SHSAT Sunset

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  • It’s the peer effect, stupid: What makes schools like Stuyvesant great? It’s not test-based admission, but a broader culture of excellence

    We’ve conducted more than 70 interviews (and counting) with adult alumni of Stuyvesant High School who graduated between 1946 and 2013 for a book we’re working on called “The Peer Effect.” (We both graduated from Stuyvesant in the 1980s.) Many of the people we’ve interviewed grew up poor, and/or were black, Latino or Asian. Some of the graduates we interviewed from earlier years were from poor or working-class Jewish families. We also interviewed a lot of former students who were brought up in white, middle-class families.

    Stuyvesant is a mobility machine — students that come in poor usually are upwardly mobile. This includes students admitted under Discovery, or who barely made the cut, and even those who had “poor” grades (including those who comfortably passed the cutoff scores). The vast majority of graduates went on to good colleges and to professional careers. It’s not surprising, then, that there’s so much agita over any changes to the admission policy, even though it will only affect around 1000 seats across the schools per class.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-its-the-peer-effect-stupid-20190215-story.html

  • Chancellor Carranza’s Gifted & Talented Remarks at the CEC4 Townhall

    Recently at the district 4 education townhall, Chancellor Carranza was asked a fairly complex question on Gifted and Talented programs.

    Parents wanted to know what your vision for G&T education is? Can you commit that G&T education will always be a part of the DOE? What are your positions in terms of access to G&T education both at the kindergarten level, changing the entry points for that, and also possibly changing the SHSAT and the access to the specialized high schools?

    How do we get and replicate the diversity that exists at this G&T school [ i.e., TAG citywide gifted and talented school] that does amazing work for an incredibly diverse population of learners? How do we replicate that in other schools and get more schools like TAG?

    The Chancellor gave an amazing impromptu answer. Which I believe does a superb job of collecting the main arguments against New York’s Gifted and Talented and SHSAT practices.

    I transcribed the following from an impromptu speech. There may be grammatical errors.

    That’s a whole lot of topics right there. So let me try to be succinct.  When we talk about differentiating instruction for different learners most people ( and I’m guilty since I just said here in this public meeting ) think about students that have to have curriculum differentiated because they have learning disabilities.  But it’s the same concept for differentiating learning for gifted students.

    You can’t put a gifted student in the traditional classroom with a traditional curriculum and expect them not to be bored or expect them not to be less than motivated. So you have to differentiate along the entire curriculum. [But] here’s the challenge that I have with gifted and talented programs as I see them right now in New York City. And I’ve visited a lot of gifted and talented programs.

    When you have over 35% of your students being designated as gifted and talented, we need to bottle the water that we’re drinking and ship it all over the place because that is so far beyond the percentage of gifted and talented that, from a statistical perspective, should be found in the population. I’m just being honest with you.  So what it tells me is the mechanisms that we’re using to identify true “gifted and talentedness” is perhaps are not the most robust and truly [accurate way to] identify gifted and talented students.

    Think about “How do we currently identify admitting programs for a student that is gifted and talented?”

    Well, you have to sign up for a test, and then you take the test…

    I just read in the Wall Street Journal that parents are paying $400 an hour to tutor their four-year-olds for this gifted and talented test. Then, you look at who is being identified for gifted and talented. Think about the 1.1 million students in the New York City Department of Education, 70% of whom are black and Latino students, yet don’t even come close to representing the gifted and talented pool of students in our system. I am no detective but somethings not right. The exclusive process of using a test, at four years old, to identify a student for gifted and talented measures their privilege. And I’m not talking about wealth. I’m talking about the privilege in the home of a student rather than the true giftedness or talentedness of a student.

    We need to make sure that the processes that we’re using to identify students for gifted and talented are truly research-based, evidence-based, and not skewed against any one particular group of students. That being said, I think it’s important to have gifted and talented programs in a school system. I’m not against gifted and talented, but we’ve got some work to do around, not only how we identify students, but also where those programs are across our entire program.

