Research on the passing of Hecht-Calandra in 1971. This includes supporting documents from various agencies and stakeholders.
Christa_McAuliffe_Intermediate_v_De_Blasio_et_al__nysdce-18-11657__0048.2Category: history
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Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years
It’s important to understand the political climate before the NY State legislature decided to pass Hecht-Calandra in 1971. The New York Times does a great job filing in that context.
In 2016, a proposal to send some Upper West Side children — who were zoned for a high-performing, mostly white,
wealthy elementary school near their homes — to a lower-performing school, attended mostly by low-income black and Hispanic students, about a ten-minute walk away, was met with vitriol.
A version of the plan — which ultimately impacted a relatively small number of schools — eventually passed after years of negotiations.
B犀利士 ut the recent push for integration has been led in part by liberal white parents.
Some of these parents helped force the most comprehensive local desegregation policy yet: the elimination of screened middle schools in Brooklyn’s District 15, which includes upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Park Slope. Some parents there have said the election of President Trump prompted them to combat segregation in their children’s schools.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html
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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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How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools
The anniversary of de Rivera’s battle comes amid another controversy about diversity at Stuyvesant. The school accepts students based entirely on an entrance exam, and the result is that few black and Latino students are admitted. (Only ten black students were admitted to Stuyvesant’s incoming class last year.) Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed eliminating the test for all of the specialized public schools in the city and offering admission to the top seven per cent of students in each district, insuring more diverse enrollment. Stuyvesant is currently seventy-three per cent Asian, and many Asian-Americans feel that the proposal is an attack on their community. De Rivera is disheartened by the low numbers of black and Latinos at specialized schools, and feels that racism is still built into the educational system, just as sexism was. She points out that Bates has eliminated mandatory reporting of S.A.T. scores from its admissions process. “How do we get those numbers up?” she said. “Taking a percentage of high achievers from each district makes moral sense.” -
Lawmakers, teachers union push to change elite high schools’ admission process, boost diversity
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 other specialized schools — is outdated and discriminates against black and Hispanic kids.
Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew joined lawmakers at the union headquarters in downtown Manhattan Monday to unveil a bill that would allow the city to also consider grade point average and other factors.
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Special Classes Help Gifted in Ghettos
OUTSIDE, there is a burned‐out tenement, a symbol of a devastated inner‐city neighborhood. Inside, a teacher is working on algebra problems with a class of gifted children, preparing them for entrance to specialized high schools.
Of the 16,800 pupils in District 7, 400 are in special progress classes. The district is about 68 percent Hispanic, 31 percent black and 1 percent “other,” meaning white and Oriental.
Madeline Golia, the coordinator of the district’s program for gifted and talented pups, said that admission to the special progress classes is based on several “flexible” standards. These include performance on the citywide reading test, mathematical ability, teacher evaluation, emotional adjustment and personal screening.
Selection Method Changed
This represents a change from the days when intelligence tests were used to determine eligibility for classes for the gifted, and when pupils who scored only one I.Q. point below the “gifted” score — 130 — were not admitted. I.Q. tests no longer are administered in New York City schools.
The District 7 standard, Mrs. Golia said, is that the pupil read one year and six months above grade level and be at grade level in math. Over‐all, only 40 percent of pupils in the city’s schools read at or above grade level. There are no citywide math tests.
This article points out quite a bit.
- Specialized High School test prep was given to students IN school. It wasn’t an added outside program like today’s “DREAM” program
- We had norm-referenced G&T before SPE which caused the predictable diversity issues. SP changed this to a local-normed admission process. This gives evidence to what I’ve always held. That Bloomberg/Klein knew that switching to a national norm-referenced exam would decimate Black participation in G&T
- SP had 400 students in a 16K district
- Students back then were performing at similar to lower on criterion-referenced exams ( something we already know, but some challenge )
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Gifted Grade Schoolers To Get Special Instruction
This is where NYC’s infamous Gifted & Talented program all started.
The city school system will get its first program for teaching gifted elementary ‐school children this fall, following a vote to set up the program by’ the central Board of Education last night.
A grant of $60,000 from the Vincent Astor Foundation will finance two experimental “early ‐learner” classes, in Brooklyn and Manhattan, for especially bright children aged from 4 to 6 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/08/16/archives/gifted-grade-schoolers-to-get-special-instruction.html
And 2 years later…
The two existing experimental classrooms for 4‐to‐6‐year‐old pupils are situated in Public School 116 at 210 East 33d Street in Manhattan and P.S. 114 at 1077 Remsen Avenue in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn.
Students are selected from all boroughs on the basis of interviews, recommendations and tests and, according to Dr. Ehrlich, represent the top one‐half of 1 per cent of the pupil population.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/05/11/archives/pilot-project-aids-gifted-children-in-city-schools.html