SHSAT Sunset

Tag: alumni

  • 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 giving academically talented kids in every city neighborhood an opportunity to receive instruction in the above-grade level material they would encounter on the SHSAT. Today, that opportunity is concentrated in just a handful of schools.

    Today, no other school system in the country uses a single test to determine who is admitted to their most competitive public schools. None uses the SHSAT, which is distinctive in its content and format, and mysterious in its scoring. It is not aligned with what most students are taught and includes question types which are unfamiliar to most test takers and give a significant advantage to students who have had prior exposure to the test, even with recent changes to its components. This speaks to the validity of the test, or whether it is actually measuring what it was designed to measure. New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza addressed this issue when he testified before the NYS Assembly Committee on Education last year. In his testimony, Chancellor Carranza explained that “a test is valid when it measures what it was designed to measure and it’s reliable when it gives you an accurate measurement over time…[a]s students go through their school day and they’re learning the state standards which the legislature has said this is what you need to know to be able to get a diploma from the State of New York, this test does not measure that. It does not measure that mastery. It’s a tricky test designed to rank order students. So in terms of reliability and validity for ranking students, it is. But the question is it the best methodology for measuring talent, for identifying talent, for identifying the grit, the tenacity, the dedication, the desire of students to be able to go a specialized public school in New York City. It is not valid, it is not reliable when it is used in that way.”

    Although it would be logical to expect that the students who perform the best on the SHSAT to also be the students who perform the best on state tests, research indicates that is not necessarily the case. In 2015, Sean Corcoran, a researcher at NYU, examined data from 2005 to 2013 and determined that Black, Latinx and female students who score well on state tests are admitted to specialized high schools at a lower rate than White, Asian and male students. While the reasons for these differences are not fully understood, they were enough for Corcoran to conclude that the SHSAT acts as a BARRIER to admission for certain groups. This finding, standing alone, raises serious questions about the continued utilization of the SHSAT in the high school admissions process.

    To the extent a special program like Discovery must be used, we see an opportunity to strengthen this alternate path. We have proposed combining the Discovery Program with the DOE’s DREAM middle school enrichment program as part of a larger, coordinated effort to identify academically talented students who are educationally disadvantaged as early as possible in their academic careers, and then provide them with accelerated instruction and other appropriate support, academic as well as social, both before and after their enrollment in high school. This would allow the City to move beyond the SHSAT as the sole way to identify talent, and target academically talented students from communities underrepresented at the City’s specialized high schools with a longer period of enrichment and support than the summer session currently offered through the Discovery Program. This would help compensate for our uneven educational system, and would assist admitted students with addressing the challenges they may face once they start high school.

    https://medium.com/@shsbadi/shsbadi-at-10-lessons-learned-and-the-path-forward-d6ca29c8a5de

  • Billionaire joins push to stop de Blasio’s high school admissions test plan

    Powerful specialized high school alumni have now promised to put MILLIONS into lobbying against replacing the embattled 114 multiple-choice exam as the sole admissions criteria for these schools.

    Cosmetics tycoon Ron Lauder is bankrolling a multimillion-dollar effort to stop Mayor Bill de Blasio from eliminating the admissions test to the city’s top high schools, sources told The Post on Monday.


    The billionaire Clinique chairman — a 1961 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science— is prepared to spend at least “seven figures” of his personal fortune on TV commercials and other efforts to block de Blasio’s controversial proposal, sources said.


    The campaign will target Albany lawmakers, whom the mayor needs to amend a 1971 state law that created the Specialized High School Admission Test — and may even include attack ads against de Blasio, one source said.


    In an email sent to his friends Monday morning — and obtained by The Post — Lauder said he was “joining a new effort called the Education Equity Campaign to achieve the goal of creating new Specialized High Schools” and “will be helping this campaign however I can.”

    https://nypost.com/2019/04/22/billionaire-joins-push-to-stop-de-blasios-high-school-admissions-test-plan/

    These millions are on top of the hundreds of thousands alumni already report in lobbying.

  • 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.

    Referring to 2014 Legal Action

    I believe but haven’t confirmed that this filing was done through the state education department’s appeals process: Appeals or Petitions to Commissioner of Education. Maybe SHSAT reform supporters should have been filing petitions all along?