    Now elevate that conversation. Part of the way we’re doing that is that we’re spending time going to programs across the system and identifying programs that have great practices. So I can tell you people have already visited this program here [ i.e., TAG ] and have taken some really good notes about what are the best practices. We’re working with our superintendents and our principals and our executive superintendents. So we’re gathering from the field what is happening.

    Just to take that one step further, ask the question about specialized high schools and specialized high school admissions.  It’s the same thing. A lot of people have made a lot a lot a lot a lot of an issue about the specialized high school admissions testing. They’ve said, “chancellor why in the world are you spending all this time around eight particular schools?”

    I don’t call them elite schools. They’re not elite schools. They are specialized schools. I could take you to schools that have no screens. I could take you to schools that take whoever comes and registers in their school that are doing phenomenal things for kids and graduated great students.

    What do great schools do? Let me tell you where I stand on the specialized school because everybody’s read about it. The notion that you can test a four-year-old and tutor him to be successful on a test. I saw a lot of people say yeah that’s not okay. But think about what we do to our students that desire to go to a specialized school? They may desire to go to a specialized school; God bless America, more power to them. I’m all for it. My oldest daughter who just graduated from college, but my oldest daughter when I lived in San Francisco went to a specialized school. She did — total transparency.

    Now, why do I tell you this? Because in our system when we tell students in middle school, “we want you to go to school every single day.” Don’t miss school. Sound right? We want you to do well in your school. We want you to do well in English and Math and Social Studies and Science. We want you to get involved in a sport. We want you to play an instrument. We want you to dance. We want you to paint. We want you to volunteer. None of that matters if you want to go to a specialized school because all the matters is that you take one test on one Saturday for a few hours and get a certain cut score and guess what? You get the opportunity. “Opportunity,” make sure we’re clear on that, an opportunity to go to a specialized school. It doesn’t matter what your grades are. It doesn’t matter what your attendance is. It doesn’t matter what your community involvement is. And we know for a fact that there are families, God bless them, and some that can’t afford it and go without to pay lots of money for many years to tutor their children for the specialized admissions test.

    By the way, that test is not aligned to state standards.  When we’re telling students to do well in school, and do well in their classes, what they’re doing is doing well in the state standards and the curriculum. A curriculum that gets them to master what the state of New York has said to do. But that doesn’t matter because if you want to go to specialized school, we want you to study and get tutoring for another test that’s not aligned to state standards! It doesn’t matter if you go to school to give it all your all. Because if you do well on this test, you get the opportunity.

    I don’t know about you, but we’re selling our families a bill of goods and there is not one psychometrician.  Not one that has validated that specialized high school admissions test as valid or reliable for identifying the gifted and talented-ness of students to go to a specialized school. So we have a flawed test that has now been memorialized into state law.

    Remember I told you I lived all over the United States. I’ve never seen a state legislature codify for local control a single process for admitting to a certain sect of schools. I said that to the lawmakers in Albany as well. I’ve never seen this! Talk about local control.

    So what I’m saying is there are other ways. When my daughter went to a specialized school, she had to take an admissions test that was aligned to the state standards in California. Because we lived in California at the time. On top of that, she had to write an essay. On top of that, she had to get teacher recommendations. On top of that, all of her grades from middle school counted to composite that gave a different picture on what it was that she was. Her extracurricular activities all counted and it wasn’t just one way of getting into a specialized school. It was multiple ways of getting into a specialized school which gave more opportunity to more kids.

    Now if you don’t believe me just on those things that the system is flawed? Consider this. There are 165 specialized schools in the United States of America. 165. Of the 165 specialized schools in the United States of America, there are only eight that use a single test as a sole criteria for admissions to a specialized school. And guess where all eight of those are? New York City. So either we’ve got it all figured out or perhaps oh and by the way that specialized admissions test the analysis has shown that it is also flawed against girls, women. There are less females that are able to show admittance to specialized schools based on that test.

