Tag: prep
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Failing The Stuyvesant Test
In bringing its federal complaint against the Specialized High Schools admissions policy, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (to which I am an unpaid advisor) is challenging both the effect of the test in diminishing opportunities for bright black and Latino youth and shining a light on the arbitrary nature of the admissions process. How…
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Does Admissions Exam for Elite High Schools Measure Up? No One Knows
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…
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High Stakes, but Low Validity? A Case Study of Standardized Tests and Admissions into New York City Specialized High Schools
This is a study of the admissions process at a select group of New York City public high schools. It offers the first detailed look at the admissions practices of this highly regarded and competitive group of schools, and also provides a window into the broader national debate about the use of standardized tests in…
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Best schools shouldn’t be determined by a test
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…
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Educators For Excellence: Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza on Desegregating NYC Schools
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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Special Classes Help Gifted in Ghettos
OUTSIDE, there is a burned‐out tenement, a symbol of a devastated inner‐city neighborhood. Inside, a teacher is working on algebra problems with a class of gifted children, preparing them for entrance to specialized high schools. Of the 16,800 pupils in District 7, 400 are in special progress classes. The district is about 68 percent Hispanic,…