SHSAT Sunset

Category: analysis

  • Who Finds Out About Summer Test Prep Can Depend on Race

    “If if it wasn’t for having a dual-income household, I would not be able to afford it at all,” said Auressa Simmons who enrolled her daughter Anaiyah.

    On top of the tuition for the summer program, she and her husband pay for a van share that takes Anaiyah to her summer classes.

    In contrast, Melissa Doyle is just tuning into the high-school admissions process for her eighth-grade son. She attended a recent session in the Bronx about the specialized high schools.

    “I didn’t even know  that they had to take the, what is it, the S-H-S-A-T test,” Doyle said. If her son decides to take the entrance exam in October, he’ll be competing against students who spent years preparing for it.

    https://www.wnyc.org/story/who-finds-out-about-summer-test-prep-can-depend-race/

  • Evidence on New York City and Boston exam schools

    The current admissions approach almost certainly shuts out many gifted, disadvantaged students. When we rely on parents, teachers, or students to make the decision to apply to a program for gifted students (by, for example, voluntarily signing up for a test), evidence indicates it is disadvantaged students who disproportionately get shut out.

    But getting rid of the test is not the answer.  Well-educated, high-income parents work the system to get their kids into these programs. The less transparent the approach (e.g., portfolios or teacher recommendations instead of a standardized test) the greater the advantage these savvy, connected parents have in winning the game.

    An important step is to make the test universal, rather than one that students choose to take. In the dozen states where college admissions tests are universal (free, required, and given during school hours), many more students take the test and go on to college.[8] The democratizing effect is strongest among low-income and nonwhite students. The same dynamic holds among young children: when testing for giftedness is universal, poor, Black and Hispanic children are far more likely to end up in gifted classes.[9]A school district in Florida showed huge increases in the diversity of its gifted programs when it shifted to using a universal test, rather than recommendations from parents and teachers, to identify gifted students.

    Rather than force students to take yet another test, New York could use its existing 7th– and 8th-grade tests to determine admission to the exam schools. These tests are, in principle, aligned to what is taught in the schools and so are an appropriate metric by which to judge student achievement.  When so many are complaining about over-testing, why have yet another test for students to cram and sit for?

    The city could go further toward diversifying the student body by admitting the top scorers at each middle school to the exam schools. Texas uses this approach to determine admission to the University of Texas flagships: the top slice (originally 10%, now lower) of students in each high school is automatically admitted to these selective colleges. This ensures that Texas’s elite colleges at least partially reflect the economic, ethnic and racial diversity of the state’s (highly segregated) school system.

     

    https://www.brookings.edu/research/evidence-on-new-york-city-and-boston-exam-schools/

  • Does Admissions Exam for Elite High Schools Measure Up? No One Knows

    Many parents and teachers have long contended that the SHSAT is an assessment of students’ test-taking skills, honed by extensive test preparation, more than their potential to succeed at the specialized schools.

    Pian Rockfeld, an English teacher at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, one of the smaller specialized schools, has proctored the SHSAT. She said she could always tell who had taken prep courses. The students would draw diagrams to decipher confusing questions that left others stumped, or if they were good in math, they would start midway through the test on the math section to take advantage of a quirk in the scoring process that rewards students who score extremely high on one part of the exam rather than those with high but more balanced scores across subjects.

    “The test does not assess at all how hard a student works, or the creative and independent thinking that a student would need to thrive in our high school,” Ms. Rockfeld said. “I’m always wondering what kids we’re missing by using this test.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/nyregion/shsat-new-york-city-schools.html

  • To integrate specialized high schools, are gifted programs part of the problem or the solution?

    “We’re working to raise the bar for all kids,” Carranza said in a statement to Chalkbeat. “We also have to think about access and barriers to entry, and that includes whether we’re creating unnecessary barriers by tracking students at the age of 4 or 5 years old based on a single test.”

    https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/07/17/to-integrate-specialized-high-schools-are-gifted-programs-part-of-the-problem-or-the-solution/

  • Who Wins, and Who Loses, in the Proposed Plan for Elite Schools?

    Dr. Caceres, the Bronx principal, said that half of his eighth-grade students already take advanced math and science classes, and have the ability and work ethic to thrive in a challenging school like Bronx Science. His students do not do well on the SHSAT, he said, in part because most of their families cannot afford tutoring. When the results came back this spring, some of the students were so disappointed they cried.