    So it’s not only flawed. Stuyvesant High School this past year of the hundreds of students admitted to the freshman class, but there were ten black students admitted to Stuyvesant. Yet the percentage of students but there were less than 30 black and brown kids that got into Stuyvesant this past year based on that test.  But 70% of the students in the New York City Department of Education are black and Latino.

    You show me show me a test, show me a psychometrician that has validated that test, show me the data that shows we are giving the opportunity to all students in the New York City Department of Education and I’m listening. Nobody’s been able to do that. It has to change. And when we have that kind of a disparity in our admissions process to a public school. We have to have that conversation. And I’m going to be doing that.

    CEC District 4 Townhall February 12th, 2019

  • NYC has the country’s most segregated schools; will the city’s plan to change that make its best schools worse?

    The old “integration will make our schools worse” argument. A frequent argument after Brown vs. Board in the 60’s makes its return.

    “There’s no research that shows that it’s either valid or reliable as an instrument to identify talent,” said Carranza about the SHSAT.  “It’s just a hard test.”

    NYC Chancellor

    https://pix11.com/2019/02/16/nyc-has-the-countrys-most-segregated-schools-will-the-citys-plan-to-change-that-make-its-best-schools-worse/

  • High-Stakes Standardized Testing Supporter: Yuh-Line Niou

    Name: Yuh-Line Niou
    Assembly Link: https://nyassembly.gov/mem/Yuh-Line-Niou
    Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Yuh-Line_Niou
    Phone: 212-312-1420

    Assembly-member Yuh-Line Niou is a proponent of keeping the SHSAT exam as the SOLE measure of merit for access to Specialized High Schools.

    Although her website claims to be against standardized testing, this is false. Speaker Heastie reported that assembly-member Niou was one of the key assembly-members to lobby against allowing the 2018 SHSAT bill on the floor for a vote.

    In blocking this vote, assembly-member Niou blocked a proposal that would fix a historic under-representation of girls in our top STEM high schools. Since the blocked proposal would increase girls at specialized high schools from 44% to 67%.

    Media: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pol-carl-heastie-school-desegregation-20180607-story.html

    Response to 2018 SHSAT Results

    After complaining that she did not have time to discuss the mayor’s 2018 SHSAT proposal, Assembly-member Niou ignored the subject for the entire year.

    The internet was abuzz with discussion after it was shown that only 7 Black students were given offers to Stuyvesant high school due to the SHSAT exam. Assembly-member Niou had absolutely no response to the result.

    I asked but got no response either.

    She did have time to post Baby shark though.

  • Stuyvesant Alumni President: Calling NYC Schools ‘Segregated’ Makes Me ‘Feel Like I’m a Bad Person’

    “How is this possible, that people are saying we’re segregated, we’re Jim Crow,” Kim told the Times. “These words are too harsh. It makes me feel like I’m a bad person.”

    This is a striking and revelatory assessment of what’s happening. New York City officials admitted long ago to having a segregated public school system, and committed to integration. A 1955 study — conducted the year after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education — found that 42 city elementary schools were more than 90 percent black and Puerto Rican, and nine middle schools were more than 85 percent. Though these 51 facilities comprised just 8 percent of the city’s elementary and junior high schools at the time, the extremity of their divisions fueled some soul-searching by the board of education, which committed itself to change. “[Public] education in a racially homogenous setting is socially unrealistic and blocks the attainment of goals of democratic education,” New York City’s Board of Education declared.

    Segregation is a matter of fact, not of feeling, and Kim’s claim that it is too harsh a descriptor because it makes him feel bad belies that it is the literal state of affairs, not a rhetorical effort to assign guilt to him personally. Yet his assessment is indicative of a broader cultural trend, most prevalent among white conservatives, that considers being called “racist” worse than actual racism.

    http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/this-isnt-about-your-feelings.html

  • Racist? Fair? Biased? Asian-American Alumni Debate Elite High School Admissions

    “We used to joke that whoever had the most money to spend on test prep would probably go to Stuyvesant.” That was how Ms. Rahman was introduced to the specialized school debate as a young Bangladeshi immigrant living in Brooklyn.

