SHSAT Sunset

Tag: first-hand

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Whose Side Are Asian-Americans On?

    Hsin, the sociology professor, told me, “If you were to put aside any concerns about goals of diversity at all and you just wanted to come up with mechanism for identifying the most talented individuals to be admitted to specialized high schools, you would never come up with the admissions policy you have now.” Grades, which are repeated measures over time, are considered better indicators of academic acumen. It’s also been shown that they are better than standardized test scores when it comes to predicting success for black and Latinx students.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/151328/whose-side-asian-americans-on

  • 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

  • The Students Trying to Get Ahead in a One-Test System

    At Think Prep, a testing outfit near Penn Station, six students bent over desks in a windowless classroom. They’d been there for the past six weeks, Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., studying practice S.H.S.A.T. questions. (The program costs five thousand six hundred dollars.)

    […]

    The instructor, whose name was Andrew, wiped down the board. He’d attended Hunter College High School, another school with exam-based admissions, though it uses a different test. “It’s a mess,” he said, of the S.H.S.A.T. “It’s one test—one test date. You might get sick. You might get nervous. The test itself is a black box. It tests obscure concepts. They don’t release how the scores are calibrated, and there’s a weird curve.”

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system

  • 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

  • Letters: The Test That Changed Their Lives

    I was one of the few kids of Caribbean descent in Stuyvesant and I knew plenty of people who deserved to be there but didn’t test well or didn’t even know about the test.

    The fact that my mother didn’t want me to go because she genuinely didn’t know what the specialized high school test was or what a specialized high school was, is indicative of the larger problem at hand — that there isn’t enough outreach done in these communities that they want to pull “diverse” students from, and that the public and elementary schools serving these communities are underfunded and woefully under-prepare students for high school, much less a specialized one.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/nyregion/nyc-specialized-high-school-shsat.html