SHSAT Sunset

Blog

  • Entrenched positions and pleas for change: NYC council debates school integration

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    City council members on Wednesday grilled education department officials on school segregation at a joint hearing of the Education Committee and Civil and Human Rights Committee. The sharp questions and answer session took place just weeks before the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The atmosphere was a stark departure from…

  • Big Money Enters Debate Over Race and Admissions at Stuyvesant

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    Follow the money they typically say. Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir, and Richard D. Parsons, the former chairman of Citigroup, have for decades had their hands in New York City affairs. Mr. Lauder ran a failed bid for mayor and successfully led a campaign for term limits for local elected officials. Mr. Parsons…

  • Billionaire joins push to stop de Blasio’s high school admissions test plan

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    Powerful specialized high school alumni have now promised to put MILLIONS into lobbying against replacing the embattled 114 multiple-choice exam as the sole admissions criteria for these schools. Cosmetics tycoon Ron Lauder is bankrolling a multimillion-dollar effort to stop Mayor Bill de Blasio from eliminating the admissions test to the city’s top high schools, sources told…

  • High-Stakes Standardized Testing Supporter: Eric Adams

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    Name: Eric AdamsBallotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Eric_Adams_(New_York) Phone: 718-802-3700 Brooklyn President Eric Adams now advocates for keeping the SHSAT exam as the sole admission’s criteria in New York City specialized high schools. Mr. Eric Adams is running for mayor in 2021 and is currently funding raising for this purpose. At first, Mr. Adams was AGAINST the SHSAT high-stakes…

  • Seven NYC Students Didn’t Get Seats in Elite Schools, So They Asked State for Help

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    Another attack on NYC’s specialized high school diversity efforts. This is representing attorney Claude M. Millman’s ( Bronx Science ’81 Alumni ) second legal action against the SHSAT reform that I know of. Previously he represented a coalition of anti-reform protesters in another SHSAT related matter in 2014. I believe but haven’t confirmed that this…

  • Toward a Black education agenda

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    “We have 5,000 applicants every year for these schools and NYC is the only school system that uses a single test as the only criteria for admission. All other schools in the nation have multiple measures for admission into specialized schools. They look at what the student has done all year, their GPA, their development.…

  • Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years

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    It’s important to understand the political climate before the NY State legislature decided to pass Hecht-Calandra in 1971. The New York Times does a great job filing in that context. In 2016, a proposal to send some Upper West Side children — who were zoned for a high-performing, mostly white, wealthy elementary school near their…

  • Important Technical Features of the SHSAT Exam

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    Recently @akilbello went over some very important open questions regarding the SHSAT. These remind us of how important it is for the NYC Department of Education to immediately release the SHSAT manual. Read the lengthy twitter thread here.

  • First Senate Forum on NYC Specialized High Schools

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  • AERA Position Statement on High-Stakes Testing

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    The American Educational Research Association is the foremost and most respected national educational research society. Below is their opinions on using high-stakes testing in admissions. This position statement on high-stakes testing is based on the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. The Standards represent a professional consensus concerning sound and appropriate test use in education and psychology.…