Author: siteadmin
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Educators For Excellence: Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza on Desegregating NYC Schools
Opponents of school desegregation argued in 1977 that “either we have to lower the standards for everybody so the special nature of the schools would disappear, or we would have to allow these students to be subjected to failure.” It is eerie how today’s opponents repeat these same arguments. This argument assumes that black and…
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Exam High Schools and Academic Achievement: Evidence from New York City
Publicly funded exam schools educate many of the world’s most talented students. These schools typically contain higher achieving peers, more rigorous instruction, and additional resources compared to regular public schools. This paper uses a sharp discontinuity in the admissions process at three prominent exam schools in New York City to provide the first causal estimate…
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SHSAT Invalid: I’ve spent years studying the link between SHSAT scores and student success. The test doesn’t tell you as much as you might think.
First, that requires defining merit. Only New York City defines it as the score on a single test — other cities’ selective high schools use multiple measures, as do top colleges. There are certainly other potential criteria, such as artistic achievement or citizenship. However, when merit is defined as achievement in school, the question of…
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Discovery Expansion: Elite New York High Schools to Offer 1 in 5 Slots to Those Below Cutoff
By 2020, 20 percent of the ninth-grade seats in every specialized high school will be set aside for Discovery students, according to city education officials. Currently, only 5 percent of the 4,000 ninth-grade seats are filled through Discovery. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/discovery-program-specialized-schools-nyc.html
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Everyone needs help getting into Stuyvesant: What it really takes
Now that I mention it, I don’t think I was all that good at the test questions at the beginning. But my mother, a math teacher, had a blue shoulder bag of “manipulables”: toys, essentially, that she used to explain concepts in geometry and probability. The blue bag was always in the foyer, as if…
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Three charter-school leaders for ending single-test high school admissions: Black and Latino kids can perform at the highest levels
Using a single test to determine admission to the most elite schools is not a sound way to select students. It’s an outdated process that leads schools to miss too many talented students, a single-measure notion that the best colleges don’t even use. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t based on the middle-school curriculum…
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Specialized high schools and race
Another overview. Adds a DoE spokesperson quote. According to New York City Department of Education spokesman Will Mantell, the citywide average GPA of students in the top 7 percent of their classes is 94 out of 100, the same average GPA of students offered a spot at the elite high schools. Additionally, he said their…
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Stuyvesant Principal Eric Contreras In Favor of ‘Mixed Metrics’ Assessment Instead of Only SHSAT
Principal Eric Contreras is stepping down, but is in favor of using multiple criteria for measuring merit, as opposed to the single roughly 100 math and English multiple-choice SHSAT. That makes both the principal and valedictorian of Stuyvesant pro-reform. Though Contreras told the Journal he is in favor of “mixed metrics” to be used in…
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Questions raised about aptitude tests
Fox news interviews students and other stakeholders about the SHSAT “It’s not the right way to evaluate a student’s merit,” said Muhammad Deen, no other college uses one single test. Deen says he came just below the cutoff to get into Brooklyn tech and instead ended up attending a charter school. He and Morales support…
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Should These Tests Get a Failing Grade?
SHSAT 1, NYTimes reporters and editors 0 But the problems I encountered when taking the SHSAT online demonstrate how even one standardized test question might derail a promising student’s future. In fact, I was thrown off by the very first question on the test […] Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of…