Tag: alumni
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SHSBADI at 10: Lessons Learned and the Path Forward
We realized that both the admissions process and the school system had changed from the time of our attendance. Many of us came to Stuyvesant by way of gifted classes in our neighborhood public schools. Until the 90s, gifted education was decentralized, with accelerated SP (“special progress”) and IGC (“intellectually gifted”) classes in local schools…
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Seven NYC Students Didn’t Get Seats in Elite Schools, So They Asked State for Help
Another attack on NYC’s specialized high school diversity efforts. This is representing attorney Claude M. Millman’s ( Bronx Science ’81 Alumni ) second legal action against the SHSAT reform that I know of. Previously he represented a coalition of anti-reform protesters in another SHSAT related matter in 2014. I believe but haven’t confirmed that this…
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How One ‘Ordinary’ Brooklyn High School Produced Six Nobel Laureates, a Supreme Court Justice, and Three Senators
Verba, it turns out, was a graduate of James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York. So is Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. And the Senate minority leader, Charles Schumer. And even a former Republican senator from Minnesota, Norm Coleman. At least six Nobel laureates also attended the…
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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…
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Racist? Fair? Biased? Asian-American Alumni Debate Elite High School Admissions
“We used to joke that whoever had the most money to spend on test prep would probably go to Stuyvesant.” That was how Ms. Rahman was introduced to the specialized school debate as a young Bangladeshi immigrant living in Brooklyn. In high school, she came to believe that the admissions process was about money, not…
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Overemphasizing a Test, Oversimplifying Our Children: An APA Perspective on Specialized High School Reform towards Educational Equity
The SHSAT is misperceived as an objective, and “colorblind” tool to measure merit. However, an expansive body of research reveals that school screening policies that do not consider race or socioeconomic status do not reduce, but rather contribute to further “stratification by race and ethnicity across schools and programs.” […] In the field of testing,…
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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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Asian Americans should embrace reform of specialized high school admissions
Not all communities view testing in the same light, and aversion to change is natural. Still, SHSAT supporters have yet to persuasively explain away decades of social-science research. Contrary to the belief that scrapping the SHSAT would lower the quality of students, education experts such as Amy Hsin, associate professor of sociology at CUNY, have argued that grades…
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Diversify elite schools, for all: Asian-American students have to learn better lessons
As test prep for the SHSAT exam has become more widespread, diversity has plummeted. Schools like Stuyvesant have wound up in highly public cheating scandals. Without greater student-body diversity, schools like Stuyvesant may never be able to curb cheating because it becomes too commonplace; students will continue to do it until they get caught. Students…