SHSAT Sunset

Tag: doe-quote

  • Chancellor Carranza’s Gifted & Talented Remarks at the CEC4 Townhall

    Recently at the district 4 education townhall, Chancellor Carranza was asked a fairly complex question on Gifted and Talented programs.

    Parents wanted to know what your vision for G&T education is? Can you commit that G&T education will always be a part of the DOE? What are your positions in terms of access to G&T education both at the kindergarten level, changing the entry points for that, and also possibly changing the SHSAT and the access to the specialized high schools?

    How do we get and replicate the diversity that exists at this G&T school [ i.e., TAG citywide gifted and talented school] that does amazing work for an incredibly diverse population of learners? How do we replicate that in other schools and get more schools like TAG?

    The Chancellor gave an amazing impromptu answer. Which I believe does a superb job of collecting the main arguments against New York’s Gifted and Talented and SHSAT practices.

    I transcribed the following from an impromptu speech. There may be grammatical errors.

    That’s a whole lot of topics right there. So let me try to be succinct.  When we talk about differentiating instruction for different learners most people ( and I’m guilty since I just said here in this public meeting ) think about students that have to have curriculum differentiated because they have learning disabilities.  But it’s the same concept for differentiating learning for gifted students.

    You can’t put a gifted student in the traditional classroom with a traditional curriculum and expect them not to be bored or expect them not to be less than motivated. So you have to differentiate along the entire curriculum. [But] here’s the challenge that I have with gifted and talented programs as I see them right now in New York City. And I’ve visited a lot of gifted and talented programs.

    When you have over 35% of your students being designated as gifted and talented, we need to bottle the water that we’re drinking and ship it all over the place because that is so far beyond the percentage of gifted and talented that, from a statistical perspective, should be found in the population. I’m just being honest with you.  So what it tells me is the mechanisms that we’re using to identify true “gifted and talentedness” is perhaps are not the most robust and truly [accurate way to] identify gifted and talented students.

    Think about “How do we currently identify admitting programs for a student that is gifted and talented?”

    Well, you have to sign up for a test, and then you take the test…

    I just read in the Wall Street Journal that parents are paying $400 an hour to tutor their four-year-olds for this gifted and talented test. Then, you look at who is being identified for gifted and talented. Think about the 1.1 million students in the New York City Department of Education, 70% of whom are black and Latino students, yet don’t even come close to representing the gifted and talented pool of students in our system. I am no detective but somethings not right. The exclusive process of using a test, at four years old, to identify a student for gifted and talented measures their privilege. And I’m not talking about wealth. I’m talking about the privilege in the home of a student rather than the true giftedness or talentedness of a student.

    We need to make sure that the processes that we’re using to identify students for gifted and talented are truly research-based, evidence-based, and not skewed against any one particular group of students. That being said, I think it’s important to have gifted and talented programs in a school system. I’m not against gifted and talented, but we’ve got some work to do around, not only how we identify students, but also where those programs are across our entire program.

    Now elevate that conversation. Part of the way we’re doing that is that we’re spending time going to programs across the system and identifying programs that have great practices. So I can tell you people have already visited this program here [ i.e., TAG ] and have taken some really good notes about what are the best practices. We’re working with our superintendents and our principals and our executive superintendents. So we’re gathering from the field what is happening.

    Just to take that one step further, ask the question about specialized high schools and specialized high school admissions.  It’s the same thing. A lot of people have made a lot a lot a lot a lot of an issue about the specialized high school admissions testing. They’ve said, “chancellor why in the world are you spending all this time around eight particular schools?”

    I don’t call them elite schools. They’re not elite schools. They are specialized schools. I could take you to schools that have no screens. I could take you to schools that take whoever comes and registers in their school that are doing phenomenal things for kids and graduated great students.

    What do great schools do? Let me tell you where I stand on the specialized school because everybody’s read about it. The notion that you can test a four-year-old and tutor him to be successful on a test. I saw a lot of people say yeah that’s not okay. But think about what we do to our students that desire to go to a specialized school? They may desire to go to a specialized school; God bless America, more power to them. I’m all for it. My oldest daughter who just graduated from college, but my oldest daughter when I lived in San Francisco went to a specialized school. She did — total transparency.

    Now, why do I tell you this? Because in our system when we tell students in middle school, “we want you to go to school every single day.” Don’t miss school. Sound right? We want you to do well in your school. We want you to do well in English and Math and Social Studies and Science. We want you to get involved in a sport. We want you to play an instrument. We want you to dance. We want you to paint. We want you to volunteer. None of that matters if you want to go to a specialized school because all the matters is that you take one test on one Saturday for a few hours and get a certain cut score and guess what? You get the opportunity. “Opportunity,” make sure we’re clear on that, an opportunity to go to a specialized school. It doesn’t matter what your grades are. It doesn’t matter what your attendance is. It doesn’t matter what your community involvement is. And we know for a fact that there are families, God bless them, and some that can’t afford it and go without to pay lots of money for many years to tutor their children for the specialized admissions test.

