Lastly, we must renew the push to scrap the SHSAT in favor of a multifactor admission strategy. Just two years ago, former Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter was shouted down when she called on the state to kill the SHSAT. I strongly support an admissions process that takes into account performance on state-mandated tests, class rank, academic records, extracurricular activities and perhaps even socio-economic factors.
Author: siteadmin
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URBAN AGENDA: End Apartheid in Admissions to NYC’s Elite High Schools
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He dreamed of attending Stuyvesant. But getting accommodations for his disability proved too much.
At the city’s eight specialized high schools requiring an exam as the sole basis of admission, students classified with disabilities represent a staggeringly small share of the population, much lower than the average at high schools citywide. In fact, the specialized high schools rank close to the bottom or last, according to the Education Department data from the 2022-23 school year.
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IBO Report: The Specialized High School Admissions Pipeline
While about one third of traditional public and charter school 8th grade students took the SHSAT during the 2021-2022 school year, far fewer students received offers of admission and ultimately enrolled. IBO examined admissions rates by disability status and found students with disabilities were less likely than their peers without disabilities to take the SHSAT, to receive offers of admission to a specialized high school—and to enroll.
Students with disabilities took the SHSAT three times less frequently (12.4%) than their peers without disabilities (38.3%).
The disparity between the two groups increased as students moved through the admissions pipeline. Students with disabilities received offers of admission eleven times less often (0.6%, compared with 6.7%) and they enrolled nearly twelve times less than their peers without disabilities (0.5%, compared with 5.8%).
This really should be a federal ADA lawsuit.
https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/the-specialized-high-school-admissions-pipeline-june-2024.html
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Why Are New York City Schools Still So Segregated?
“You can’t fix segregation by creating more segregated Stuyvesants, more segregated gifted-and-talented programs. Ultimately, what we’ve always advocated for is that all students in New York City deserve high-quality, diverse, and equitable schools,” Gonzales told me. “There are many policies sitting on the table, literally collecting dust, that can be implemented to decrease segregation in New York City schools.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-are-new-york-city-schools-still-so-segregated.html -
Court Allows Case Challenging Segregation in N.Y.C. Schools to Advance
“We cannot just keep on saying, ‘This problem is too big — there’s nothing we can do about it,’” Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels, of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, told a lawyer for the city at the time.
“Meanwhile, thousands and thousands and thousands of children keep on being graduated from a system that’s not teaching them,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/nyregion/nyc-schools-segregation.html
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Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?
Although colleges can no longer employ racial preferences in admissions, several legal scholars said they believe schools can still consider race in recruiting strategies. The Supreme Court, in turning away another recent legal challenge, has also signaled — at least for now — that it’s permissible for colleges to pursue diversity as an end goal so long as racial preferences aren’t the means to achieve it.
Of the scenarios we’ve shown, an expanded recruiting strategy requires the most work from colleges. But it’s also “the big overlooked gold mine here,” said Richard Sander, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who has worked on admissions strategies at the law school level.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/upshot/affirmative-action-alternatives.html -
Make education fairer for all: Specialized high schools must open up
Although I was ranked third in my middle school, I still thought the SHSAT was too biased and I lacked support and tutoring. Had I not been admitted to LaGuardia, I may not have gotten into college and began my path to success. How many others like me have slipped through the cracks?
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South Korea is cutting ‘killer questions’ from an 8-hour exam some blame for a fertility rate crisis
These notoriously difficult questions sometimes include material that isn’t covered in public school curricula, Lee said, lending an unfair advantage to students with access to private tutoring. He added that while it was “a personal choice” for parents and children to seek tutoring, many feel forced to do so due to the intense competition to do well in the exam.
The ministry “seeks to break the vicious cycle of private education that increases the burden for parents and subsequently erodes fairness in education,” Lee vowed.
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Black and Latino enrollment in NYC specialized high school integration program still lags
after 4,050 test takers received an offer based on their test scores, the city extended offers to 855 students to participate this summer in the Discovery program. (Not everyone who gets invited into the program will accept the offer or end up enrolling at a specialized high school.) Nearly 60%, or 509, of the participants in this year’s Discovery program were Asian American, according to city data. That’s even higher than the share of Asian Americans who got offers to specialized high schools based on the SHSAT, which was about 53%.
Overall, Asian American students make up about 17% of students citywide.
Meanwhile, nearly 12% of the Discovery program seats — or 99 — went to Black students, and 20%, or 172, went to Latino students. That’s higher than the overall percentage of Black and Latino students who got specialized high school offers based on the test, 3% and 6%, respectively.
It’s still not representative of the school system as a whole: Roughly 24% of the city’s students are Black across the city, and 41% are Latino.
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Stuyvesant High School Admitted 762 New Students. Only 7 Are Black.
Gaps at many of the other schools were also stark: Out of 287 offers made at Staten Island Technical High School, for example, two Black students were accepted — up from zero last year — along with seven Latino students.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/nyregion/stuyvesant-high-school-black-students.html