While talent helps, students also need knowledge, expertise and polish to get into dozens of New York City public school arts programs that use auditions and portfolios to screen applicants. Although these schools have largely escaped the rancorous debate over selective admissions policies, they raise many of the same concerns about equity, class and race.
Category: analysis
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At New York’s Other Selective Public Schools: Auditions for 9th Grade
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Brown’s Lost Promise: New York City Specialized High Schools as a Case Study in the Illusory Support for Class-Based Affirmative Action
But even if the diversity rationale falls out of favor with the U.S. Supreme Court, New York City’s revamped Discovery program should not. The law that created the program and the manner in which it is applied are class-conscious, not race-conscious. And if the conservative members of the Court ultimately do rule against the City in McAuliffe, they will have demonstrated in plain sight that their support for class-based affirmative action was a rhetorical smokescreen, after all.
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Mayor’s 2018 Proposal
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2018 SHSAT proposal.
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Is This What We Consider ‘a Good Education’?
This is one of the best “perspective” pieces on the topic yet.
The time has come, I believe, to redefine what it means to be a great public school.
McGraw put it this way: “I don’t know why we’re celebrating a school that’s 97 percent Asian or white as a great school. I don’t know who came up with the idea that that was the definition of a great public school, because I think that a great public school is a school that exposes children to all types of diverse ideas, backgrounds and cultures and pushes them to think critically about the world around them.”https://opencitymag.aaww.org/shsat-asian-americans-new-york-education/
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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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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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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
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5-10-19 Public Hearing on Specialized High Schools
The NY State Assembly had its first hearing on SHSAT exam.
The hearing brought together activists, scientists, politicians and city hall employees all to discuss Hecht-Calandra and the exam it authorized.
Follow the link below for the over 7 hours of testimony.
https://nystateassembly.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=8&clip_id=5117