SHSAT Sunset

Tag: complaint

  • Parents Mull Suit Over City Plan to Boost Diversity at Elite Schools

    Vito LaBella, president of the Christa McAuliffe Parent Teacher Organization, said that if parents decide to forge ahead, the federal suit would challenge this set-aside plan. “It’s discriminatory,” he said. “I do believe our children would no longer be allowed to partake in Discovery.”

    Currently the small Discovery program is available to disadvantaged applicants citywide. The mayor says he can make this change because the 1971 law on admissions at these high schools allows for a Discovery program of some sort.

    […]

    I.S. 87 Christa McAuliffe, a highly selective public school in the Borough Park neighborhood, has been a strong feeder to specialized high schools. With roughly 900 students, about 36% of its eighth-graders headed to Stuyvesant High School, 20% to Brooklyn Technical High School, and 20% to Staten Island Technical High School, according to city data for the 2016-17 school year.

    That year, 67% of the school’s students were Asian, 26% were white, 6% were Hispanic and 1% were black.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/parents-mull-suit-over-city-plan-to-boost-diversity-at-elite-schools-1542083367

  • Failing The Stuyvesant Test

    In bringing its federal complaint against the Specialized High Schools admissions policy, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (to which I am an unpaid advisor) is challenging both the effect of the test in diminishing opportunities for bright black and Latino youth and shining a light on the arbitrary nature of the admissions process. How peculiar, to have the state legislature determine these procedures! Normally, such technical matters are left to educators versed in psychometrics and professional judgment. Here, a 40 year-old law trumps everything we know and otherwise practice about academic merit.

    That SHSAT scores are highly sensitive to test prep is beyond dispute. Rigid rank ordering creates hair’s-breadth distinctions without substance. The test has never been validated to determine its consistency with actual high school performance so the city Department of Education cannot even demonstrate a relationship between admitted students’ test results and those of others who might have been more successful meeting elite high schools’ demands. Discounting the use of middle school grades, portfolios of student work, and (after substantiated widespread cheating at Stuyvesant) character diminishes merit to a narrow gauge of tutored test-taking proficiency on a given day in an adolescent’s life.

    https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2013/01/11/failing-the-stuyvesant-test/

  • Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High Schools

    A coalition of educational and civil rights groups filed a federal complaint on Thursday saying that black and Hispanic students were disproportionately excluded from New York City’s most selective high schools because of a single-test admittance policy they say is racially discriminatory.

    The complaint, filed with the United States Education Department, seeks to have the policy found in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to change admissions procedures “to something that is nondiscriminatory and fair to all students,” said Damon T. Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint.

    At issue is the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is the sole criterion for admission to eight specialized schools that, even in the view of city officials, have been troubled by racial demographics that are out of balance.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/nyregion/specialized-high-school-admissions-test-is-racially-discriminatory-complaint-says.html