    In high school, she came to believe that the admissions process was about money, not merit. Now, she said, “I feel like that system shouldn’t really exist.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/nyregion/nyc-specialized-high-school-test.html

  • Admissions Overhaul: Simulating the Outcome Under the Mayor’s Plan For Admissions to the City’s Specialized High Schools

    Demographic Changes. IBO compared the demographic composition of the specialized high schools under each of the three scenarios with the actual demographic composition of the ninth grade class in specialized high schools in 2017-2018.14 We found that:
    More black and Hispanic students would get offers. Under the top 7 percent scenario, the share of black students receiving offers would increase by five times and the share of Hispanic students receiving offers would increase by more than four times compared with the share of those groups that actually attended a specialized high school in 2017-2018. If the new system was fully in place, black and Hispanic students would make up roughly 19 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of all students receiving offers to the specialized high schools. Although the share of offers to black and Hispanic students would also increase under the top 3 percent and top 5 percent scenarios, the increases are less steep; for example, compared with the respective shares of incoming students who actually attended a specialized high school, the share of offers to black students under the 3 percent scenario would be about 2.4 times greater and the share of offers to Hispanic students would be a little more than double.

    • More black and Hispanic students would get offers. Under the top 7 percent scenario, the share of black students receiving offers would increase by five times and the share of Hispanic students receiving offers would increase by more than four times compared with the share of those groups that actually attended a specialized high school in 2017-2018. If the new system was fully in place, black and Hispanic students would make up roughly 19 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of all students receiving offers to the specialized high schools. Although the share of offers to black and Hispanic students would also increase under the top 3 percent and top 5 percent scenarios, the increases are less steep; for example, compared with the respective shares of incoming students who actually attended a specialized high school, the share of offers to black students under the 3 percent scenario would be about 2.4 times greater and the share of offers to Hispanic students would be a little more than double.
    • Fewer Asian students would get offers. Just over 31 percent of offers would go to Asian students if the plan was fully phased in, compared with 60.9 percent of ninth graders enrolled in specialized high schools in 2017-2018. Under all three scenarios, Asian students would still comprise the largest share of offers.
    • Roughly the same number of white students would get offers. Under the top 7 percent scenario, the share of white students receiving offers would be nearly 4 percentage points lower than the share of incoming white students at the specialized high schools in 2017-2018, from 24.1 percent last school year to 20.3 percent if the new program was fully in place. Under the top 3 percent scenario, however, the share of offers going to white students would be slightly greater than the actual share of incoming white students at specialized high schools.
    • More girls would receive offers and under all three scenarios they would account for the majority of students receiving offers. In the top 7 percent scenario, girls would receive two-thirds of all offers, compared with just 41 percent of students who actually attended specialized high schools in 2017-2018.
    • More students in poverty would receive offers.15 In 2017-2018, students in poverty comprised about half of all incoming students to specialized high schools; that share would increase to 63 percent if the program was fully phased in for 2017-2018.

    https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/admissions-overhaul-simulating-the-outcome-under-the-mayors-plan-for-admissions-to-the-citys-specialized-high-schools.html

  • How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools


    The anniversary of de Rivera’s battle comes amid another controversy about diversity at Stuyvesant. The school accepts students based entirely on an entrance exam, and the result is that few black and Latino students are admitted. (Only ten black students were admitted to Stuyvesant’s incoming class last year.) Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed eliminating the test for all of the specialized public schools in the city and offering admission to the top seven per cent of students in each district, insuring more diverse enrollment. Stuyvesant is currently seventy-three per cent Asian, and many Asian-Americans feel that the proposal is an attack on their community. De Rivera is disheartened by the low numbers of black and Latinos at specialized schools, and feels that racism is still built into the educational system, just as sexism was. She points out that Bates has eliminated mandatory reporting of S.A.T. scores from its admissions process. “How do we get those numbers up?” she said. “Taking a percentage of high achievers from each district makes moral sense.”

