SHSAT Sunset

Tag: new yorker

  • Back to School Reform

    The allure of testing lies in its apparent neutrality—its democratic indifference to a student’s background and wealth. But this is not how the current system functions. Success correlates closely to socioeconomic advantages and access to test preparation. Pricey services offer tutoring to ever younger children. (There is a niche industry of consultants who help two-year-olds ace their preschool admissions assessments.) Yet many defenders of testing believe that more subjective forms of evaluation present their own unfairness. 

    Outside the neutral language of policy reports, the issue of testing is debated in a context of winners and losers, of model minorities and problematic ones. A less primitive view sees the conflict as being between different groups fighting for a system in which their children are the least likely to be hampered by discrimination. Because discrimination functions in different ways across lines of race and ethnicity, the issue is not simply the fairness of testing; it’s that people on either side of the question can reasonably describe their position as an attempt to fight against discrimination

    The success of Asian-American students, some from low-income families, doesn’t imply that the system is fair; it suggests that unfairness can be mitigated by extraordinary effort. There is a vast difference between an equal system and one in which it is possible to succeed.

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/back-to-school-reform

  • How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools


    The anniversary of de Rivera’s battle comes amid another controversy about diversity at Stuyvesant. The school accepts students based entirely on an entrance exam, and the result is that few black and Latino students are admitted. (Only ten black students were admitted to Stuyvesant’s incoming class last year.) Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed eliminating the test for all of the specialized public schools in the city and offering admission to the top seven per cent of students in each district, insuring more diverse enrollment. Stuyvesant is currently seventy-three per cent Asian, and many Asian-Americans feel that the proposal is an attack on their community. De Rivera is disheartened by the low numbers of black and Latinos at specialized schools, and feels that racism is still built into the educational system, just as sexism was. She points out that Bates has eliminated mandatory reporting of S.A.T. scores from its admissions process. “How do we get those numbers up?” she said. “Taking a percentage of high achievers from each district makes moral sense.”

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-a-thirteen-year-old-girl-smashed-the-gender-divide-in-american-high-schools

  • 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