Tag: wsj

  • Elite High-School Debate Simmers as Albany Session Winds Down

    They got some relief Wednesday when Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat who attended Brooklyn Technical High School, told reporters he isn’t considering a deal to pass that bill in return for other changes, such as boosting gifted programs.


    “I think we should be looking to enrich our junior high-school students as we try to put them on the path to whether it’s a specialized high school or not,” Mr. Heastie said after meeting with New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. “We need to look at the system in totality, so I didn’t agree to any trades.”


    Assemblyman Michael Benedetto, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the Assembly education committee, said Wednesday night more than 50 fellow Democrats in his chamber debated the bill on ending the test in a closed-door evening conference, and it wasn’t clear what would happen next. “I don’t think it should be the role of the legislature to dictate to a particular school district how they determine admission to their own high schools,” he said in an interview.

    Heastie Quotes on the SHSAT

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/elite-high-school-debate-simmers-as-albany-session-winds-down-11560383381

  • Parents Mull Suit Over City Plan to Boost Diversity at Elite Schools

    Vito LaBella, president of the Christa McAuliffe Parent Teacher Organization, said that if parents decide to forge ahead, the federal suit would challenge this set-aside plan. “It’s discriminatory,” he said. “I do believe our children would no longer be allowed to partake in Discovery.”

    Currently the small Discovery program is available to disadvantaged applicants citywide. The mayor says he can make this change because the 1971 law on admissions at these high schools allows for a Discovery program of some sort.

    […]

    I.S. 87 Christa McAuliffe, a highly selective public school in the Borough Park neighborhood, has been a strong feeder to specialized high schools. With roughly 900 students, about 36% of its eighth-graders headed to Stuyvesant High School, 20% to Brooklyn Technical High School, and 20% to Staten Island Technical High School, according to city data for the 2016-17 school year.

    That year, 67% of the school’s students were Asian, 26% were white, 6% were Hispanic and 1% were black.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/parents-mull-suit-over-city-plan-to-boost-diversity-at-elite-schools-1542083367

  • Stuyvesant’s Admissions-Test Backers Hire Lobbyist

    How your government actually works…

    Stanley Ng, one of the founders of the “Scholastic Merit Fund,” said Thursday it had raised $25,000 this fall and hopes to raise $100,000 by January to protect the 1971 law that mandates the admissions test for at least three of the eight specialized high schools.

    […]

    The fund hired lobbying firm Parkside Group, LLC for $60,000 from Oct. 2 through Sept. 30, 2019, plus certain expenses, according to a filing with the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics. One of Parkside Group’s lobbyists is Evan Stavisky, who went to one of the specialized schools, Bronx High School of Science.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/stuyvesants-admissions-test-backers-hire-lobbyist-1541112407

    Digging further we see the Parkside Group runs many Democrat Legislature Campaigns.

    “There ought to be a cooling off period before political consultants can lobby the very elected officials whose campaigns they ran,” said Camarda. “There is a great deal of public cynicism about government these days, and arrangements like these undermine people’s confidence that government officials are making decisions in the public interest.”

    MirRam Group, run by one of its founders, Luis Manuel Miranda, is not the only group that dabbles in both campaign management and lobbying. The Parkside Group is one of the largest similar groups. This year, it worked on the campaigns of Rep. Joe Crowley and State Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins along with lobbying for state interest groups like developers and unions.

    http://www.gothamgazette.com/state/7993-close-ties-among-bronx-electeds-campaign-consultants-lobbyists-and-donors