Opponents 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 Hispanic students are unable to achieve at high levels because they don’t have access to SHSAT test prep. On the contrary, there is no evidence to support the idea that multi-measure admittance will diminish the quality of any of these schools. These arguments are tired dog-whistles to racist assumptions and entirely grounded in efforts to preserve access to these institutions for the few.
Tag: first-hand
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Educators For Excellence: Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza on Desegregating NYC Schools
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Everyone needs help getting into Stuyvesant: What it really takes
Now that I mention it, I don’t think I was all that good at the test questions at the beginning. But my mother, a math teacher, had a blue shoulder bag of “manipulables”: toys, essentially, that she used to explain concepts in geometry and probability. The blue bag was always in the foyer, as if she might need it at the last minute while escaping a fire or running late for work.
My father, who taught English, discussed the books I was reading, even (despite his love of realism) the Star Wars spin-offs. When I got stuck on a test-prep problem, they were happy to help and had time to do so.
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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 the Mayor’s proposal to eliminate the SHSAT and instead admit students to the elite schools based on GPA and state test scores.
“It is more of a way of looking at the student as a whole, rather than this one simple test score that didn’t really showcase what a good student is,” Deen said.
http://www.fox5ny.com/news/questions-raised-about-aptitude-tests
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Nix this admissions test: A recent Stuyvesant grad makes the case against the SHSAT
Student argument against the SHSAT
Defenders of the current system, hailing the test as establishing a level playing field, argue that if more black and Latino students truly wanted to attend specialized high schools, they could just study harder. I have repeatedly heard my classmates champion this mindset, implying that black and Latino students are not as hardworking, and, even more disturbingly, not as smart as their Asian counterparts.
The SHSAT, however, does not measure work ethic or intelligence, but a student’s ability to answer over 100 tedious multiple choice questions in under three hours. It tests for access to tutors and cram schools that teach students the skills they need to answer the questions without thinking.
I flunked my first practice tests. After a prep class and some tutoring sessions, however, I knew all the tricks. If I hadn’t had access to that class, I likely would not have gotten into Stuy.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-nix-this-admissions-test-20180607-story.html
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‘So there I was, figuring it out myself’: A Brooklyn teen on why the city’s specialized high school prep wasn’t enough
My family wasn’t well off financially. Often times, we struggled and there was constant worry over whether we had food in the fridge or we had school supplies. I wasn’t expecting to enroll in a Kaplan or a Princeton Review course like my fellow affluent classmates. Nevertheless, I persisted. I sought out a free program that’s funded by the Department of Education called DREAM. Upon hearing the name of the program, I knew this was my chance to really meet my goal.
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PUTTING DREAMS TO THE TEST: A special report; Elite High School Is a Grueling Exam Away
A NYTimes overview of the test and experiences in 1998.
The Stuyvesant test is officially called the ”Examination for the Specialized Science High Schools” — Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. The same test is given for admission to all three, and students simply list their first, second and third choice. Since a majority of students list Stuyvesant first — 11,397 out of 18,524 eighth graders who took the most recent test — the cutoff for admission to Stuyvesant is higher. This year students had to score 559 or better for Stuyvesant’s admission, or get about 85 of the 100 questions right.
The test is divided into English and math sections, just like the S.A.T., and is prepared and graded by American Guidance Service, an educational publishing company outside Minneapolis-St. Paul. To make the test more fair to immigrants whose English lags, sections on sentence completion and word synonyms, antonyms and analogies have been eliminated. The English part of the Stuyvesant test emphasizes ”logical reasoning,” which educators say makes the test more difficult.