Our findings also lead us to some larger conclusions about flaws inherent in New York City’s entire system of choice in public high school admissions. Because under this system, there is no simple, direct relationship between an individual applicant’s academic strengths and the caliber of the high school she or he ultimately attends. Myriad other factors intervene, including: exposure to and awareness of the application process and the range of high-quality school options available; quality of middle school counseling; ability or willingness to undertake long inter-borough commutes to school; and others.
Success on the SHSAT and in the high school choice process often go hand-in-hand, because both require resources above and beyond academic ability alone. For evidence, one need only look at the expensive “arms race” of prep tutoring and courses for the SHSAT that many families take part in every year.
Author: siteadmin
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The Effects – Intended and Not – Of Ending the Specialized High School Test
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Back to School Reform
The allure of testing lies in its apparent neutrality—its democratic indifference to a student’s background and wealth. But this is not how the current system functions. Success correlates closely to socioeconomic advantages and access to test preparation. Pricey services offer tutoring to ever younger children. (There is a niche industry of consultants who help two-year-olds ace their preschool admissions assessments.) Yet many defenders of testing believe that more subjective forms of evaluation present their own unfairness.
Outside the neutral language of policy reports, the issue of testing is debated in a context of winners and losers, of model minorities and problematic ones. A less primitive view sees the conflict as being between different groups fighting for a system in which their children are the least likely to be hampered by discrimination. Because discrimination functions in different ways across lines of race and ethnicity, the issue is not simply the fairness of testing; it’s that people on either side of the question can reasonably describe their position as an attempt to fight against discrimination
The success of Asian-American students, some from low-income families, doesn’t imply that the system is fair; it suggests that unfairness can be mitigated by extraordinary effort. There is a vast difference between an equal system and one in which it is possible to succeed.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/back-to-school-reform
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The burden on elite high schools: They must change their cultures to welcome students of all backgrounds
Over the course of our meetings, many students lamented the lack of diversity at our schools, specifically with regard to black and Latino students. They shared that the lack of representation at their schools created environments that bred racism and other forms of prejudice both inside and outside the classroom.
This atmosphere does not foster the inclusivity and diversity that all New York City public high schools ought to embody, and inhibits underrepresented students from experiencing their education as equals. While the paucity of black and Latino and Latina students at the specialized schools is certainly reflective of larger, systemic flaws in equitable access to New York’s education system, their absence also prevents white and Asian students at those schools from receiving an education that lives up to the spirit of Brown vs. Board of Education. -
Liu: No quick fix to specialized high schools entrance exam
Senator John Liu showed his hand and hinted that he plans to kill any SHSAT reform by languishing the decision in committee over the next few years.
State Sen. John Liu said at City & State’s Education Summit on Thursday that he doesn’t expect any major changes to come out of Albany for at least several years as lawmakers and stakeholders figure out the best way to address racial disparities at the city’s specialized schools. The Queens lawmaker said that he does not yet know the best path forward, adding that he and his colleagues in the state Legislature don’t want to act hastily in response to results from the Specialized High Schools Admission Test.
For Senator Liu, this continues a pattern of not addressing specific issues around testing and admissions but rather simply declaring other proposals won’t work.
Senator Liu has yet to propose a single proposal of his own. A common practice among SHSAT supporters, as their goal is to protect the status quo as is.
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The WAVE: School Scope – Those SHSAT Tests, Part 1
This opinion piece dates SHSAT test prep to the 1950s. Of course, the entrance exam was not called “SHSAT” back then, and there was one exam per school.
When I was an 8th grade student in the 1957-58 school year at George Gershwin JHS, a jewel of a school recently opened on Linden Blvd in East NY section of Brooklyn, male students were offered an opportunity to take an after school class in prepping for the test for Brooklyn Tech, at the time the only specialized high school that went from 9th-12th grade. The others, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science began in the 10th grade and for those schools the test was taken in the 9th grade.
Norm ScottNow I should point out that at Jefferson I was among an elite group of about 200 students who were in “honor school”, a sub-school of college bound, and over the next three years we received what I considered a college-level education. But Jefferson also wanted to compete for elite status and considered gaining a NY State scholarship a measure of success. Thus we were pulled from gym cycles over the next year and a half to prep us for that test.
Norm Scott
The point is that schools were offering test prep as far back as the 50s but it was free to all students who were deemed as having potential.https://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-wave-school-scope-those-shsat-tests.html
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NEW YORK’S SPECIALIZED HIGH SCHOOLS NEED MORE STUDENTS LIKE OBRIAN
Obrian was devastated when he found out he didn’t score high enough on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) to attend Brooklyn Technical High School, one of New York City’s most selective high schools. Unlike many of the students who gain admission to the city’s specialized high schools, his family didn’t have the resources to spend thousands of dollars on test prep.
His score on the SHSAT put him just below the cutoff mark for Brooklyn Technical High School. But because of the Discovery Program – which allows students from low-income communities who score just below the standardized test cutoff to earn admission to the specialized high schools – Obrian was able to attend a summer program and then start at Brooklyn Tech his freshman year.
Now, he’s thriving. He has a sky-high GPA and he helped his school win the city championship in track and field.
It’s clear Obrian is exactly the kind of student who excels when given the opportunity to attend a specialized high school.https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-yorks-specialized-high-schools-need-more-students-obrian
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Elite or elitist? Lessons for colleges from selective high schools
An in-depth report on the state of specialized high schools across the nation.
NYC specialized high schools are the only “one-exam-only” admissions in the nation reformers might do better instead to look to Chicago’s use of area-based geographical tiers. One advantage of this system is that it retains the high-stakes entrance examination but takes inequality into account by having students with similar backgrounds compete against each other rather than pooling students from all backgrounds into one group.
The most radical option is for cities to simply abolish their selective high schools. The evidence for their impact on long-run outcomes is mixed. A number of studies have compared long-run outcomes for students who scored just below and just above the passing score (i.e. with a regression discontinuity design). Reviewing evidence from studies of the New York and Boston schools, Dynarski concludes that there is a “precisely zero effect of the exam schools on college attendance, college selectivity, and college graduation.” A 2018 study of the Chicago schools by Barrow, Sartain and de la Torre comes to similar conclusions concerning college enrollment rates. It is possible that students who scored much higher do reap benefits (or that those who scored considerably lower could do so if admitted). The overall picture however is that students from those schools do well, but many of them were going to do well anyway. Perhaps the energy, political capital, and money going to these schools could be better spent elsewhere.
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NYCLU: Paving the Way
Standardized test scores aren’t a good predictor of whether a student will succeed.
No one knows that more than Obrian, an A-student, track star, and activist at Brooklyn Tech. -
The Myth That Busing Failed
“The school bus, treasured when it was serving as a tool of segregation, became reviled only when it transformed into a tool of integration,” Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in a news analysis.
Podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/podcasts/the-daily/busing-school-segregation.html