SHSAT Sunset

Tag: stuyvesant

  • Stuyvesant students say the crushing workload is hurting their mental health. Here’s what they’re doing about it.

    Homework for regular classes is supposed to be capped at an hour over two days, or two hours for Advanced Placement classes, Giordano explained.

    Much of the discussion about the path forward has often been mired in the debate over academic standards.

    “It often comes down to this zero sum game, that in order to support students’ mental health that we need to give a little on the academics,” he said. “I think they’re both possible. They both need to be possible.”

    But they haven’t always felt possible. When English teacher Mark Henderson started working at Stuyvesant about 15 years ago, the principal at the time would tell students they could only choose two of the following: friends, sleep, or grades.

    https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/3/12/22328382/stuyvesant-high-school-mental-health

  • SHSBADI at 10: Lessons Learned and the Path Forward

    We realized that both the admissions process and the school system had changed from the time of our attendance. Many of us came to Stuyvesant by way of gifted classes in our neighborhood public schools. Until the 90s, gifted education was decentralized, with accelerated SP (“special progress”) and IGC (“intellectually gifted”) classes in local schools giving academically talented kids in every city neighborhood an opportunity to receive instruction in the above-grade level material they would encounter on the SHSAT. Today, that opportunity is concentrated in just a handful of schools.

    Today, no other school system in the country uses a single test to determine who is admitted to their most competitive public schools. None uses the SHSAT, which is distinctive in its content and format, and mysterious in its scoring. It is not aligned with what most students are taught and includes question types which are unfamiliar to most test takers and give a significant advantage to students who have had prior exposure to the test, even with recent changes to its components. This speaks to the validity of the test, or whether it is actually measuring what it was designed to measure. New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza addressed this issue when he testified before the NYS Assembly Committee on Education last year. In his testimony, Chancellor Carranza explained that “a test is valid when it measures what it was designed to measure and it’s reliable when it gives you an accurate measurement over time…[a]s students go through their school day and they’re learning the state standards which the legislature has said this is what you need to know to be able to get a diploma from the State of New York, this test does not measure that. It does not measure that mastery. It’s a tricky test designed to rank order students. So in terms of reliability and validity for ranking students, it is. But the question is it the best methodology for measuring talent, for identifying talent, for identifying the grit, the tenacity, the dedication, the desire of students to be able to go a specialized public school in New York City. It is not valid, it is not reliable when it is used in that way.”

    Although it would be logical to expect that the students who perform the best on the SHSAT to also be the students who perform the best on state tests, research indicates that is not necessarily the case. In 2015, Sean Corcoran, a researcher at NYU, examined data from 2005 to 2013 and determined that Black, Latinx and female students who score well on state tests are admitted to specialized high schools at a lower rate than White, Asian and male students. While the reasons for these differences are not fully understood, they were enough for Corcoran to conclude that the SHSAT acts as a BARRIER to admission for certain groups. This finding, standing alone, raises serious questions about the continued utilization of the SHSAT in the high school admissions process.

    To the extent a special program like Discovery must be used, we see an opportunity to strengthen this alternate path. We have proposed combining the Discovery Program with the DOE’s DREAM middle school enrichment program as part of a larger, coordinated effort to identify academically talented students who are educationally disadvantaged as early as possible in their academic careers, and then provide them with accelerated instruction and other appropriate support, academic as well as social, both before and after their enrollment in high school. This would allow the City to move beyond the SHSAT as the sole way to identify talent, and target academically talented students from communities underrepresented at the City’s specialized high schools with a longer period of enrichment and support than the summer session currently offered through the Discovery Program. This would help compensate for our uneven educational system, and would assist admitted students with addressing the challenges they may face once they start high school.

    https://medium.com/@shsbadi/shsbadi-at-10-lessons-learned-and-the-path-forward-d6ca29c8a5de

  • Close Stuyvesant High School

    This 2014 Slate.com article makes the unusual argument that Specialized High Schools should be closed.

    My alma mater, Stuyvesant High School, has been a lightning rod in New York City politics for as long as I can remember. Whenever critics have griped about the way Stuyvesant does business, my inclination has long been to say, essentially, “Screw you.” Going to Stuyvesant is one of the best things to have ever happened to me.

    Noguera is exactly right. The politicians and the education experts who are so fixated on the racial balance at Stuyvesant neglect the fact that Stuyvesant is not built to support and nurture students who need care and attention to excel academically and socially. It is a school that allows ambitious students who know how to navigate their way around a maddening, complex bureaucracy to connect with other students with the same skill sets

    A bit of a racist argument here. That these 2 groups won’t materially intersect.

