SHSAT Sunset

prep

  • Whose Side Are Asian-Americans On?

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    Hsin, 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,…

  • The Students Trying to Get Ahead in a One-Test System

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    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…

  • Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Diversity Initiative: Letter To Chancellor Carranza

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    Below is an open letter to Chancellor Richard A. Carranza from the Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Diversity Initiative (SHSBADI). SHSBADI was formed in 2010 to address the declining enrollment of Black and Latinx students at Stuyvesant and the city’s other specialized high schools. The letter below outlines SHSBADI’s recommendations for ways to increase the number of Black and Latinx students…

  • Letters: The Test That Changed Their Lives

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    I 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…

  • My Feelings about the SHSAT & Specialized Schools

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    I don’t think the standard mathematics curriculum IN MIDDLE SCHOOL CLASSES will prepare a student to successfully get into one of the specialized schools without going to extra math classes (and ELA, probably, but I’m focusing more specifically on the math, because that’s my area of expertise). Now, when I consider the ways in which…

  • Who Finds Out About Summer Test Prep Can Depend on Race

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    “If if it wasn’t for having a dual-income household, I would not be able to afford it at all,” said Auressa Simmons who enrolled her daughter Anaiyah. On top of the tuition for the summer program, she and her husband pay for a van share that takes Anaiyah to her summer classes. In contrast, Melissa…

  • Best schools shouldn’t be determined by a test

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    Kaplan Inc., is probably one of the most famous companies students turn to when they need help taking a test. Their preparation courses for tests like the SAT and ACT are part of an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars (if not in the billions). In fact, the company offers a prep course starting…

  • Educators For Excellence: Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza on Desegregating NYC Schools

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    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…

  • Asian Americans should embrace reform of specialized high school admissions

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    Not all communities view testing in the same light, and aversion to change is natural. Still, SHSAT supporters have yet to persuasively explain away decades of social-science research. Contrary to the belief that scrapping the SHSAT would lower the quality of students, education experts such as Amy Hsin, associate professor of sociology at CUNY, have argued that grades…

  • Does Admissions Exam for Elite High Schools Measure Up? No One Knows

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    Many parents and teachers have long contended that the SHSAT is an assessment of students’ test-taking skills, honed by extensive test preparation, more than their potential to succeed at the specialized schools. Pian Rockfeld, an English teacher at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, one of the smaller specialized…