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 are considered the best predictor of academic performance. “At best, the SHSAT [results] are unproven assessmentsof skills,” she says.
Moreover, unlike the SHSAT, annual statewide exams probe mastery of material actually taught in schools. Using Hsin’s measures of academic potential, modeling by the city’s Department of Education indicates that the new student body would continue to be comprised of high-performing students. Grades would average 94%, while state test scores would average 3.9 on a 4.5 scale. Fourteen percent of black and Latinx students with 4’s on state math exams get offers now. According to the Department of Education, this could rise to 32%.
Sean P. Corcoran, an associate professor of economics and education policy at New York University, and NYU research fellow E. Christine Baker-Smith ran simulations of a plan similar to de Blasio’s proposal. While critics have claimed that eliminating the SHSAT is anti-Asian, the study suggests that white and Asian American students would be affected proportionately. With only trivial changes in state exam scores, offers would increase to free-lunch-eligible students, girls, and black and Latinx students, all of whom are currently underrepresented in the specialized high schools.
Author: siteadmin
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Asian Americans should embrace reform of specialized high school admissions
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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 of the test is not the answer. Well-educated, high-income parents work the system to get their kids into these programs. The less transparent the approach (e.g., portfolios or teacher recommendations instead of a standardized test) the greater the advantage these savvy, connected parents have in winning the game.
An important step is to make the test universal, rather than one that students choose to take. In the dozen states where college admissions tests are universal (free, required, and given during school hours), many more students take the test and go on to college.[8] The democratizing effect is strongest among low-income and nonwhite students. The same dynamic holds among young children: when testing for giftedness is universal, poor, Black and Hispanic children are far more likely to end up in gifted classes.[9]A school district in Florida showed huge increases in the diversity of its gifted programs when it shifted to using a universal test, rather than recommendations from parents and teachers, to identify gifted students.
Rather than force students to take yet another test, New York could use its existing 7th– and 8th-grade tests to determine admission to the exam schools. These tests are, in principle, aligned to what is taught in the schools and so are an appropriate metric by which to judge student achievement. When so many are complaining about over-testing, why have yet another test for students to cram and sit for?
The city could go further toward diversifying the student body by admitting the top scorers at each middle school to the exam schools. Texas uses this approach to determine admission to the University of Texas flagships: the top slice (originally 10%, now lower) of students in each high school is automatically admitted to these selective colleges. This ensures that Texas’s elite colleges at least partially reflect the economic, ethnic and racial diversity of the state’s (highly segregated) school system.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/evidence-on-new-york-city-and-boston-exam-schools/
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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 was or what a specialized high school was, is indicative of the larger problem at hand — that there isn’t enough outreach done in these communities that they want to pull “diverse” students from, and that the public and elementary schools serving these communities are underfunded and woefully under-prepare students for high school, much less a specialized one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/nyregion/nyc-specialized-high-school-shsat.html
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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 peculiar, to have the state legislature determine these procedures! Normally, such technical matters are left to educators versed in psychometrics and professional judgment. Here, a 40 year-old law trumps everything we know and otherwise practice about academic merit.
That SHSAT scores are highly sensitive to test prep is beyond dispute. Rigid rank ordering creates hair’s-breadth distinctions without substance. The test has never been validated to determine its consistency with actual high school performance so the city Department of Education cannot even demonstrate a relationship between admitted students’ test results and those of others who might have been more successful meeting elite high schools’ demands. Discounting the use of middle school grades, portfolios of student work, and (after substantiated widespread cheating at Stuyvesant) character diminishes merit to a narrow gauge of tutored test-taking proficiency on a given day in an adolescent’s life.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2013/01/11/failing-the-stuyvesant-test/
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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 schools, has proctored the SHSAT. She said she could always tell who had taken prep courses. The students would draw diagrams to decipher confusing questions that left others stumped, or if they were good in math, they would start midway through the test on the math section to take advantage of a quirk in the scoring process that rewards students who score extremely high on one part of the exam rather than those with high but more balanced scores across subjects.
“The test does not assess at all how hard a student works, or the creative and independent thinking that a student would need to thrive in our high school,” Ms. Rockfeld said. “I’m always wondering what kids we’re missing by using this test.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/nyregion/shsat-new-york-city-schools.html
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To integrate specialized high schools, are gifted programs part of the problem or the solution?
“We’re working to raise the bar for all kids,” Carranza said in a statement to Chalkbeat. “We also have to think about access and barriers to entry, and that includes whether we’re creating unnecessary barriers by tracking students at the age of 4 or 5 years old based on a single test.”
