Just because students are intelligent enough to pass a test doesn’t mean they understand people who might be ethnically, racially or culturally different.
That’s what happened to Gordon in his freshman biology class when his lab partner blamed him for the AIDS virus. Or when he was told to “go back to Africa” because he disagreed with some of his peers on the merits of the Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT).
And both of us have repeatedly heard something along the lines of, “Black people don’t care about education.”
While these stories may seem shocking or anachronistic, they are not unique among Stuy’s black and Latino students. Meetings of the Stuyvesant Black Students League and ASPIRA (the Hispanic student’s association) are animated by tales of students being called the N-word in and outside of class, threatened lynchings and other examples of almost-daily abuse.
Constantly being reminded that we are not wanted in the school we attend is painful, and would obstruct any hardworking student from getting the education they deserve.
Category: opinion
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Being black at Stuyvesant: Two students on what it’s like for African Americans at the specialized high school
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GET RID OF THE SPECIALIZED HIGH SCHOOLS
Excerpt from an interesting opinion on NYC specialized high schools. Do we need them? Why do we have them?…
The very obvious solution to the specialized high schools’ diversity conundrum is here: get rid of the specialized high schools. They’re an ugly, embarrassing testament to America’s insistence upon inserting hierarchy into all things, including public services for children. What is the point of them? What, exactly, are we trying to accomplish here?
For the New York City Department of Education, the covert purpose of the specialized high schools is to buy the acquiescence of ambitious families in underserved areas: these parents believe that huge swaths of the outer boroughs have no decent facilities for their kids, but the inadequacy of the school in their own neighborhood doesn’t trouble them so much because they’re focused on getting their child into Stuyvesant instead. For New Yorkers on the whole, the existence of Stuyvesant makes the perceived mediocrity of the zoned high schools conscionable: as long as every student has a fair chance to earn an escape, we can allow those who don’t to languish.
Those who do escape receive the privilege of joining a hothouse of frantic academic competition, with its concomitant mental health crises. There’s little room for creativity or joy in learning. When students enter, they already tend to suffer from an undue focus on grades and test scores and the need to succeed at all costs (that’s how they got in), and thenceforth their universally like-minded peer group compounds the problem in an atmosphere of nonstop stress.There are other ways of looking at the world, other ways of perceiving life’s meaning, but Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are designed to ensure that their students are unlikely to encounter them. Proponents of diversity at the specialized high schools will never acknowledge that the specialized high schools inherently constitute a form of segregation, regardless of their racial demographics.
For the ruling class, the racial diversity of the specialized high schools matters for reasons of public relations. The schools operate in the fashion of scholarship programs at top universities. Their function is to isolate and retrain the (supposedly) most talented kids from low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in order to make them eligible for high-level positions within America’s fake meritocracy, which uses the “diversity” generated by their compliant presence to make a case for its own legitimacy.
What if we let the “smart” kids actually spend some time around the “normal” kids, even around the “dumb” kids? What if they learned to value solidarity instead of individual advancement? What if they came to understand that their entire communities matter, not just themselves?Read the entire article at http://www.star-revue.com/get-rid-of-the-specialized-high-schools/
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An Improvement to the Mayor’s Current Proposal
The mayor recently recommended a new specialized high school admissions procedure. Instead of a single exam, he’d like to identify the top 25% of NYC 8th grade students based on state score. Then from that group, make specialized high school offers to the top 7% of students from every school.
A critic of the mayor’s reform plan is that the plan may make offers to students who are not proficient in either math or English. This is due to the fact that even when we sort NYC students by grade, the top 25% has students who haven’t earned proficient scores.
Considering specialized high schools are accelerated, I believe it does make sense to only make offers to proficient students. Plus doing so only affects 10% of specialized high school offers.
My proposed changes to the mayor’s proposal…
- Sort all middle schools by ENI ( highest to lowest Economic Need Index )
- Select all students who’ve earned 7th Grade proficiency in State exams. Allow schools to nominate alternates for special circumstances.
- Give offers to the top 1% of students in order of ENI
- Then give offers to the top 2% of students in order of ENI
- Then give offers to the top 3% of students in order of ENI
- Continue doing so until no seats are left
This isn’t my ideal plan, but I think it’s a compromise that does fix a valid criticism of the current specialized high school admissions reform bill.
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De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist.
The mayor’s plan isn’t anti-Asian, it’s anti-racist. It would give working-class parents — including Asian-Americans — who can’t afford and shouldn’t have to find ways to afford expensive test prep programs a fairer chance that their child will be admitted into what’s known as a specialized high school. True, taking a test prep course doesn’t guarantee admission to such a school, but it does offer clear benefits and is widely understood to be essential to test-takers.