    By the way, that test is not aligned to state standards.  When we’re telling students to do well in school, and do well in their classes, what they’re doing is doing well in the state standards and the curriculum. A curriculum that gets them to master what the state of New York has said to do. But that doesn’t matter because if you want to go to specialized school, we want you to study and get tutoring for another test that’s not aligned to state standards! It doesn’t matter if you go to school to give it all your all. Because if you do well on this test, you get the opportunity.

    I don’t know about you, but we’re selling our families a bill of goods and there is not one psychometrician.  Not one that has validated that specialized high school admissions test as valid or reliable for identifying the gifted and talented-ness of students to go to a specialized school. So we have a flawed test that has now been memorialized into state law.

    Remember I told you I lived all over the United States. I’ve never seen a state legislature codify for local control a single process for admitting to a certain sect of schools. I said that to the lawmakers in Albany as well. I’ve never seen this! Talk about local control.

    So what I’m saying is there are other ways. When my daughter went to a specialized school, she had to take an admissions test that was aligned to the state standards in California. Because we lived in California at the time. On top of that, she had to write an essay. On top of that, she had to get teacher recommendations. On top of that, all of her grades from middle school counted to composite that gave a different picture on what it was that she was. Her extracurricular activities all counted and it wasn’t just one way of getting into a specialized school. It was multiple ways of getting into a specialized school which gave more opportunity to more kids.

    Now if you don’t believe me just on those things that the system is flawed? Consider this. There are 165 specialized schools in the United States of America. 165. Of the 165 specialized schools in the United States of America, there are only eight that use a single test as a sole criteria for admissions to a specialized school. And guess where all eight of those are? New York City. So either we’ve got it all figured out or perhaps oh and by the way that specialized admissions test the analysis has shown that it is also flawed against girls, women. There are less females that are able to show admittance to specialized schools based on that test.

    So it’s not only flawed. Stuyvesant High School this past year of the hundreds of students admitted to the freshman class, but there were ten black students admitted to Stuyvesant. Yet the percentage of students but there were less than 30 black and brown kids that got into Stuyvesant this past year based on that test.  But 70% of the students in the New York City Department of Education are black and Latino.

    You show me show me a test, show me a psychometrician that has validated that test, show me the data that shows we are giving the opportunity to all students in the New York City Department of Education and I’m listening. Nobody’s been able to do that. It has to change. And when we have that kind of a disparity in our admissions process to a public school. We have to have that conversation. And I’m going to be doing that.

    CEC District 4 Townhall February 12th, 2019

  • Admissions Overhaul: Simulating the Outcome Under the Mayor’s Plan For Admissions to the City’s Specialized High Schools

    Demographic Changes. IBO compared the demographic composition of the specialized high schools under each of the three scenarios with the actual demographic composition of the ninth grade class in specialized high schools in 2017-2018.14 We found that:
    More black and Hispanic students would get offers. Under the top 7 percent scenario, the share of black students receiving offers would increase by five times and the share of Hispanic students receiving offers would increase by more than four times compared with the share of those groups that actually attended a specialized high school in 2017-2018. If the new system was fully in place, black and Hispanic students would make up roughly 19 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of all students receiving offers to the specialized high schools. Although the share of offers to black and Hispanic students would also increase under the top 3 percent and top 5 percent scenarios, the increases are less steep; for example, compared with the respective shares of incoming students who actually attended a specialized high school, the share of offers to black students under the 3 percent scenario would be about 2.4 times greater and the share of offers to Hispanic students would be a little more than double.

    • More black and Hispanic students would get offers. Under the top 7 percent scenario, the share of black students receiving offers would increase by five times and the share of Hispanic students receiving offers would increase by more than four times compared with the share of those groups that actually attended a specialized high school in 2017-2018. If the new system was fully in place, black and Hispanic students would make up roughly 19 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of all students receiving offers to the specialized high schools. Although the share of offers to black and Hispanic students would also increase under the top 3 percent and top 5 percent scenarios, the increases are less steep; for example, compared with the respective shares of incoming students who actually attended a specialized high school, the share of offers to black students under the 3 percent scenario would be about 2.4 times greater and the share of offers to Hispanic students would be a little more than double.
    • Fewer Asian students would get offers. Just over 31 percent of offers would go to Asian students if the plan was fully phased in, compared with 60.9 percent of ninth graders enrolled in specialized high schools in 2017-2018. Under all three scenarios, Asian students would still comprise the largest share of offers.
    • Roughly the same number of white students would get offers. Under the top 7 percent scenario, the share of white students receiving offers would be nearly 4 percentage points lower than the share of incoming white students at the specialized high schools in 2017-2018, from 24.1 percent last school year to 20.3 percent if the new program was fully in place. Under the top 3 percent scenario, however, the share of offers going to white students would be slightly greater than the actual share of incoming white students at specialized high schools.
    • More girls would receive offers and under all three scenarios they would account for the majority of students receiving offers. In the top 7 percent scenario, girls would receive two-thirds of all offers, compared with just 41 percent of students who actually attended specialized high schools in 2017-2018.
    • More students in poverty would receive offers.15 In 2017-2018, students in poverty comprised about half of all incoming students to specialized high schools; that share would increase to 63 percent if the program was fully phased in for 2017-2018.

