SHSAT Sunset

  • Specialized High Schools – some comments should not matter

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    Educator blog post: The current admissions system is based on a single test, on one day. That’s the way it’s been, for a long, long time. But in 1970 or 1971, someone decided to study the admissions policy for the schools (at that time the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School, and…

  • 2016-2017 SHSAT Admissions Test Offers By Sending School

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    City data detailing offers by sending schools for 2016 to 2017. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Education/2016-2017-SHSAT-Admissions-Test-Offers-By-Sending-/8ws3-956v

  • NYT Editorial Board: It’s Time to Integrate New York’s Best Schools

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    New York’s elementary and middle schools do not prepare children for the test, all but ensuring that students seek out extensive test preparation. Many Asian and white students have done so for thousands of dollars apiece. Black and Latino students are likely to walk in with little or no test preparation. Of all elite public high…

  • ‘So there I was, figuring it out myself’: A Brooklyn teen on why the city’s specialized high school prep wasn’t enough

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    My family wasn’t well off financially. Often times, we struggled and there was constant worry over whether we had food in the fridge or we had school supplies. I wasn’t expecting to enroll in a Kaplan or a Princeton Review course like my fellow affluent classmates. Nevertheless, I persisted. I sought out a free program…

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

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    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…

  • NYC Will Spend $15 Million To Increase Diversity At Elite Public Schools

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    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…

  • City Announces New Initiatives to Increase Diversity at Specialized High Schools

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    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…

  • The Big Problem With the New SAT

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    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…

  • Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York

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    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…

  • Lawmakers, teachers union push to change elite high schools’ admission process, boost diversity

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    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…