    “Don’t you think it’s embarrassing that Bronx Science is in the Bronx and only a handful of students are from the Bronx?” he asked. “People might think we don’t have the students, but we do have the students.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/nyregion/specialized-school-exam-losers-winners.html

  • SHSAT Invalid: I’ve spent years studying the link between SHSAT scores and student success. The test doesn’t tell you as much as you might think.

    First, that requires defining merit. Only New York City defines it as the score on a single test — other cities’ selective high schools use multiple measures, as do top colleges. There are certainly other potential criteria, such as artistic achievement or citizenship.

    However, when merit is defined as achievement in school, the question of whether the test is meritocratic is an empirical question that can be answered with data.

    https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/06/22/ive-spent-years-studying-the-link-between-shsat-scores-and-student-success-the-test-doesnt-tell-you-as-much-as-you-might-think/

  • Discovery Expansion: Elite New York High Schools to Offer 1 in 5 Slots to Those Below Cutoff

    By 2020, 20 percent of the ninth-grade seats in every specialized high school will be set aside for Discovery students, according to city education officials. Currently, only 5 percent of the 4,000 ninth-grade seats are filled through Discovery.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/discovery-program-specialized-schools-nyc.html

  • Should These Tests Get a Failing Grade?

    SHSAT 1, NYTimes reporters and editors 0

    But the problems I encountered when taking the SHSAT online demonstrate how even one standardized test question might derail a promising student’s future.

    In fact, I was thrown off by the very first question on the test

    […]

    Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the author of “Measuring Up” and “The Testing Charade,” and one of the country’s foremost experts on standardized tests, agreed that the question is, at best, ambiguous. “Problematic items do sometimes occur even in good tests, and that is one more reason it is never acceptable to make a consequential decision based on a single test score,” he said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/business/nyc-admissions-tests-shsat.html

  • 74 Analysis Shows Girls Already Outperform Boys at NYC’s Elite Schools Amid Fear That Opening Up Admissions Would Water Down Quality

    With the city’s focus on improving STEM options for girls, the use of the SHSAT seems a bit hypocritical

    Perhaps, but the mayor’s initiative would also give more offers to a particular kind of student — one more likely to earn high GPAs, achieve college readiness on Regents exams, and graduate with top honors.

    That type of student is girls.

    According to the city’s calculation, girls would receive 62 percent of offers under the new policy — a big leap. Over the past three years, girls received 45 percent of offers; they constitute just 42 percent of the more than 15,000 students enrolled in the eight elite schools, a proportion that has remained essentially unchanged for years.

    Although more girls than boys sit for the test, girls are less likely to get an offer and more likely to turn one down.

    https://www.the74million.org/article/nyc-specialized-schools-girls-boys/

  • 2 Ideals at Issue

    Many teachers and principals are convinced that there should be ability grouping for the good of the most able and the least able students. But often these same educators are uneasy over the racial isolation that often results. This has put some programs for bright students on shaky ground.

    Classes for gifted children are being abolished, for example, at P.S. 152, down the block from Brooklyn College, because even though the school’s enrollment is becoming increasingly black and Puerto Rican, the gifted classes are disproportionately white.

    “There is no doubt that our classes for the intellectually gifted would have been totally segregated at that school if we had continued them,” said Dr. Ralph T. Brande, the superintendent of Community School District 22. Nonetheless, most of the district’s schools continue to have classes for the intellectually gifted.

    “District 22 is one of the last bastons of the middle‐class — both black and white —in the city,” Dr. Brande explained in an interview. “We have to do something to keep them in the schools. Will they flee the public schools and the city if they lose the classes for the intellectually gifted and the special progress classes at the junior highs?

    “I know the word ‘elitist’ is associated with these programs, but the problem that concerns me is whether we can still develop these children if we throw them in with everyene else.”

    At least one of the decentralized. districts, District 3, which reaches from Columbus Circle into ,Ilarlem on the city’s West Sides has answered the question;by banning all classes for the intellectually. gifted and operating entirely on what it says is a heterogeneous basis.

    “The families in our district are either poor or well off and everyone knows there is a correlation between economic background and how kids do in school” says Joseph Elias, the distriet superintendent. “Until we iriade the change, if You were. white you go into the ‘smart’ class and if you were not ‘,White you got into the ‘dumb’ class, Getting their children into the classes for the gifted was a way for parents to avoid having to spend $3,000 or $4,000 a year for a private school.”

    犀利士 l” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/22/archives/2-ideals-at-issue.html