SHSAT Sunset

Tag: nytimes

  • Reopen Schools, and Reform Them

    Instead of allowing the pandemic to worsen longstanding inequities, New York could seize on the disruption to fix its broken high school admissions practices at all its schools. Several promising proposals have emerged in recent years. Instead of a single exam, Albany could allow the city to use state test scores, class rank and other measures. These important reforms would require the State Legislature to overturn Hecht-Calandra, the 1971 law that explicitly requires three of the specialized high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School — to use an exam as the only point of entry.

    Changing admissions policies to allow talented Black and Latino students — indeed, all students — a fair shot at attending the city’s top high schools should be the easy part. The far harder challenge facing the city in the coming years is how to prevent millions of children who were already vulnerable before the pandemic from falling far further behind.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/opinion/new-york-public-high-schools.html

  • The Myth That Busing Failed

    “The school bus, treasured when it was serving as a tool of segregation, became reviled only when it transformed into a tool of integration,” Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in a news analysis.

    Podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/podcasts/the-daily/busing-school-segregation.html

  • How New York’s Elite Public Schools Lost Their Black and Hispanic Students

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    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/nyregion/nyc-public-schools-black-hispanic-students.html

  • De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist.

    The mayor’s plan isn’t anti-Asian, it’s anti-racist. It would give working-class parents — including Asian-Americans — who can’t afford and shouldn’t have to find ways to afford expensive test prep programs a fairer chance that their child will be admitted into what’s known as a specialized high school. True, taking a test prep course doesn’t guarantee admission to such a school, but it does offer clear benefits and is widely understood to be essential to test-takers.

    Nor is the plan a form of affirmative action. Affirmative-action admission policies — like those in place at some universities — require that race be one part of a host of measures considered. Mr. de Blasio’s plan doesn’t stipulate any racial criterion for admission, much less racial quotas (which the Supreme Court outlawed in 1978). The plan will simply give kids from a wider variety of backgrounds access to a public resource: an excellent public high school education. This is a public resource, something all New York City families contribute to with their taxes. Only about 5 percent of all New York City high school students are enrolled in a specialized high school and last year half of these kids came from just 21 middle schools.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/opinion/stuyvesant-new-york-schools-de-blasio.html

  • Big Money Enters Debate Over Race and Admissions at Stuyvesant

    Follow the money they typically say.

    Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir, and Richard D. Parsons, the former chairman of Citigroup, have for decades had their hands in New York City affairs. Mr. Lauder ran a failed bid for mayor and successfully led a campaign for term limits for local elected officials. Mr. Parsons has been a prominent adviser to two mayors.


    Now, they are teaming up to try to influence one of the city’s most intractable and divisive debates: how to address the lack of black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and the other elite public high schools that use a test to determine admission.


    Mr. Lauder this week announced that he was financing a multimillion-dollar lobbying, public relations and advertising effort called the Education Equity Campaign, whose immediate goal is to ensure that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to eliminate the entrance exam does not pass the State Legislature, people involved in the effort said.

    […]

    Tusk Strategies, a political strategy firm with close ties to Mr. Bloomberg, said it was orchestrating the effort for a fee of between $50,000 and $150,000 a month.


    Also on the payroll are Albany lobbying firms, including Patrick B. Jenkins & Associates and Bolton St.-Johns, known for their connections to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration and the State Legislature, respectively.


    The group’s board of advisers, who are also being compensated, includes education experts who have supported Mr. Bloomberg’s accountability-driven brand of education reform.


    The public face of the campaign, the Rev. Kirsten John Foy, whose civil rights organization is receiving a contribution for its involvement, is a prominent minister and a Sharpton ally. The campaign is planning to spend at least $1 million on advertisements alone. Neither the website nor the ads bear any mention of Mr. Lauder or Mr. Parsons.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/nyregion/specialized-high-schools-lobbying.html

  • Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years

    It’s important to understand the political climate before the NY State legislature decided to pass Hecht-Calandra in 1971. The New York Times does a great job filing in that context.

    In 2016, a proposal to send some Upper West Side children — who were zoned for a high-performing, mostly white, wealthy elementary school near their homes — to a lower-performing school, attended mostly by low-income black and Hispanic students, about a ten-minute walk away, was met with vitriol.


    A version of the plan — which ultimately impacted a relatively small number of schools — eventually passed after years of negotiations.
    B犀利士 ut the recent push for integration has been led in part by liberal white parents.


    Some of these parents helped force the most comprehensive local desegregation policy yet: the elimination of screened middle schools in Brooklyn’s District 15, which includes upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Park Slope. Some parents there have said the election of President Trump prompted them to combat segregation in their children’s schools.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html

  • Why Did New York’s Most Selective Public High School Admit Only 7 Black Students?

    Nearly 900 students have been offered admission to one of New York City’s most elite public high schools. Only seven of those students are black.

    New York Times podcast on the SHSAT issue. Audio program reviews SHSAT history to current politics.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/podcasts/the-daily/black-students-nyc-high-school.html

  • New York’s Best Schools Need to Do Better

    Another NYTimes editorial opinion.

    Many Asian-American New Yorkers have objected to eliminating the exam, arguing that the mayor’s plan would deny admission to hard-working and high-achieving children in their communities. Many alumni at Stuyvesant and other specialized high schools have argued that dropping the test would lead to the admission of students who could not handle the rigorous curriculum. But where’s the evidence?


    An admissions policy that is demonstrably unfair shouldn’t be allowed to continue simply because it has worked for certain groups. As the city schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has said, public education belongs to the entire city.


    Research shows that grades are a better predictor of success than a single exam, particularly for black and Latino children who come from communities that have faced generations of racism. Elite colleges like Harvard and Yale don’t use a single exam to admit students. Why would a New York City public school?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/new-york-specialized-high-schools-black-hispanic.html

  • Stuyvesant Has 29 Black Students Out of 3,300. How Do They Feel?

    The students — members of the school’s Black Students League and Aspira, the Hispanic student organization — recalled painful memories of having heard racist comments behind their backs at school. They reflected on their shared sense of alienation. They said they worried that adults would allow inequities in the system to persist.
    “It’s frustrating to see that nobody wants to do anything, until it’s like, ‘Oh no, nobody got it in,’” said Katherine Sanchez, 17, whose parents are from the Dominican Republic. “But it’s like, ‘well you didn’t try to make anyone come in, you didn’t do anything about it.’”

    Katherine and some of the others noted how strange it was to leave their mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods to make lengthy commutes to Tribeca, where the school takes up most of a city block. Katherine, the oldest of four siblings, said she was the first person in two decades to go to Stuyvesant from her middle school in Morris Park, in the Bronx.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/nyregion/stuyvesant-high-school-black-students.html

  • Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots

    Lawmakers considering Mr. de Blasio’s proposal have faced a backlash from the specialized schools’ alumni organizations and from Asian-American groups who believe discarding the test would water down the schools’ rigorous academics and discriminate against the mostly low-income Asian students who make up the majority of the schools’ student bodies. (At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of current students are Asian-American.) The push to get rid of the test, which requires approval from the State Legislature, appears all but dead.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/nyregion/black-students-nyc-high-schools.html