    https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/admissions-overhaul-simulating-the-outcome-under-the-mayors-plan-for-admissions-to-the-citys-specialized-high-schools.html

  • Wallack Declaration – Christa McAuliffe I.S 187 vs NYC

    Case 1:18-cv-11657-ER Document 50 Filed 01/17/19

    Some interesting sections from the full declaration.

    Christa_McAuliffe_Intermediate_v_De_Blasio_et_al__nysdce-18-11657__0050.0

    Notes…

    Deputy Chancellor for Early Childhood Education and Student Enrollment in the New York City Department of Education (“DOE”). As such, the DOE Office of Student Enrollment, which among other things is responsible for enrollment in the Specialized High Schools, reports to me

    The Chancellor, the decision-making group, and I were in no way motivated by a desire to harm Asian-American students or to limit the enrollment of Asian American students in the eight Specialized High Schools. Instead, the Chancellor, the decision making group, and I were trying to increase the ethnic, racial, geographic, and socio-economic diversity of the student bodies of those high schools, which we believe will be beneficial to all students enrolled in those schools

    The Specialized High Schools have consistently provided rigorous instruction to academically gifted students in a challenging environment

    Specialized high schools should not be referred to as “Gifted and Talented” or schools for the “academically gifted”. These schools do not measure or seek to measure “giftedness”.

    It is my understanding that in the late 1960s, the Specialized High Schools were offering admission based upon the scores of an entrance examination and a Discovery Program that extended offers of admission to disadvantaged students who showed potential for success at the Specialized High Schools.

    In 1977, New York enacted legislation, the Hecht-Calandra Act, to codify the requirement that a competitive achievement examination be the main criterion for admission to the Specialized High Schools but expressly provided for a Discovery Program that was unlimited in size to admit disadvantaged students with great potential to the Specialized High Schools.

    See Laws of 1971, chap.1212, Roberts Dec. at Ex. 1 (Dkt. no. 48-1)

    Enactment of the Hecht-Calandra Act did not end debate about the
    fairness of the use of a single test for admission to the Specialized High Schools. ln 1977 the federal Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether the single test as an admission standard constituted a form of discrimination against members of minority groups and females. See Marcia Chambers, U.S. Inquiry Into Bias Is Opposed At Prestigious New York Schools, N.Y. TIMES, November 7, 1971, available at
    https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/07/archives/us-inquiry-into-bias-is-opposed-at-prestigious-new-york-schools-us.html (last visited January 12,2019). According to that news article, Board of Education data from the 1975-1976 school year showed that 23 percent of the students then enrolled at the Specialized High Schools were African-American, 9 percent Latino, l2 percent Asian-Arnerican, and 56 percent White. The Board of Education and the Office of Civil Rights reached an agreement that did not change the admissions criteria. See Ari Goldman, On The
    Right Track, N.Y. TIMES, June 77, 1978, available at
    https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/17/archives/on-the-right-track.html (last visited .Ianuary 12, 2019)

    Despite all these efforts to increase diversity, only 30 of the approximately 650 intermediate schools provided 50% of the students admitted to the Specialized High Schools, and the combined percentage of African-American and Latino students enrolled in the Specialized High Schools continued to decline

    The ENI is a measure of economic need that DOE has created and which it utilizes in many contexts to measure economic disadvantage. DOE has found the ENI to be a more effective measure of economic disadvantage in many contexts than other measures of poverty. A school’s ENI estimates the percentage of students facing economic hardship and is based upon the average of the Economic Need Values (“ENV”) of the students attending the school.

    The gradual expansion of the Discovery Program and the use of the current criteria are race-neutral policies that make no school assignments based upon race and are designed to more effectively identify disadvantaged students than the old criteria, because the
    current criteria place an emphasis. upon schools with high ENI scores, while also seeking to advance geographic, socio-economic, racial and ethnic diversity. Students who are both from low-income families and attending schools that have students with higher economic hardship
    face more disadvantages than students w1ro are from low-income families but attend schools with higher-income students. See, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/20/is-segregation-back-in-us-public-schools/integrating-rich-and-poor-matters-most.

