Tag: nytimes
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Who Wins, and Who Loses, in the Proposed Plan for Elite Schools?
Dr. Caceres, the Bronx principal, said that half of his eighth-grade students already take advanced math and science classes, and have the ability and work ethic to thrive in a challenging school like Bronx Science. His students do not do well on the SHSAT, he said, in part because most of their families cannot afford…
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Discovery Expansion: Elite New York High Schools to Offer 1 in 5 Slots to Those Below Cutoff
By 2020, 20 percent of the ninth-grade seats in every specialized high school will be set aside for Discovery students, according to city education officials. Currently, only 5 percent of the 4,000 ninth-grade seats are filled through Discovery. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/discovery-program-specialized-schools-nyc.html
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Should These Tests Get a Failing Grade?
SHSAT 1, NYTimes reporters and editors 0 But the problems I encountered when taking the SHSAT online demonstrate how even one standardized test question might derail a promising student’s future. In fact, I was thrown off by the very first question on the test […] Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of…
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NYT Editorial Board: It’s Time to Integrate New York’s Best Schools
New York’s elementary and middle schools do not prepare children for the test, all but ensuring that students seek out extensive test preparation. Many Asian and white students have done so for thousands of dollars apiece. Black and Latino students are likely to walk in with little or no test preparation. Of all elite public high…
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The Big Problem With the New SAT
The SAT will remain a “norm-referenced” exam, designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the middle and with…
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Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York
The earlier test that Judge Wood ruled was discriminatory, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, was used until 2004. She said that because the minority candidates were failing that test in greater numbers, the burden was on public officials to prove the test served a valid purpose. In similar rulings, judges around the country have…
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Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High Schools
A coalition of educational and civil rights groups filed a federal complaint on Thursday saying that black and Hispanic students were disproportionately excluded from New York City’s most selective high schools because of a single-test admittance policy they say is racially discriminatory. The complaint, filed with the United States Education Department, seeks to have the policy found…
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Brooklyn: Action Filed Over School Admissions
The first legal challenge against Hecht-Calandra was launched in 1974. Only 3 years after the law was passed. Since then there’s been a number of legal actions. Here’s one from 2007. A public-interest law firm in Washington filed a class-action lawsuit against the New York City Education Department yesterday, charging that a program created to…
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Admission Test’s Scoring Quirk Throws Balance Into Question
Mr. Feinman had stumbled on a little-known facet of the test: because of the complex way it is graded, a student scoring extremely high on one part of the exam has a sharp advantage over a student with high but more balanced scores in each subject. “As taxpayers and parents, we should know how the…
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3 High Schools For Students Who Excel
The Board of Education will open three selective high schools in September on campuses of the City University of New York, expanding the slots for strong students who do not make it into the Bronx High School of Science or the other two competitive science schools. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/15/nyregion/3-high-schools-for-students-who-excel.html