Black and Latino students who do as well as their white and Asian peers on the MCAS exam nonetheless have a much lower chance of being admitted to Boston Latin School and the city’s two other exam schools, according to a Harvard report being released Tuesday.
Their path is hindered by a separate test — designed for private institutions — that students applying to the city’s top-flight exam schools must take. Black and Latino students do notably worse on that exam and also take it at lower rates.
“MCAS scores in fifth grade identify a substantial number of high-skilled black and Hispanic students who currently do not enroll in exam schools,” the report said. “Assigning students to exam schools based on such scores could increase the number of black and Latino students at BLS by up to 50 percent.”
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Highly skilled black, Latino students face admission barriers to exam schools, study finds
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Social Justice Was Always Essential to NYC’s Public High Schools
But here’s where Blumenstein and other critics get it wrong because, although Bronx Science founder Morris Meister was a firm believer in merit-based admissions, it was in the context of seeing science education as integral to a democratic social and political vision. Criticizing reforms intended to make the city more democratic by fossilizing Meister’s original vision is paradoxical.
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Whose Side Are Asian-Americans On?
Hsin, the sociology professor, told me, “If you were to put aside any concerns about goals of diversity at all and you just wanted to come up with mechanism for identifying the most talented individuals to be admitted to specialized high schools, you would never come up with the admissions policy you have now.” Grades, which are repeated measures over time, are considered better indicators of academic acumen. It’s also been shown that they are better than standardized test scores when it comes to predicting success for black and Latinx students.
https://newrepublic.com/article/151328/whose-side-asian-americans-on
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Hey DOE: Revamp the SHSAT The current exam doesn’t accurately measure ability
Part of the reason for this disparity is that many kids don’t find out about specialized high schools and the SHSAT early enough, if at all. “In my middle school, my class didn’t know there was an SHSAT. We were considered the dumb class because we didn’t test well in elementary,” says Angie, currently a senior at Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists. She is black and Latina. “However, the higher performing class got to take it as well as the prep they needed.”
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But then I talked to my classmates and saw other sides to the issue. For example, one of my friends in middle school got nearly failing grades, but his parents paid for private home tutoring for the SHSAT and he ended up going to Bronx Science. It’s unfair that a lazy and complacent student can ace the test and go to a great school, while a straight-A student who might not have passed the test or even known about it would be denied admission.
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When Angie, who wasn’t told about the SHSAT as an 8th grader, took the SAT in high school, she got one of the highest scores in her school. “People said, why didn’t you take the SHSAT? You could have gotten into a specialized a school,” she said. “So I think info needs to be distributed a lot better. Not being told about this opportunity makes me feel like the kids in my class were just expected to fail.”http://www.ycteenmag.org/issues/NYC263/Hey_DOE:_Revamp_the_SHSAT.html?story_id=NYC-2018-09-16
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SHSAT and Its Discontents: WNYC Audio Interviews
Madina Touré, New York City education reporter for Politico New York, andClara Hemphill, founder of InsideSchools at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, discuss proposals to change admissions policies at NYC’s specialized high schools.
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Assessing the Assessment: SHSAT
Don’t assume that because your student does well in school that they will do well on any other test or in any other setting. Kids who do the best on the test are those who go into confident and prepared. Don’t make assumptions your kid will do well. If you’re thinking of a Specialized High School start looking into the test and preparation in 6th grade. Explore the DREAM – SHSI program run by the DOE or at very least have your child take a practice test to see how they would do on the SHSAT so that you have plenty of time to prepare if you need to.
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Schools chancellor calls for more black, Latino students in city’s specialized high schools
“We’re the only city in America that requires a single test for admission to a public school,” he said. “So I’m asking the question . . . ‘Is that OK?’ I’m asking the question, ‘Is that justice for our kids?’ ”
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“You have brilliant black and Latino students . . . if they don’t do well on that test, given one day, for one time period, for one opportunity, if they do not do well they don’t get the opportunity,” said the chancellor, who derided the current system as “neither reliable or valid.” -
Closing gap at specialized high schools
Ultimately, the city has to do more to improve educational opportunities for everyone, not just the admission process to the top schools. More middle schools need to be high-achieving ones, more gifted programs are needed in the younger grades, and the city should add more specialized high schools, too.
There’s no guarantee that the city’s plan will close the gap. But if city officials think boldly, they could transform these schools into places that give all students the opportunity for something special.
https://www.amny.com/opinion/editorial/closing-gap-at-specialized-high-schools-1.20853768
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The Students Trying to Get Ahead in a One-Test System
At Think Prep, a testing outfit near Penn Station, six students bent over desks in a windowless classroom. They’d been there for the past six weeks, Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., studying practice S.H.S.A.T. questions. (The program costs five thousand six hundred dollars.)
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The instructor, whose name was Andrew, wiped down the board. He’d attended Hunter College High School, another school with exam-based admissions, though it uses a different test. “It’s a mess,” he said, of the S.H.S.A.T. “It’s one test—one test date. You might get sick. You might get nervous. The test itself is a black box. It tests obscure concepts. They don’t release how the scores are calibrated, and there’s a weird curve.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system
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Fair and objective or useless and biased? A Chalkbeat guide to the case for and against New York City’s specialized high school test
There’s no doubt that the exam is a clean-cut way of making admissions decisions — and clarity is rare in the New York City high school admissions system, where sought-after schools can all have different criteria and students are eventually admitted by an algorithm.
But we also know that not all eligible New York City students are taking the SHSAT, and its use shuts out lots of students who can’t afford test prep. Students also have to know how and when to sign up to take it. (The city has tried to address some of those issues. It hasn’t worked.)
Researchers say the recently released study doesn’t do much to settle the debate around the SHSAT, either. “It tells us something we already knew: Kids who do well on the SHSAT do well in high school,” Aaron Pallas, a researcher at Columbia who reviewed the study, recently told Chalkbeat. “But it doesn’t tell us what is the best combination of factors that predict who might do well in an exam school.”