first-hand
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Op-Ed: NYC High School Admissions Creates Winners And Losers. I Lost.
· opinionYou 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…
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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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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
· opinionI 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…
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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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Whose Side Are Asian-Americans On?
· analysisHsin, 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,…
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Hey DOE: Revamp the SHSAT The current exam doesn’t accurately measure ability
· opinionPart 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…
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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…
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Letters: The Test That Changed Their Lives
· opinionI 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…
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Questions raised about aptitude tests
Fox news interviews students and other stakeholders about the SHSAT “It’s not the right way to evaluate a student’s merit,” said Muhammad Deen, no other college uses one single test. Deen says he came just below the cutoff to get into Brooklyn tech and instead ended up attending a charter school. He and Morales support…
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Educators For Excellence: Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza on Desegregating NYC Schools
· opinionOpponents of school desegregation argued in 1977 that “either we have to lower the standards for everybody so the special nature of the schools would disappear, or we would have to allow these students to be subjected to failure.” It is eerie how today’s opponents repeat these same arguments. This argument assumes that black and…