American students in the Discovery Program is unconstitutional
Recently, Attorney “Chris
Kieser
Mr. Kieser’s comments are quoted below.New York City’s specialized high schools are the envy of the nation.
The above statement seems to be the standard opening to the SHSAT defense but is never backed by empirical data. Any results from Specialized High Schools should be statistically corrected for “Selection Bias” [1], and also the size of the student pool in New York City.
With about 1.1 Million students, NYC is the largest school district in the nation. Therefore skimming the top students in a pool that wide, even inaccurately, will result in impressive outcomes.For parents who cannot afford to send their children to private school, the specialized high schools are their only option for a top-flight secondary education.
The above quote is simply false. New York has many excellent high schools available to parents.
These parents often work long hours to give their children the best possible opportunity for a coveted seat in these desirable schools.
Yes, parents of all backgrounds work hard to get the best possible opportunity for the children. Many parents spend $2000-4000 or more in special “prep” schools for the single SHSAT exam.
And too often this figure represents 5-10% of their annual household income. It’s disappointing that NY lawmakers support a system that requires this investment.Although this parenting behavior is commendable, these prepped students are not necessarily smarter than their peers. They are though, more capable of scoring highly on a single 50-60 math question and 50-60 English multiple-choice question exam.
Prepped students are taught the quirks of the SHSAT and other test-taking strategies [2]. They’re introduced to concepts just a few months before their peers. None of this suggests merit.Unlike many private schools, the specialized high schools don’t care about your family’s income, race or whether you attended a prestigious middle school. They admit students based on an objective exam, the Specialized High School Admission Test.
Notice, Mr. Keiser does not mention gender. Because the SHSAT exam is notoriously biased against girls as well [3].
In this context “Bias” simply means that the exam is sensitive to external factors that it was not designed to measure. “Bias” does not mean “racist” or “intolerant” in this case.
Hence, if we have an exam that’s only given on Saturdays but a group of students
have a religious holiday on that day. Then we may see a bias against that group of students. We’re not arguing that the test designers wear pillowcases and burn crosses. But rather that we’ve managed to unwittingly create a system of measuring merit that does not accurately do so.Every eighth grader in New York City can sign up for the SHSAT and, with a high enough score, attend one of the city’s best schools. It’s a purely meritocratic approach to admissions.
No mention of the fact that students learn much of the material on the SHSAT in prep and not in class. Or that the quality of the prep classes varies by cost. Or that some feeder schools offer SHSAT prep, while most poor schools do not.
Meritocratic, as in based on your access to a suitable and effective SHSAT prep program [4].Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza believe that this fair and transparent approach has led to too many Asian-American students in the specialized high schools.
This is the unfortunate and dangerous tribalism fanned by Mr. Keiser. An all too common approach to dividing Americans.
Mayor de Blasio has stated publicly that that “Multiple-measures”are more accurate and should be used instead of a single-measure multiple-choice exam. Many many teaching groups and teachers unions have publicly agreed [5].
In the field of psychometric testing, there’s little argument that the Mayor’s correct on this issue.Discovery is open to rising freshmen who scored just below the SHSAT cutoff for admission and who are certified as economically disadvantaged. Students who complete the program gain admission to the high school that fall. Discovery has traditionally accounted for less than 5% of the total number of students admitted to the specialized high schools.
“Traditionally” does not factor in. The mayor has legal control of the discovery program. At times, his predecessors did not run any discovery programs.
To address this “injustice,” de Blasio and Carranza decided to limit the program to certain middle schools that score 60% or higher on the city’s “Economic Need Index,” a measure that estimates the percentage of economically disadvantaged students attending a particular school. Then they expanded Discovery to 20% of the seats at each specialized high school, effectively locking the ineligible schools out of a large portion of available spots.
There are serious issues with using Free Reduced-priced Lunches ( FRL ) as a measure of poverty [6]. FRL may be a useful shorthand, but its accuracy has been widely challenged, as the above link shows.
The NYC Department of Education has instead used a more accurate measure of poverty. The “Economic Need Index” correlates to the schools hardest hit by poverty, homelessness, lack of resources, etc. This is NOT a proxy for race.
Ineligible schools will still have access to 80% of specialized high school seats. Almost 10,000 of the 12,000 seats.But city officials calculated the school’s Economic Need Index as just 57.9%, rendering its students ineligible for the new Discovery Program. No matter how hard they work, Christa McAuliffe students cannot compete for a full one-fifth of the seats at the specialized high schools.
Christa McAuliffe would be ineligible for only 20% of SHSAT offers. Earlier, they received over 4% of total SHSAT offers [7].
Losing 20% of McAuliffe’s offers would have them earning about 170 SHSAT offers, still more than most entire school districts combined.Discovery should remain a pathway for economically disadvantaged students of all races to enter the specialized high schools.
Agreed. And that’s exactly what Mayor de Blasio has proposed. Based on a more accurate measure of poverty than FRL.
Government officials should not use race or ethnic background to decide who gets to attend the city’s best schools.
Also Agreed. And if anyone proposes this I’ll be the first to stand up and disagree with them.
[1]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system
[2]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system
[3]https://www.the74million.org/article/nyc-specialized-schools-girls-boys/
[4]https://www.amny.com/opinion/columnists/mark-chiusano/high-school-admissions-test-nyc-shsat-1.18994239
[5]https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/new-york-city-specialized-high-school-complaint/
[6]https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-promising-alternative-to-subsidized-lunch-receipt-as-a-measure-of-student-poverty/
[7]https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/06/14/where-specialized-high-school-students-come-from-and-where-they-dont/ -
Challengers of Affirmative Action Have a New Target: New York City’s Elite High Schools
This week, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative, libertarian-leaning law firm that has a history of challenging affirmative action policies, filed the first lawsuit against his admissions reform proposal, which he announced this summer.
But the suit does not take on the part of Mr. de Blasio’s proposal that has provoked the most controversy: a plan that would entirely eliminate the exam that is currently the sole means of admission into the city’s elite specialized high schools. The mayor wants to replace the test with a system that guarantees seats to top performers at each of the city’s middle schools, which would guarantee that the schools accept many more black and Hispanic students.
Instead, Pacific Legal is taking aim at the first, and more modest, phase of Mr. de Blasio’s proposal: the expansion of a program known as Discovery.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/nyregion/affirmative-action-lawsuit-nyc-high-schools.html
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America Is Sacrificing Black Education for a False Meritocracy
New York’s segregated schools have become as much a national stain as the Mississippi segregation academies for which Hyde-Smith was shamed in November. Yet because they remain so desirable, and rich with opportunity for those who attend them, their basic premise goes largely unquestioned. As is the guiding principle that sustains them — that in America, a good education is something to be hoarded rather than guaranteed to all children.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/new-york-city-school-integration.html
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High-Stakes Standardized Testing Supporter: Jeffrey Dinowitz
Name: Jeffrey Dinowitz
Assembly Link: https://nyassembly.gov/mem/Jeffrey-Dinowitz
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dinowitz
Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Jeffrey_Dinowitz
Phone: 718-796-5345Assembly-member Dinowitz claims the typical “the test is not the problem” position. He gives no solutions to “the real problem”, just that it’s not the fact we use the SHSAT exam as the SOLE measure of merit for access to Specialized High Schools.
Media: Assemblyman Dinowitz Decries Efforts to End Merit-Based Admissions in Specialized High Schools
Media: Assemblyman Tried to Block Minorities From Attending Riverdale School: Suit