    I have a theory about declining white representation at Stuyvesant. I seriously doubt that it’s because New York City is no longer home to white eighth-graders from affluent families who have expansive vocabularies and solid critical thinking skills and who are more than capable of scoring well on the entrance exam. I’ve met more than my share of such young people. My gut tells me that Stuyvesant has grown steadily less attractive to white families with the kind of social and cultural capital that helps people get ahead in America. 

    Instead of reinventing Stuyvesant from the ground up, we should instead recognize that it never made sense for one warehouse of a school to hoover up such a big chunk of the city’s whiz kids. Better to spread gifted and talented kids across a wide range of schools offering different instructional models

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/the-case-for-shutting-down-stuyvesant-high-school-the-best-public-school-in-new-york.html

  • Being black at Stuyvesant: Two students on what it’s like for African Americans at the specialized high school

    Just because students are intelligent enough to pass a test doesn’t mean they understand people who might be ethnically, racially or culturally different.


    That’s what happened to Gordon in his freshman biology class when his lab partner blamed him for the AIDS virus. Or when he was told to “go back to Africa” because he disagreed with some of his peers on the merits of the Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT).


    And both of us have repeatedly heard something along the lines of, “Black people don’t care about education.”


    While these stories may seem shocking or anachronistic, they are not unique among Stuy’s black and Latino students. Meetings of the Stuyvesant Black Students League and ASPIRA (the Hispanic student’s association) are animated by tales of students being called the N-word in and outside of class, threatened lynchings and other examples of almost-daily abuse.


    Constantly being reminded that we are not wanted in the school we attend is painful, and would obstruct any hardworking student from getting the education they deserve.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-being-black-at-stuyvesant-20190629-zonvvyzykzdhlp2tknmd7urojq-story.html

  • NYC selective high school admissions uproar a symptom of a much bigger problem

    Multiple studies have found no difference in college enrollment, college quality or graduation rates of kids who just barely met the test score cutoff for selective public schools like Stuyvesant and those who just barely missed the mark and then attended more ordinary public high schools, Valant said.


    Valant would like to see selective schools drop their test-in requirements and instead award admission to a set number of top-performing students from every district or system middle school. The resulting classes would be more diverse and formed with anobjective, open access measure of long-term performance.


    “I think the Stuyvesant story matters because there is something incredibly important about Stuyvesant and other symbols of excellence. When you send the message that only certain groups belong in those types of institutions, that only certain people can ‘earn’ access, that’s a dangerous message to students of color and students in poverty who may feel left out. And it’s a dangerous message to the kids who make it into Stuyvesant. None of it is good for society.”

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/nyc-selective-high-school-admissions-uproar-symptom-much-bigger-problem-n985736

  • 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

  • It’s the peer effect, stupid: What makes schools like Stuyvesant great? It’s not test-based admission, but a broader culture of excellence

    We’ve conducted more than 70 interviews (and counting) with adult alumni of Stuyvesant High School who graduated between 1946 and 2013 for a book we’re working on called “The Peer Effect.” (We both graduated from Stuyvesant in the 1980s.) Many of the people we’ve interviewed grew up poor, and/or were black, Latino or Asian. Some of the graduates we interviewed from earlier years were from poor or working-class Jewish families. We also interviewed a lot of former students who were brought up in white, middle-class families.

    Stuyvesant is a mobility machine — students that come in poor usually are upwardly mobile. This includes students admitted under Discovery, or who barely made the cut, and even those who had “poor” grades (including those who comfortably passed the cutoff scores). The vast majority of graduates went on to good colleges and to professional careers. It’s not surprising, then, that there’s so much agita over any changes to the admission policy, even though it will only affect around 1000 seats across the schools per class.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-its-the-peer-effect-stupid-20190215-story.html

  • How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools


    The anniversary of de Rivera’s battle comes amid another controversy about diversity at Stuyvesant. The school accepts students based entirely on an entrance exam, and the result is that few black and Latino students are admitted. (Only ten black students were admitted to Stuyvesant’s incoming class last year.) Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed eliminating the test for all of the specialized public schools in the city and offering admission to the top seven per cent of students in each district, insuring more diverse enrollment. Stuyvesant is currently seventy-three per cent Asian, and many Asian-Americans feel that the proposal is an attack on their community. De Rivera is disheartened by the low numbers of black and Latinos at specialized schools, and feels that racism is still built into the educational system, just as sexism was. She points out that Bates has eliminated mandatory reporting of S.A.T. scores from its admissions process. “How do we get those numbers up?” she said. “Taking a percentage of high achievers from each district makes moral sense.”

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-a-thirteen-year-old-girl-smashed-the-gender-divide-in-american-high-schools

  • Whose Side Are Asian-Americans On?

    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, which are repeated measures over time, are considered better indicators of academic acumen. It’s also been shown that they are better than standardized test scores when it comes to predicting success for black and Latinx students.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/151328/whose-side-asian-americans-on