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Diversify elite schools, for all: Asian-American students have to learn better lessons
As test prep for the SHSAT exam has become more widespread, diversity has plummeted. Schools like Stuyvesant have wound up in highly public cheating scandals. Without greater student-body diversity, schools like Stuyvesant may never be able to curb cheating because it becomes too commonplace; students will continue to do it until they get caught. Students who have taken test prep who may not otherwise meet the criteria for admissions to these elite schools may feel pressure to succeed at all costs.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-diversify-elite-schools-for-all-20180716-story.html
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High Stakes, but Low Validity? A Case Study of Standardized Tests and Admissions into New York City Specialized High Schools
This is a study of the admissions process at a select group of New York City public high schools. It offers the first detailed look at the admissions practices of this highly regarded and competitive group of schools, and also provides a window into the broader national debate about the use of standardized tests in school admissions. According to New York State law, admission to these schools mustbe based solely on an exam. The exam used is called the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). This study makes use of the individual test results from 2005 and 2006.Several key findings emerge:1. The SHSAT has an unusual scoring feature that is not widely known,and may give an edge to those who have access to expensive test-prep tutors. Other reasonable scoring systems could be constructed that would yield different results for many students, and there is noevidence offered to support the validity of the current system.2. Thousands of students who are not being accepted have scores that are statistically indisti nguishable from thousands who are granted admission. And these estimates are derived using the less precise, classical-test-theory-based measures of statistical uncertainty, which may understate the problem. The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) fails to provide the more accurate, item- response-theory-based estimates of the SHSAT’s standard error of measurement (SEM) near the admission cutoff scores, which would offer a clearer picture of how well the test is able to differentiate among students who score close to the admi ssion/rejection line. This omissionviolates generally-accepted testi ng standards and practices.3. Students who receive certain versions of the test may be more likely to gain admission than students who receive other versions. No evidence is offered on how accurate the statistical equating of different test versions is. The mean scaled scores vary across versions much more than would be expected given the chance distribution of ability across large random samples of students, suggesting that the scoring system may not be completely eliminating differences among test versions.4. No studies have ever been done to see if the SHSAT is subject toprediction bias across gender and ethnic groups (i.e., if SHSAT scorespredict things for different groups). -
Who Wins, and Who Loses, in the Proposed Plan for Elite Schools?
Dr. Caceres, the Bronx principal, said that half of his eighth-grade students already take advanced math and science classes, and have the ability and work ethic to thrive in a challenging school like Bronx Science. His students do not do well on the SHSAT, he said, in part because most of their families cannot afford tutoring. When the results came back this spring, some of the students were so disappointed they cried.
“Don’t you think it’s embarrassing that Bronx Science is in the Bronx and only a handful of students are from the Bronx?” he asked. “People might think we don’t have the students, but we do have the students.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/nyregion/specialized-school-exam-losers-winners.html
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VALIDITY OF HIGH-SCHOOL GRADES IN PREDICTING STUDENT SUCCESS BEYOND THE FRESHMAN YEAR: High-School Record vs. Standardized Tests as Indicators of Four-Year College Outcomes
High-school grades are often viewed as an unreliable criterion for college admissions, owing to differences in grading standards across high schools, while standardized tests are seen as methodologically rigorous, providing a more uniform and valid yardstick for assessing student ability and achievement. The present study challenges that conventional view. The study finds that high-school grade point average (HSGPA) is consistently the best predictor not only of freshman grades in college, the outcome indicator most often employed in predictive-validity studies, but of four-year college outcomes as well.
A previous study, UC and the SAT (Geiser with Studley, 2003), demonstrated that HSGPA in college-preparatory courses was the best predictor of freshman grades for a sample of almost 80,000 students admitted to the University of California. Because freshman grades provide only a short-term indicator of college performance, the present study tracked four-year college outcomes, including cumulative college grades and graduation, for the same sample in order to examine the relative contribution of high-school record and standardized tests in predicting longerterm college performance.
Key findings are: (1) HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample; (2) surprisingly, the predictive weight associated with HSGPA increases after the freshman year, accounting for a greater proportion of variance in cumulative fourth-year than first-year college grades; and (3) as anadmissions criterion, HSGPA has less adverse impact than standardized tests on disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students. The paper concludes with adiscussion of the implications of these findings for admissions policy and argues forgreater emphasis on the high-school record, and a corresponding de-emphasis on standardized tests, in college admissions.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED502858.pdf