    From the WSJ article…

    The petitioners’ unusual move comes at a time of intense debate over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s effort to overhaul the admissions system. While lobbying legislators to change the state law, he vastly expanded the Discovery program for the coming school year, in hopes that doing so would better integrate schools that are predominantly Asian.


    “The absurdity of the implementation of the mayor’s Discovery program is that it is supposed to be directed towards getting African-American and Hispanic kids into these specialized high schools, and it is so arbitrarily drawn that even those kids are adversely affected,” the students’ lawyer, Claude Millman, said Friday.


    The petitions say the city ignored language in the 1971 law requiring that Discovery operate “without in any manner interfering with the academic level” of these eight schools. The petitions include signed statements from three former principals of Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science, saying the current version of Discovery admits many students whose test scores are too low for them to keep up.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/seven-nyc-students-didnt-get-seats-in-elite-schools-so-they-asked-state-for-help-11555768800

    It will be interesting to see how Mr. Millman plans to establish that letting students in who scored a few multiple-choice questions lower on a single test “interferes with the academic level” of the schools.

    In the past students accepted via the discovery program scored identically to students who aced the SHSAT and scored up to 300 points higher…

    Stuyvesant’s current principal, Eric Contreras, didn’t comment on the petitions but expressed confidence in the Discovery program. “Current ninth-graders who participated in Discovery last summer are doing well and participating fully in the Stuyvesant experience,” he said by email. “I have no doubt that the students who complete the program this coming summer will also be successful here.”

    WSJ article

  • 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 school: Gary Becker and Robert Solow in economics, Arthur Ashkin and Martin Perl in physics, and Baruch Blumberg and Stanley Cohen in medicine.

    The secret doesn’t seem to have been any of the obvious factors. It wasn’t a particularly wealthy group of students, like, say, those who attend Phillips Andover Academy or other private high schools that have produced lots of prominent professionals.


    “An ordinary middle- and lower–middle-class high school,” is how Verba described it in a 2011 interview with the Annual Review of Political Science.


    It was, Fish said, “just a district school,” not a magnet school and not an exam school that required for entrance a high score on a competitive standardized test.

    https://www.educationnext.org/one-ordinary-brooklyn-high-school-produced-six-nobel-laureates-supreme-court-justice-three-senators/

  • 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

  • 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 merit. Now, she said, “I feel like that system shouldn’t really exist.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/nyregion/nyc-specialized-high-school-test.html

  • 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, known as psychometrics, a single measure like the SHSAT violates the universally accepted norm and consensus in favor of multiple measures.[19] Having a single-test as the admission policy in no means takes into account the wide range of diverse experiences of all students and their families in New York City.

    Further, a single measure of a student’s academic potential taken at one particular point in time can be imprecise. Using multiple criteria reduces the risk that a school admissions decision is based on an erroneous measurement. Almost all US academic institutions employ multiple-measure admissions policies

    http://www.cacf.org/

    Archive:

    https://shsatsunset.org/CACF-SHSAT-Paper-201811-01.pdf

    CACF-SHSAT-Paper-201811-01

  • 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/

  • 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 are considered the best predictor of academic performance. “At best, the SHSAT [results] are unproven assessmentsof skills,” she says.

    Moreover, unlike the SHSAT, annual statewide exams probe mastery of material actually taught in schools. Using Hsin’s measures of academic potential, modeling by the city’s Department of Education indicates that the new student body would continue to be comprised of high-performing students. Grades would average 94%, while state test scores would average 3.9 on a 4.5 scale. Fourteen percent of black and Latinx students with 4’s on state math exams get offers now. According to the Department of Education, this could rise to 32%.

    Sean P. Corcoran, an associate professor of economics and education policy at New York University, and NYU research fellow E. Christine Baker-Smith ran simulations of a plan similar to de Blasio’s proposal. While critics have claimed that eliminating the SHSAT is anti-Asian, the study suggests that white and Asian American students would be affected proportionately. With only trivial changes in state exam scores, offers would increase to free-lunch-eligible students, girls, and black and Latinx students, all of whom are currently underrepresented in the specialized high schools.

    http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20180725/OPINION/180729955/asian-americans-should-embrace-reform-of-specialized-high-school

  • 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 who have taken test prep who may not otherwise meet the criteria for admissions to these elite schools may feel pressure to succeed at all costs.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-diversify-elite-schools-for-all-20180716-story.html