SHSAT Sunset

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  • Elite New York High School Grads Ask, Where’d the $4 Million Go?

    Yet alumni have struggled to raise an endowment like those at other top U.S. schools. The closest was an effort begun in 1999, called Campaign for Stuyvesant, that over the years managed to raise about $4.5 million, on its way to a $12 million goal.

    It never made it. Today, all that’s left is about $330,000. Alumni, including members of a group called Concerned Stuyvesant Alumni, want to know where it went.

     https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/elite-new-york-high-school-grads-ask-where-d-the-4-million-go

  • 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 potential—and they come from every zip code, every neighborhood—and that’s what our specialized schools will look like in the future.” Today, de Blasio joined the Department of Education in championing its new, test-focused initiatives, none of which expand admissions criteria, and called them “an important step forward” in diversifying the schools.

    https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-will-spend-15-million-to-increase-diversity-at-elite-public-schools

  • 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 private tutoring industry. NYC’s DREAM tutoring claimed a 10% success rate, but so did the larger tutoring services with thousands of students.

    “In my district, many parents pay top dollar for test prep programs, an option lower income families do not always have. Each child has a right to be prepared for this exam regardless of socio-economic status, race or ethnicity,”

    Senator Toby Ann Stavisky

    The problem with the senator’s logic is that NYC’s DREAM only caters for a few hundred of the city’s 30,000 students who take the exam. But even then it costs millions.

    “Our specialized high schools need to better reflect the diversity of our neighborhoods and our City while maintaining their high standards, and this strong package of reforms is an important step forward,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “This is a matter of fairness – we have to ensure that high-performing students who are black and Latino, and who come from low-income neighborhoods, have the same opportunities to enroll and thrive in these schools.” 

    “These new initiatives are an important step towards more diverse specialized high schools,” said Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. “This is about equity and excellence for all of our high-performing middle school students, regardless of their zip code or background. We’re going to increase diversity without lowering any standards; to the contrary, greater diversity will help all our students succeed.” 

    https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/news/announcements/contentdetails/2016/06/09/city-announces-new-initiatives-to-increase-diversity-at-specialized-high-schools

  • 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 sharply descending numbers at the top and bottom. Test designers accomplish this, among other ways, by using plausible-sounding “distractors” to make multiple-choice items more difficult, requiring students to respond to a large number of items in a short space of time, and by dropping questions that too many students can answer correctly.

    “Criterion-referenced” tests, on the other hand, measure how much students know about a given subject. Performance is not assessed in relation to how others perform but in relation to fixed academic standards. Assuming they have mastered the material, it is possible for a large proportion, even a majority, of examinees to score well; this is not possible on a norm-referenced test. K-12 schools increasingly employ criterion-referenced tests for this reason. 

    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/the-big-problem-with-the-new-sat.html

  • 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 thrown out written exams for firefighters and police officers, ruling they were not relevant to the tasks they would perform.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/nyregion/questions-of-bias-are-raised-about-a-teachers-exam-in-new-york.html

    https://gothamist.com/news/city-pay-largest-ever-settlement-nyc-teachers-affected-discriminatory-certification-tests

  • 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 other specialized schools — is outdated and discriminates against black and Hispanic kids.

    Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew joined lawmakers at the union headquarters in downtown Manhattan Monday to unveil a bill that would allow the city to also consider grade point average and other factors.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/pols-shake-hs-admissions-boost-diversity-article-1.1823183

  • 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 in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to change admissions procedures “to something that is nondiscriminatory and fair to all students,” said Damon T. Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint.

    At issue is the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is the sole criterion for admission to eight specialized schools that, even in the view of city officials, have been troubled by racial demographics that are out of balance.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/nyregion/specialized-high-school-admissions-test-is-racially-discriminatory-complaint-says.html

  • 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 increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the city’s elite specialized high schools violates the Constitution by excluding whites and Asians. The law firm, the Center for Individual Rights, filed the suit in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on behalf of three Chinese-American parents whose children were denied admission to the Specialized High School Institute, which prepares students for the test determining admission to schools like Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science. 

    https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/nyregion/20mbrfs-admissions.html

    SHSI focused on city schools in which students from low-income households, most of whom were Black and Latinx, were overrepresented. Accepted students completed an 18-month academic development program, preparing them for one single exam: the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

    https://www.the74million.org/article/brizard-4-ways-to-think-about-the-systems-that-are-keeping-new-york-citys-specialized-high-schools-segregated/

  • 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 test is graded — not necessarily with an eye to changing it — but certainly as a matter of public knowledge,” said Mr. Feinman, who lives on the Upper East Side. “It shouldn’t be hidden or disclosed only to the select few who have the advantage of test prep.”


    Even some veteran test-prep tutors were surprised.
    Barry Feldman, an owner of GRF Test Preparation, which tutored Mr. Feinman’s daughter, said that in 24 years in the business, he has never focused on the scoring method.


    “I just really never thought about it before,” said Mr. Feldman, a retired junior high school math teacher and a 1964 graduate of Stuyvesant. “What are the reasons? Why do they do it how they do it? I don’t know. I really don’t know, and I never really thought about questioning it.”


    Officials of American Guidance Service, a private company in Minnesota, said the test had been designed to the city’s specifications. Principals of the six specialized schools are not involved in developing or grading the test, much as colleges are not involved in administering the SAT.


    In essence, the scoring system rewards students with more points per question as they get closer to a perfect score on either math or verbal.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/12/nyregion/admission-tests-scoring-quirk-throws-balance-into-question.html

  • 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