Author: siteadmin
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Scrap the SHSAT, for diversity’s sake: Mayor de Blasio is right about selective high schools
We at the New York Urban League are taking these issues head-on by helping to educate parents and students about the SHSAT so more black and Latino students are aware of the exam. Exams are administered in the fall; check the New York City Department of Education website for test dates, and encourage students to…
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Pathways to an Elite Education Exploring Strategies to Diversify NYC’s Specialized High Schools (2015)
This brief examines students’ pathways from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school, and simulates the effects of various admissions criteria that have been proposed as alternatives to the current policy. Analyzing data from 2005 to 2013, we found that while the SHSAT is (by design) the most important factor determining who attends…
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New York City released its study of the SHSAT. Here’s why it won’t end the admissions debate.
Still, the study doesn’t address key questions about whether the SHSAT is any better at predicting student success than the alternative system de Blasio put forward. And it can’t get at the heart of the debate about the importance of diversifying the elite schools. The study uses data from every single eighth grade student who…
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SHSAT History: New York Specialized High School Admission Policies Have Changed Over the Years
A new reform movement was launched in 1996 when a report issued by the community-activist organization ACORN branded the high-stake one-shot admissions test a form of educational apartheid. They were supported by Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, but once again the campaign failed because of deeply entrenched political opposition. In 1995 the city opened a Specialized High Schools Institute (SHSI), city-run preparatory program…
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Who Finds Out About Summer Test Prep Can Depend on Race
“If if it wasn’t for having a dual-income household, I would not be able to afford it at all,” said Auressa Simmons who enrolled her daughter Anaiyah. On top of the tuition for the summer program, she and her husband pay for a van share that takes Anaiyah to her summer classes. In contrast, Melissa…
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Asian Americans should embrace reform of specialized high school admissions
Not all communities view testing in the same light, and aversion to change is natural. Still, SHSAT supporters have yet to persuasively explain away decades of social-science research. Contrary to the belief that scrapping the SHSAT would lower the quality of students, education experts such as Amy Hsin, associate professor of sociology at CUNY, have argued that grades…
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Evidence on New York City and Boston exam schools
The current admissions approach almost certainly shuts out many gifted, disadvantaged students. When we rely on parents, teachers, or students to make the decision to apply to a program for gifted students (by, for example, voluntarily signing up for a test), evidence indicates it is disadvantaged students who disproportionately get shut out. But getting rid…
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Letters: The Test That Changed Their Lives
I was one of the few kids of Caribbean descent in Stuyvesant and I knew plenty of people who deserved to be there but didn’t test well or didn’t even know about the test. The fact that my mother didn’t want me to go because she genuinely didn’t know what the specialized high school test…
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Failing The Stuyvesant Test
In bringing its federal complaint against the Specialized High Schools admissions policy, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (to which I am an unpaid advisor) is challenging both the effect of the test in diminishing opportunities for bright black and Latino youth and shining a light on the arbitrary nature of the admissions process. How…
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Does Admissions Exam for Elite High Schools Measure Up? No One Knows
Many parents and teachers have long contended that the SHSAT is an assessment of students’ test-taking skills, honed by extensive test preparation, more than their potential to succeed at the specialized schools. Pian Rockfeld, an English teacher at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, one of the smaller specialized…