Category: opinion

  • 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 flew into the classroom, lodging itself in the whiteboard, missing our heads by inches. The teacher was so traumatized that she never returned. But we, the students, were back in the same room two days later. A rotation of substitutes, unqualified to teach the course, monitored us the rest of the year. None of us passed the end-of-year exam.


    As the son of two poor immigrants, neither of whom are fluent in English, I already had obstacles in my path, but by that point, I knew that my educational environment had become one, too.

    My story is not unique. New York City has at least 124 small high schools where fewer than 1 in 5 students enters the school having passed the 8th grade state English exam. At Victory Collegiate, that number was 1 in 20. At some schools the number is zero. These schools are, on average, 92% black and Hispanic.

    http://gothamist.com/2019/03/19/op-ed_nyc_high_school_admissions.php

  • 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 and talented admissions, where disparities are equally abysmal. Or SAT and ACT results. There is an entire economy set up around test prep for a reason.


    We have a system that is profoundly unfair — against the poor, against immigrants, against black and brown students, and against Asian Americans — and we call it a meritocracy.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-demolish-the-meritocracy-myth-20190320-nz2ra5nsqjba5hsyh3f6khihzy-story.html

  • 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 of the graduates we interviewed from earlier years were from poor or working-class Jewish families. We also interviewed a lot of former students who were brought up in white, middle-class families.

    Stuyvesant is a mobility machine — students that come in poor usually are upwardly mobile. This includes students admitted under Discovery, or who barely made the cut, and even those who had “poor” grades (including those who comfortably passed the cutoff scores). The vast majority of graduates went on to good colleges and to professional careers. It’s not surprising, then, that there’s so much agita over any changes to the admission policy, even though it will only affect around 1000 seats across the schools per class.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-its-the-peer-effect-stupid-20190215-story.html

  • 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/

  • 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 displeasure with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to diversify New York City’s elite specialized high schools. Many of these phone calls possess the same overt racial animus of years past, with arguments that had served the same purpose then: to maintain the broken status quo.

    For a young black or Latino middle schooler living in Flatbush in the 1980s, the thought of going to one of the crown jewels of New York’s public schools seemed unimaginable. Even though I was ranked third at my middle school and enrolled in a gifted program, I did not for a moment consider taking the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test in order to apply to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or Brooklyn Tech. Left to my own young devices, I determined the SHSAT would be too difficult and too culturally biased for me to perform well on it. Instead, I opted to apply to the fourth specialized high school, LaGuardia. Although the school was the most competitive school of its kind, I based my decision in part on LaGuardia’s different application process, which entails a performance audition and tends to attract more culturally diverse applicants.

    https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/opinion/opinion/my-journey-shows-why-specialized-high-school-admissions-must-change.html

  • 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 proposal to admit students based on a more equitable policy has been met with vehement opposition from people with false presumptions about students like me. Many assume that low-income students of color like me are just “too lazy” to prepare for the exam, and that kids who do better on the SHSAT prove they “deserve” to get in.

    Replacing the SHSAT with a more balanced approach is about taking a holistic approach that factors in academic excellence, motivation and grit throughout a student’s entire middle school career. To me, that’s better than relying on a single test, any day of the week.

     

    https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-stop-relying-on-just-one-test-20181204-story.html

  • 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 senior at Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists. She is black and Latina. “However, the higher performing class got to take it as well as the prep they needed.”
    […]
    But then I talked to my classmates and saw other sides to the issue. For example, one of my friends in middle school got nearly failing grades, but his parents paid for private home tutoring for the SHSAT and he ended up going to Bronx Science. It’s unfair that a lazy and complacent student can ace the test and go to a great school, while a straight-A student who might not have passed the test or even known about it would be denied admission.
    […]
    When Angie, who wasn’t told about the SHSAT as an 8th grader, took the SAT in high school, she got one of the highest scores in her school. “People said, why didn’t you take the SHSAT? You could have gotten into a specialized a school,” she said. “So I think info needs to be distributed a lot better. Not being told about this opportunity makes me feel like the kids in my class were just expected to fail.”

    http://www.ycteenmag.org/issues/NYC263/Hey_DOE:_Revamp_the_SHSAT.html?story_id=NYC-2018-09-16

  • 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 plan will close the gap. But if city officials think boldly, they could transform these schools into places that give all students the opportunity for something special.

    https://www.amny.com/opinion/editorial/closing-gap-at-specialized-high-schools-1.20853768

  • 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 at Specialized High Schools along with their thoughts on the pending State Legislation (S7983, A10427 and S8503) to address this issue. 

    https://www.stuyalumni.org/open-letter-to-chancellor-carranza/

  • 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, other than test companies and those involved in data mining, to put so much emphasis on standardized tests. You are not preparing students for higher education by using a single test criteria for top high schools- you are not preparing them for today’s workplace either.