The fact that the test changes so frequently with no impact on the quality of graduates from the specialized high schools also argues against the utility of the exam as a necessary factor in that success.
Category: analysis
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Is the SHSAT a Valid Test?
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Two key questions about how New York City admits students into its elite public schools
Two key questions about the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT) have not received enough attention in the current debate.
First, is the SHSAT a good test?
Second, is using a test, even if it’s good, as the sole basis for admission a good idea?
The answer to the second question is easy. No.
No one should use a test score in isolation to determine who should be admitted to a school, which is likely why no one but New York’s specialized schools does it. The American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education all recommend using “multiple sources and types of relevant information” to make educational decisions.
The College Board, which owns the SAT college entrance exam, and ACT Inc., which owns the ACT test, have long insisted that colleges should use test scores as only one valuable piece of information among others. If a holistic approach to admissions is good enough for Stanford, Caltech, Phillips Exeter and Thomas Jefferson, shouldn’t it be for Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech?Answering that question is hard, too, because the city releases no copies of the exam after they are given. All the major test makers for the college and graduate school admission make retired exams and test questions readily available, but New York City’s Department of Education does not.
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Important Technical Features of the SHSAT Exam
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.
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NYC selective high school admissions uproar a symptom of a much bigger problem
Multiple studies have found no difference in college enrollment, college quality or graduation rates of kids who just barely met the test score cutoff for selective public schools like Stuyvesant and those who just barely missed the mark and then attended more ordinary public high schools, Valant said.
Valant would like to see selective schools drop their test-in requirements and instead award admission to a set number of top-performing students from every district or system middle school. The resulting classes would be more diverse and formed withan objective , open access measure of long-term performance.
“I think the Stuyvesant story matters because there is something incredibly important about Stuyvesant and other symbols of excellence. When you send the message that only certain groups belong in those types of institutions, that only certain people can ‘earn’ access, that’s a dangerous message to students of color and students in poverty who may feel left out. And it’s a dangerous message to the kids who make it into Stuyvesant. None of it is good for society.” -
New York City High Schools’ Endless Segregation Problem
The public schools in New York State are the most segregated in the country, according to a 2014 study from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. That’s largely driven by New York City.
The selective high schools are by no means the only places where inequality exists in the system, but they are the most visible, the easiest apple to pick. The black enrollment at Stuyvesant peaked in 1975, according to state records highlighted in a 2012 profile in the Times, when there were 303 black students out of 2,536 total.
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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
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Asian Test-Prep Centers Offer Parents Exactly What They Want: ‘Results’
At GPS, as with its competitors, one of the most popular courses focuses on New York City’s Specialized High School Admissions Test, an entrance requirement for eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools. (LaGuardia High, a performing-arts school, has an audition system.) Less than 20 percent of eighth graders who take the exam clear the minimum score needed to get into a specialized school, including — at the most competitive end — Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. A typical summer class for this test at GPS lasts three hours a day, every weekday, and can cost around $1,400. But Yan says virtually all his students get into a specialized high school. He knows this because he hands out Visa gift cards once results come out: $50 for Stuyvesant, $30 for Bronx Science, $20 for the others.
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Pro-SHSAT Activists have Spent over Quarter Million Dollars Lobbying NY Democrats
Some advocates for keeping the test have decided to invest in lobbyists. The alumni foundation for Bronx High School of Science, one of the elite high schools, signed a $96,000 contract with lobbying firm Bolton-St. John, according to public filings. Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation, which renewed a $120,000 contract with firm Yoswein, has lobbied for the test since at least September 2017, filings show.
Another group called the Scholastic Merit Fund, comprised of more advocates who want to preserve the test, hired Parkside Group LLC for $60,000 to lobby in support of the test.
Sen. Shelley Mayer, a Yonkers Democrat who will chair the Senate education committee, said she has “serious process concerns” about how de Blasio’s office handled the rollout of this plan, but she declined to comment beyond that. She deferred to newly elected Queens senator John Liu, a Democrat who will chair the New York City Senate education subcommittee, who says he acknowledges the city’s segregation problem but feels the Asian community should have been consulted.The lobby groups that have been paid to protect the SHSAT include
- The Parkside Group ( Democrat Campaign Consultant & Lobbyist )
- Bolton-St. John
- Yoswein
How are we supposed to compete against the Parkside Group, who are paid BY Democrats to help them win their seats? This is their homepage…
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Response: De Blasio’s attempt to reduce the number of Asian-American students in the Discovery Program is unconstitutional
Recently, Attorney “Chris
Kieser
Mr. Kieser’s comments are quoted below.New York City’s specialized high schools are the envy of the nation.
The above statement seems to be the standard opening to the SHSAT defense but is never backed by empirical data. Any results from Specialized High Schools should be statistically corrected for “Selection Bias” [1], and also the size of the student pool in New York City.
With about 1.1 Million students, NYC is the largest school district in the nation. Therefore skimming the top students in a pool that wide, even inaccurately, will result in impressive outcomes.For parents who cannot afford to send their children to private school, the specialized high schools are their only option for a top-flight secondary education.