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-a-thirteen-year-old-girl-smashed-the-gender-divide-in-american-high-schools

  • High-Stakes Standardized Testing Supporter: Jumaane D. Williams

    Name: Jumaane D. Williams
    Public Advocate Link: https://advocate.nyc.gov/
    Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Jumaane_Williams
    Phone Hotline: (212) 669-7250

    Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams strongly supports the SHSAT as the sole measure of academic merit.  He argues that the only reason he got into a specialized high school was that he was good at taking tests, and not particularly good in class.

    Jumaane Williams has also been heavily lobbied on his SHSAT position by some of the city’s most powerful lobbyists. 

    Media:

    Jumaane accepts campaign contributions from Pro-SHSAT lobbyists for multiple years.

    These also seem to coincide with increase SHSAT scrutiny

    Now here’s Jumaane in his own words ( same years campaign contributions )…

    It’s difficult to fact-check this speech because there’s so much wrong. Beacon high school stats are wrong. Beacon is 14% Black, and 20% Latino. Much better than Stuyvesant’s 1% Black.

    He also argues substantially against multiple-measures. Claiming that muliple-measures of assessment are less accurate, while the ENTIRE industry argues the exact opposite.

    Response to 2018 SHSAT Results

    Mr Williams had the same tired excuses and redirects.


    Jumaane has been falsely “calling” for discussion from at least 2014. He never facilitates this discussion. He has never provided a framework for this discussion. He simply punts the issue with “needs discussion”, leaving the status quo he supports in place.

    The “Cutting off access points to education” Jumanne mentions is referring to a small tweak in the way the city defines “disadvantaged” in reference to disadvantaged students. The city now includes a child’s school poverty concentrate when calculating disadvantageness. That’s what Jumaane considers the big injustice this week.

    As for “pitting communities against each other“, I’d like to remind our public advocate that we have always had to fight the status quo for school integration. It has never come easily.

  • High-Stakes Standardized Testing Supporter: Andrew Gounardes

    Senator Andrew Gounardes

    Name: Andrew Gounardes
    Senate Link: https://www.nysenate.gov/senators/andrew-gounardes
    Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Andrew_S._Gounardes
    Phone: (718) 238-6044

    Senator Andrew Gounardes defends the use of the single SHSAT multiple-choice test as the SOLE measure of a student’s ability without any reservation.  Senator Gounardes has a classic “Resource Hoarding” position.  His constituents are over-represented by the exam, hence he defends it.

    Senator Gounardes also claims the typical “the test is not the problem” position.  He does not acknowledge anti-female bias in the SHSAT.

    In the video below he also claims that many Democratic Senators also opposes the exam.  Senator Gounardes appears to be against school integration policies in general, e.g. D15 diversity plan.

    Media: Short video

    Media: Full video

    Andrew Gounardes Website

    First, Specialized high schools have over 15,000 of the most sort after high school seats. So, no that’s not a small number.

    Secondly, the 1% statistic Senator Gounardes uses is disingenuous since he’s considering all students from all grades and ages in the entire city. But still, specialized schools would account for more than 1% of students.

    Thirdly, the SHSAT reform proposal is by no means the ONLY initiative put forward by the city’s department of education. Arguing it doesn’t solve all school problems is invalid. We should fix the use of a statistically biased exam, but ALSO continue to solve other education equity issues. So much for philoxenia he claims to believe in.

    One thing’s clear, we won’t solve this issue while re-electing Democrats like Senator Andrew Gounardes. If you’re interested in a primary challenge and would like help, please reach out to NYCandidate.org