SHSAT Sunset

Tag: shapiro

  • 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

  • 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