Author: siteadmin
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NYC Will Spend $15 Million To Increase Diversity At Elite Public Schools
In 2014, Mayor de Blasio was among those calling for change: he said that “the specialized high schools are the jewels in the crown of our school system, but they don’t reflect this city,” and said that he would create a system “of multiple measures to actually understand who are the kids with the greatest…
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City Announces New Initiatives to Increase Diversity at Specialized High Schools
In 2016 Mayor de Blasio tried a variety of approaches to get more Black and Latinx students into specialized high schools. This included tutoring and outreach costing $15M over 5 years. None of these initiatives worked in the end. One reason for this is that city tutoring would end up competing with an increasingly aggressive…
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The Big Problem With the New SAT
The SAT will remain a “norm-referenced” exam, designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the middle and with…
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Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York
The earlier test that Judge Wood ruled was discriminatory, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, was used until 2004. She said that because the minority candidates were failing that test in greater numbers, the burden was on public officials to prove the test served a valid purpose. In similar rulings, judges around the country have…
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Lawmakers, teachers union push to change elite high schools’ admission process, boost diversity
State lawmakers, city officials and the teachers union have teamed in a fresh push to increase diversity at the city’s elite public high schools by overhauling their admissions process. Critics say the current state-mandated system relying on test scores from a single exam — which is used at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and five…
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Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High Schools
A coalition of educational and civil rights groups filed a federal complaint on Thursday saying that black and Hispanic students were disproportionately excluded from New York City’s most selective high schools because of a single-test admittance policy they say is racially discriminatory. The complaint, filed with the United States Education Department, seeks to have the policy found…
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Brooklyn: Action Filed Over School Admissions
The first legal challenge against Hecht-Calandra was launched in 1974. Only 3 years after the law was passed. Since then there’s been a number of legal actions. Here’s one from 2007. A public-interest law firm in Washington filed a class-action lawsuit against the New York City Education Department yesterday, charging that a program created to…
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Admission Test’s Scoring Quirk Throws Balance Into Question
Mr. Feinman had stumbled on a little-known facet of the test: because of the complex way it is graded, a student scoring extremely high on one part of the exam has a sharp advantage over a student with high but more balanced scores in each subject. “As taxpayers and parents, we should know how the…
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3 High Schools For Students Who Excel
The Board of Education will open three selective high schools in September on campuses of the City University of New York, expanding the slots for strong students who do not make it into the Bronx High School of Science or the other two competitive science schools. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/15/nyregion/3-high-schools-for-students-who-excel.html
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PUTTING DREAMS TO THE TEST: A special report; Elite High School Is a Grueling Exam Away
A NYTimes overview of the test and experiences in 1998. The Stuyvesant test is officially called the ”Examination for the Specialized Science High Schools” — Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. The same test is given for admission to all three, and students simply list their first, second and…