    In addition, the ENI factor, more than the previously used Title I measure allows for a more specific assessment of the level of economic hardship at a school. because the ENI factor is on a scale and because the chosen threshold is 0.60 or greater, which includes approximately 50oh of the intermediate schools. (A Title I school is defined by the federal Title I statutory scheme. which provides that at least40Yo of families must be low-income for the school to be eligible for remedial education assistance through Title I. In New York City, more than 50% of the intermediate schools meet the Title I standard.) In other words, using the ENI factor and a 0.60 threshold allows DOE to more precisely target schools where the majority of students are facing economic hardship and the disadvantages that accompany it. The fact that many of the schools with an ENI of 0.60 or above have recently not sent students to the eight Specialized High Schools further speaks to the level of disadvantage these students face. The gradual expansion of the Discovery Program is designed to increase the diversity of the Specialized High
    School across these dimensions – racial, ethnic, geographic and socio-economic – in an orderly fashion, while ensuring that the scholastic achievement of the student bodies at the Specialized High Schools will remain excellent.

    Moreover, I note that there are many Asian-American students in the intermediate schools with ENIs of 0.60 or greater. I understand that for the class admitted in September 2018, of the students offered admission to a Specialized High School from an intermediate school with an ENI of 0.60 or greater, 70% were Asian-American, and that this constituted 1,060 Asian-American students

    Indeed, it was projected that the total enrollment of
    Asian-American students in the eight Specialized High Schools would decline by approximately 2.1%, from 53% to 50.9%. The total enrollment of students whose race or ethnicity was unknown to DOE would decline by approximately 1.2%, from 9% to 7.8%. And the total enrollment of White students would decline by approximately 2.5%, from 27.2% to 24.7%.


  • To integrate specialized high schools, are gifted programs part of the problem or the solution?

    “We’re working to raise the bar for all kids,” Carranza said in a statement to Chalkbeat. “We also have to think about access and barriers to entry, and that includes whether we’re creating unnecessary barriers by tracking students at the age of 4 or 5 years old based on a single test.”

    https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/07/17/to-integrate-specialized-high-schools-are-gifted-programs-part-of-the-problem-or-the-solution/

  • Who Wins, and Who Loses, in the Proposed Plan for Elite Schools?

    Dr. Caceres, the Bronx principal, said that half of his eighth-grade students already take advanced math and science classes, and have the ability and work ethic to thrive in a challenging school like Bronx Science. His students do not do well on the SHSAT, he said, in part because most of their families cannot afford tutoring. When the results came back this spring, some of the students were so disappointed they cried.

    “Don’t you think it’s embarrassing that Bronx Science is in the Bronx and only a handful of students are from the Bronx?” he asked. “People might think we don’t have the students, but we do have the students.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/nyregion/specialized-school-exam-losers-winners.html

  • Specialized high schools and race

    Another overview.  Adds a DoE spokesperson quote.

    According to New York City Department of Education spokesman Will Mantell, the citywide average GPA of students in the top 7 percent of their classes is 94 out of 100, the same average GPA of students offered a spot at the elite high schools. Additionally, he said their state test scores are comparable, an average of 3.9 out of 4.5 for the top 7 percent versus 4.1 for those admitted to the specialized high schools.

    https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/education/nyc-specialized-high-schools-and-race.html

  • City Announces New Initiatives to Increase Diversity at Specialized High Schools

    In 2016 Mayor de Blasio tried a variety of approaches to get more Black and Latinx students into specialized high schools. This included tutoring and outreach costing $15M over 5 years.

    None of these initiatives worked in the end. One reason for this is that city tutoring would end up competing with an increasingly aggressive private tutoring industry. NYC’s DREAM tutoring claimed a 10% success rate, but so did the larger tutoring services with thousands of students.

    “In my district, many parents pay top dollar for test prep programs, an option lower income families do not always have. Each child has a right to be prepared for this exam regardless of socio-economic status, race or ethnicity,”

    Senator Toby Ann Stavisky

    The problem with the senator’s logic is that NYC’s DREAM only caters for a few hundred of the city’s 30,000 students who take the exam. But even then it costs millions.

    “Our specialized high schools need to better reflect the diversity of our neighborhoods and our City while maintaining their high standards, and this strong package of reforms is an important step forward,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “This is a matter of fairness – we have to ensure that high-performing students who are black and Latino, and who come from low-income neighborhoods, have the same opportunities to enroll and thrive in these schools.” 

    “These new initiatives are an important step towards more diverse specialized high schools,” said Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. “This is about equity and excellence for all of our high-performing middle school students, regardless of their zip code or background. We’re going to increase diversity without lowering any standards; to the contrary, greater diversity will help all our students succeed.” 

    https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/news/announcements/contentdetails/2016/06/09/city-announces-new-initiatives-to-increase-diversity-at-specialized-high-schools