Nor is the plan a form of affirmative action. Affirmative-action admission policies — like those in place at some universities — require that race be one part of a host of measures considered. Mr. de Blasio’s plan doesn’t stipulate any racial criterion for admission, much less racial quotas (which the Supreme Court outlawed in 1978). The plan will simply give kids from a wider variety of backgrounds access to a public resource: an excellent public high school education. This is a public resource, something all New York City families contribute to with their taxes. Only about 5 percent of all New York City high school students are enrolled in a specialized high school and last year half of these kids came from just 21 middle schools.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/opinion/stuyvesant-new-york-schools-de-blasio.html
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NYC chapter of Sharpton’s group looks to scrap elite schools test, in break with longtime ally
“The National Action Network, as a Civil Rights organization, cannot allow nor support ‘elitism,’” the remarks state. “As for the opposition’s position for ‘keeping the test as is and fix all middle schools,’ NAN asks why hasn’t this been done before??! And doing so would take too long. Eliminate the test and fix all the middle schools in the process.”
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Testimony regarding segregation in New York City public schools
UFT opposes single measure admissions
The union is on record criticizing and challenging the validity of a single test as the sole criteria for high stakes decisions – such as entrance to early elementary gifted and talented programs or specialized high schools. The proponents of these standardized tests for entrance to competitive screened schools allege the tests are a reliable, objective measure that reinforce the schools’ success and set the standard for academic achievement; ultimately, it’s not broke, so no need to fix it. We respectfully and vehemently disagree. Our prior 2014 testimony citing the Education Policy Research Institute at Arizona State University’s report, “High Stakes, But Low Validity,” and the American Educational Research Association’s 2012 qualitative research, challenged the wisdom of a sole measure for admitting students in specialized high schools, plus revealed the most competitive educational institutions determine academic merit using formulas comprised of multiple academic measures, among which the most highly valued variable is exceptional talent.
The UFT believes admission to the specialized high schools must be changed to a system of multiple measures. This is not news. We urge the City Council to revisit our recommendations contained within our union task force’s 2014 report called “Redefining High Performance for Entrance Into Specialized High Schools — Making the Case for Change.” (4) That same standard, multiple indicators to assess a student’s academic standing, must be applied across the board – so a single test does not determine access to gifted and talented programs, middle schools or the specialized high schools. The UFT opposes creating additional specialized high schools where admission is based on a single test. The UFT supports admission programs based on multiple measures that capture a year of a student’s growth and ability.http://www.uft.org/testimony/testimony-regarding-segregation-new-york-city-public-schools
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New York’s Best Schools Need to Do Better
Another NYTimes editorial opinion.
Many Asian-American New Yorkers have objected to eliminating the exam, arguing that the mayor’s plan would deny admission to hard-working and high-achieving children in their communities. Many alumni at Stuyvesant and other specialized high schools have argued that dropping the test would lead to the admission of students who could not handle the rigorous curriculum. But where’s the evidence?
An admissions policy that is demonstrably unfair shouldn’t be allowed to continue simply because it has worked for certain groups. As the city schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has said, public education belongs to the entire city.
Research shows that grades are a better predictor of success than a single exam, particularly for black and Latino children who come from communities that have faced generations of racism. Elite colleges like Harvard and Yale don’t use a single exam to admit students. Why would a New York City public school?https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/new-york-specialized-high-schools-black-hispanic.html
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NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson: The time to act is now on specialized high schools
I support the success of all communities, which is why I believe the single test admissions process used to gain admittance to our eight test-based specialized schools must be abolished.
This is not a decision I make lightly, but I believe when tackling tough issues, we must make decisions based on fact, not on emotion or politics.
The single test admissions process we currently operate under was flawed from the beginning. It was mandated in 1971 under the Hecht-Calandra Act as a direct response to integration efforts to increase the number of black and brown students in specialized high schools.
The sponsors of that legislation — State Senator John Calandra and Assemblymember Burton Hecht – wanted to stop those efforts, which they felt were “an insidious attack” and “an attempt to destroy [those] schools.”
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I’m an Asian American graduate of Brooklyn Tech. Please don’t use me as a wedge in your education lawsuit
The lawsuit, brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation ostensibly to contest alleged discrimination against Asian American students, targets changes to the city’s expanding Discovery Program. It allows students attending low-income middle schools to receive an offer to one of the city’s elite high schools if they score just below the admissions cut-off on the Specialized High School Admissions Test.
Fortunately, a district judge ruled Feb. 25 that the preliminary injunction the plaintiffs sought to halt the plan was not warranted. But the Pacific Legal Foundation appears prepared to take its case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — whose composition and majority have recently shifted rightward, threatening the civil rights that many have fought so hard to achieve.
To me, this suit is as an affront to who I am as a lawyer, as an Asian American, and as a graduate of New York City’s public school system. It’s also one to which I feel a strange personal connection. -
How private tutoring makes an unequal education system even less fair
Studies show that almost every student can improve their grades with private tutoring. But when only the rich can afford it — in New York the average cost of private tutoring is $64 an hour, though rates can easily approach and even exceed $100 — it’s no surprise their children are overrepresented in elite high schools and colleges, at the expense of everyone else.
In fact, in New York there is a dedicated tutoring industry just for the Specialized High School Admissions Test, the now-infamous admissions test that is the sole criteria for admission to elite — and wildly racially imbalanced — high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Prep programs for those schools, which are considered a feeder to the Ivy League and top liberal arts colleges, can cost thousands of dollars.