Category: opinion
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Op-Ed: NYC High School Admissions Creates Winners And Losers. I Lost.
You would never guess that Victory Collegiate is located in one of the most diverse and wealthy cities in the world: my school was 90 percent black, 7 percent Hispanic, and had a few Arab and South Asian kids. Most of us qualified for free lunch. One day, in my AP Biology class, a bullet…
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Demolish the meritocracy myth: No, the specialized high school exam is not a fair admissions screen; it’s discriminatory
And for others, paid school consultants, tutors and prep courses, some starting as early as kindergarten, give students with means, or those with parents in the know, a leg up. That includes poor Asian families who spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars prepping for the exam. The same can be said for gifted…
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It’s the peer effect, stupid: What makes schools like Stuyvesant great? It’s not test-based admission, but a broader culture of excellence
We’ve conducted more than 70 interviews (and counting) with adult alumni of Stuyvesant High School who graduated between 1946 and 2013 for a book we’re working on called “The Peer Effect.” (We both graduated from Stuyvesant in the 1980s.) Many of the people we’ve interviewed grew up poor, and/or were black, Latino or Asian. Some…
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CityViews: Equitable Admission to High Schools Must Start with Middle School
recent actions by the Trump administration strongly suggest that attempts to increase representation of African American and Latinx students at schools with competitive admissions processes could invite investigation from the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice. It is safer just to eliminate competitive processes wherever possible. https://citylimits.org/2019/01/21/cityviews-equitable-admission-to-high-schools-must-start-with-middle-school/
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My journey shows why specialized high school admissions must change
With a sense of tragic déjà vu, reactionary forces are once again pushing back against any proposed integration of prestigious, but largely segregated, schools. This development is so predictable that it would be comical – were it not for the terrible consequences. Already, several irate New Yorkers have called my district office to voice their…
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Stop relying on just one test: Mayor de Blasio is right to try to want to turn away from the SHSAT high school admissions exam
I was the valedictorian of my eighth-grade class and earned a special honor for never missing a day of school, but that wasn’t enough to help me, or others like me, gain admission into schools like American Studies. Instead, a single specialty test was used to gauge my intelligence, work ethic and worthiness. The mayor’s…
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Hey DOE: Revamp the SHSAT The current exam doesn’t accurately measure ability
Part of the reason for this disparity is that many kids don’t find out about specialized high schools and the SHSAT early enough, if at all. “In my middle school, my class didn’t know there was an SHSAT. We were considered the dumb class because we didn’t test well in elementary,” says Angie, currently a…
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Closing gap at specialized high schools
Ultimately, the city has to do more to improve educational opportunities for everyone, not just the admission process to the top schools. More middle schools need to be high-achieving ones, more gifted programs are needed in the younger grades, and the city should add more specialized high schools, too. There’s no guarantee that the city’s…
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Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Diversity Initiative: Letter To Chancellor Carranza
Below is an open letter to Chancellor Richard A. Carranza from the Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Diversity Initiative (SHSBADI). SHSBADI was formed in 2010 to address the declining enrollment of Black and Latinx students at Stuyvesant and the city’s other specialized high schools. The letter below outlines SHSBADI’s recommendations for ways to increase the number of Black and Latinx students…
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Why I Support Multiple Measures of Admission to New York’s Specialized High Schools
First, I support multiple measures of evaluation for colleges, jobs, sports teams and anything else I can think of, why should I support a single test as the sole standard of admission to specialized high schools. Secondly, at a time when more and more colleges are becoming SAT/ACT Optional, it is in no one’s interest,…