Alan Singer has written an interesting commentary on the testing regime used to admit students to New York City’s most selective high schools.
Admission is based on one test and one test only. The test is designed by–who else–Pearson.
Many successful students sign up for expensive tutoring courses. So, like SAT prep, the scores reflect ability to pay for tutoring as much as they do “merit.”
Mayor Bloomberg defends the process, saying it was created to identify “the best and brightest” and it will not change.
Very small numbers of black and Hispanic students are able to gain admission to the celebrated exam schools. At Stuyvesant High School, only 19 black students were admitted into an entering class of nearly 1,000.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There we go with the “best and brightest” again. Guess Bloomberg didn’t get your memo.
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He forgot that the B&B got us into the war in Vietnam, they didn’t get us out.
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“Best and the Brightest” should not mean “Test for the Whitest.”
I was so proud to work for the NYC public schools at the turn of the millenium, before the teeth of reform really began to sink in.
But now… lucky me… I must endure one of the most extreme cases of “reform,” over-testing, and privatization. Bridgeport, Conn.
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To be statistically accurate, Stuyvesant is 72% Asian, 24% white, 2% Hispanic and 1% Black. The question is whether a single test is a fair way to assess students and how can we restructure the admissions process to be fairer.and more inclusive.
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Alan Singer’s fine article echoes the reporting of Juan Gonzalez and others, which shows not just the low number of African and Latino students at the specialized high schools, but the alarming drop over time.
According to the legal complaint filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and others (http://naacpldf.org/filed/case_issue/Specialized/%20High%20Schools%Complaint.pdf), the percentage of African American students at Bronx Science went from 11.8% in 1994-95 to 3% in 2010-11.
At Stuyvesant, the percentage went from 12.9% in 1979 to 4.8% in 1994-95, to just above 1% in 2010-11.
Under the Bloomberg/Tweed regime of the past ten years, the number of minority educators has also precipitously declined in NYC, as they have in Arne Duncan’s home town of Chicago.
This provides yet more factual evidence of the rank hypocrisy and deception embedded in the slogan that (corporate) education reform is the civil rights issue of our time.
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Testing results tell us nothing and lead us nowhere. The unique talents of our students are never fully realized because NO test is a sufficiently sensitive measure. If I were a student I would want to scream, “Stop testing me and get to know me!”
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Having actually attended Stuyvesant – class of 1997 – these sorts of headlines appear, shall we say, disingenuous.
I’ve taken this test, obviously. It’s basically a scaled-down version of the SAT; a math section and an English section. Algebra, sentence completion, reading comprehension, geometry, that sort of thing. In my day, you got your score plus the three cut-offs (Stuy, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech) – if your score is above Cutoff A, you’ve made it into School A, etc.
There is nothing wrong with the test per se – ok, yes, you could include more subjects or fiddle around with the length of the various subsections, but at the end of the day, you either know the material or you don’t. Now, some people might recall a certain average score gap between different ethnic groups on the SATs. Same happens here, and because of the cut-off your “statistically average” member of Ethnicity A is going to be more likely than a statistically average member of Ethnicity B to get in.
But why? Is it because black kids are being discriminated against? Not by this test. Math is math is math, and sentence structure is sentence structure is sentence structure. Ah, but are black kids, on average, getting more or less instruction in these things? Probably not, because they are lower on the socio-economic spectrum and so get access to worse schools, don’t get as much individualized attention/prep, etc. [Although to counter that, a lot of the Stuy kids used to be children of not-very-rich immigrants, so there’s something to be said for parent involvement and work ethic.]
So what’s the solution? Dumb down the test? Give black kids an extra 50 points just for being black? BS. Either you address the socio-economic aspects of the problem, and then ten years from now you’ll have as many blacks as whites attending schools like Stuy, or you do not, in which case any noise about the Stuy admissions process being “discriminatory” is just that – noise.
P.S. I’m actually against many of Bloomberg’s educational “initiatives”, but this is basically going back to “should we give kids a boost on the SATs for being black” question. On a smaller scale, naturally. As a WHITE kid growing up on food stamps who’d nevertheless clawed his way into Stuy and, subsequently, an Ivy League school, I can and will tell anyone advocating some variation of this “solution” to take it and shovel it (/Sandra Bullock).
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No boost of scores based on color, but it happens that NYC’s exam schools are the only ones in the nation that base admission on one test only. No college does that. Why should high schools? You didn’t get into an Ivy League college based solely on your SAT. You also submitted an essay, recommendations, and high school grades. What’s wrong with that?
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