The above quote is simply false. New York has many excellent high schools available to parents.
These parents often work long hours to give their children the best possible opportunity for a coveted seat in these desirable schools.
Yes, parents of all backgrounds work hard to get the best possible opportunity for the children. Many parents spend $2000-4000 or more in special “prep” schools for the single SHSAT exam.
And too often this figure represents 5-10% of their annual household income. It’s disappointing that NY lawmakers support a system that requires this investment.Although this parenting behavior is commendable, these prepped students are not necessarily smarter than their peers. They are though, more capable of scoring highly on a single 50-60 math question and 50-60 English multiple-choice question exam.
Prepped students are taught the quirks of the SHSAT and other test-taking strategies [2]. They’re introduced to concepts just a few months before their peers. None of this suggests merit.Unlike many private schools, the specialized high schools don’t care about your family’s income, race or whether you attended a prestigious middle school. They admit students based on an objective exam, the Specialized High School Admission Test.
Notice, Mr. Keiser does not mention gender. Because the SHSAT exam is notoriously biased against girls as well [3].
In this context “Bias” simply means that the exam is sensitive to external factors that it was not designed to measure. “Bias” does not mean “racist” or “intolerant” in this case.
Hence, if we have an exam that’s only given on Saturdays but a group of students
have a religious holiday on that day. Then we may see a bias against that group of students. We’re not arguing that the test designers wear pillowcases and burn crosses. But rather that we’ve managed to unwittingly create a system of measuring merit that does not accurately do so.Every eighth grader in New York City can sign up for the SHSAT and, with a high enough score, attend one of the city’s best schools. It’s a purely meritocratic approach to admissions.
No mention of the fact that students learn much of the material on the SHSAT in prep and not in class. Or that the quality of the prep classes varies by cost. Or that some feeder schools offer SHSAT prep, while most poor schools do not.
Meritocratic, as in based on your access to a suitable and effective SHSAT prep program [4].Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza believe that this fair and transparent approach has led to too many Asian-American students in the specialized high schools.
This is the unfortunate and dangerous tribalism fanned by Mr. Keiser. An all too common approach to dividing Americans.
Mayor de Blasio has stated publicly that that “Multiple-measures”are more accurate and should be used instead of a single-measure multiple-choice exam. Many many teaching groups and teachers unions have publicly agreed [5].
In the field of psychometric testing, there’s little argument that the Mayor’s correct on this issue.Discovery is open to rising freshmen who scored just below the SHSAT cutoff for admission and who are certified as economically disadvantaged. Students who complete the program gain admission to the high school that fall. Discovery has traditionally accounted for less than 5% of the total number of students admitted to the specialized high schools.
“Traditionally” does not factor in. The mayor has legal control of the discovery program. At times, his predecessors did not run any discovery programs.
To address this “injustice,” de Blasio and Carranza decided to limit the program to certain middle schools that score 60% or higher on the city’s “Economic Need Index,” a measure that estimates the percentage of economically disadvantaged students attending a particular school. Then they expanded Discovery to 20% of the seats at each specialized high school, effectively locking the ineligible schools out of a large portion of available spots.
There are serious issues with using Free Reduced-priced Lunches ( FRL ) as a measure of poverty [6]. FRL may be a useful shorthand, but its accuracy has been widely challenged, as the above link shows.
The NYC Department of Education has instead used a more accurate measure of poverty. The “Economic Need Index” correlates to the schools hardest hit by poverty, homelessness, lack of resources, etc. This is NOT a proxy for race.
Ineligible schools will still have access to 80% of specialized high school seats. Almost 10,000 of the 12,000 seats.But city officials calculated the school’s Economic Need Index as just 57.9%, rendering its students ineligible for the new Discovery Program. No matter how hard they work, Christa McAuliffe students cannot compete for a full one-fifth of the seats at the specialized high schools.
Christa McAuliffe would be ineligible for only 20% of SHSAT offers. Earlier, they received over 4% of total SHSAT offers [7].
Losing 20% of McAuliffe’s offers would have them earning about 170 SHSAT offers, still more than most entire school districts combined.Discovery should remain a pathway for economically disadvantaged students of all races to enter the specialized high schools.
Agreed. And that’s exactly what Mayor de Blasio has proposed. Based on a more accurate measure of poverty than FRL.
Government officials should not use race or ethnic background to decide who gets to attend the city’s best schools.
Also Agreed. And if anyone proposes this I’ll be the first to stand up and disagree with them.
[1]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system
[2]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system
[3]https://www.the74million.org/article/nyc-specialized-schools-girls-boys/
[4]https://www.amny.com/opinion/columnists/mark-chiusano/high-school-admissions-test-nyc-shsat-1.18994239
[5]https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/new-york-city-specialized-high-school-complaint/
[6]https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-promising-alternative-to-subsidized-lunch-receipt-as-a-measure-of-student-poverty/
[7]https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/06/14/where-specialized-high-school-students-come-from-and-where-they-dont/