Blogger Ed in the Apple reports on education and politics in New York City and New York State.
In this post, he reviews Chancellor Richard Carranza’s tenure in the city.
This is the most startling insight to me:
The dominant education issue last year was the segregated nature of the admission process for the Specialized High Schools, and the entrance examination, the Specialized High School Admissions Test that is required by state law. Last year at Stuyvesant High School only nine Afro-American students passed the entrance exam out of over 900 students who received acceptance offers. A year later the legislature has taken no action to change the exam and the issue continues to dominate the education debate.
The mayor/chancellor has avoided another issue. There are over 200 middle and high schools with entrance requirements: test scores, interviews, portfolios, all under the discretion of the chancellor. The students are far whiter and more middle class than the school system. The schools are extremely popular with progressive voter parents. The chancellor has taken no action to alter/reduce/eliminate the screens.
Most of the screened admissions schools were created by Bloomberg and Klein, theoretically to increase “equity.” In fact, the selective admissions schools increased segregation and inequity.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The chancellor has taken no action to alter/reduce/eliminate the screens.”
Say what? Tell that to the parents in District 15, which just this year piloted a middle school admissions process that completely eliminated screens BECAUSE the NYC chancellor acted to “alter/reduce/eliminate the screens”.
But geez — here we have a chancellor taking on the third rail of NYC education policy — the segregation in the schools. And you still have critics who insist that it’s all lip service and “no action” as been done.
And, by the way, despite the NY State legislators taking no action on the segregation in the specialized high schools, Carranza and de Blasio have taken action, by a huge expansion of the Discovery program where many hundreds of students from the most poverty stricken middle schools are getting a chance to attend even if they scored below the SHSAT cut off. It sounds like Blogger Ed has no idea what he is talking about — does he even realize how huge the specialized high school Discovery programs are this year? It was an ENORMOUS expansion that had to fight off a lawsuit which tried to prevent it from happening. But the DOE persevered.
I just get really tired of mischaracterizations. If we are making sweeping attacks on the people who are actually working hard to change things because they aren’t doing it fast enough and thus are supposedly fake progressives, then how will we ever get to where we want to be? Revolution?
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^^^I also think that it is important to be accurate and this quote from above is inaccurate:
“Last year at Stuyvesant High School only nine Afro-American students passed the entrance exam out of over 900 students who received acceptance offers.”
Students do not “pass” the SHSAT and anyone who wants to have a serious discussion about its flaws should not help promote the ignorance about it that too many people have.
It is entirely possible and in fact almost 100% certain that more than 9 African-American students scored higher than the SHSAT cut off for Stuy. But because those students ranked a different specialized high school as their top choice, they are at a different high school. By using entirely incorrect terms like “passing” — and feeding into the notion that there is some agreed upon test score that demonstrates that one has “passed” — demonstrated sufficient knowledge — it feeds into the belief that the SHSAT is a valid indicator.
That just isn’t how the SHSAT works. The term “pass the entrance exam” makes absolutely no sense. The students in any specialized high school are those who ranked that school high and it turned out that school still had seats available when students with their scores were placed. And a cut off score is ONLY a measure of how many seats are available to filled and how popular the school happens to be that year compared to other schools. And the SHSAT score itself is simply a measure of how many questions in each part a student missed compared to how many questions in each part the students who were randomly assigned to take that version of the exam missed.
In other words, if you give the very same SHSAT to 20,000 students at MIT, Cal Tech, and Harvard instead of giving it to 20,000 high school students, the 20,000 students at MIT, Cal Tech and Harvard would receive exactly the same scores! And if those students – as an experiment – were told to choose their favorite high school to be placed in — then 15,000 of those students would have supposedly “failed” because no matter what, only the first 5,000 would have “passed” and then the rest would be noted as supposed “failures” because the seats were full.
And no doubt people who don’t understand the SHSAT would be marveling at why 20,000 students at MIT, Harvard and Cal Tech could not manage to get SHSAT scores that were any “higher” than the 20,000 high school students did when they take the SHSAT, and why did 15,000 of them “fail” the test anyway?
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NYC is now the most segregated urban district in the nation.
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NYC was one of the most segregated urban districts under Bloomberg, too.
The big difference is that de Blasio and Carranza are trying to do something about it, and Bloomberg did not.
Have you looked closely at what is happening in District 15? I don’t think you are giving credit to the parents and DOE which worked incredibly hard to figure out how to make schools LESS segregated and are having some success.
Here is what people do not understand. NYC public schools are segregated because of the movement of families into neighborhoods long after school zones were drawn. If you had looked at the so-called white majority “segregated” schools 20 years ago you would have found that most of them had very few white students and kept getting more and more simply as more young couples who already lived there had children and other families moved into that zone.
Critics of NYC’s segregation say that a middle school that is 55% or 51% white is “segregated”. That is a misleading term and implies that there are absolutely no one but white students (or perhaps white and Asian students).
The way in which the term “segregated” is thrown around makes it lose power because the parents IN those schools are not seeing the kind of “segregation” that outsiders keep insisting are there.
There is a kind of ugly inference here that there is some intentional segregation. But instead, what has happened is this: a school was mostly non-white, then more white parents moved into the neighborhood and started using the school, then more did, then the school became majority white.
PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights used to be “segregated” because the population was almost entirely non-white. Now it is “segregated” because the population is majority white! Nothing happened during those 10 or 12 years except the choice of people who lived in a home that had been zoned for that neighborhood school for decades and decades chose to use it.
Or look closely at the demographics of PS 32 in Brooklyn.
I challenge folks who complain that NYC public schools are too “segregated” to tell me which of these enrollment years is the magic number at PS 32 and what they propose to do to make sure that too many white parents who are zoned for this neighborhood school not send their kids:
2007-08: 39% African-American, 45% Latino, 3% Asian, 13% white
2012-13: 25% African-American, 35% Latino, 7% Asian, 32% white (310 students total)
2017-18: 23% African-American, 24% Latino, 8% Asian, 40% white
(The enrollment doubled in size during this time).
But what happens next year or the year after if PS 32 is 50% white and then gets lumped as a “segregated” school just like MS 51 with it’s 51% white population is “segregated”?
The fact is that de Blasio is addressing this. The latest is to redraw the attendance zones that have been in place for many decades. And he will probably get it done over a lot of objections and anger by those parents who now find the house they thought was zoned for one school is now zoned for a different school and anger from the outsiders who insist that Carranza and de Blasio just aren’t achieving perfect integration fast enough because they just know it is simple to wave your hands and achieve.
I could throw out a statistic, too. NYC has more students attending integrated schools than any other city. It does. Because you can add up the populations of the huge number of integrated schools like PS 32 and you will find a population that is larger than most entire city school systems.
There is a good argument to be made that NYC is not achieving integration fast enough, but there is also a good argument to be made that immediately upending a system of 1.1 million students that has been based in neighborhood elementary schools is not necessary going to have better results than the kind of efforts being made in District 15.
But Carranza and de Blasio are among the few Democrats anywhere willing to tackle the third rail of education – integration – and make everyone unhappy because no matter what they do, it will be too much or not enough or a complete and utter failure because it didn’t achieve 100% success.
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I wish I could understand why you are so defensive about DeBlasio.
I am hugely unimpressed by him.
He continued to employ a large number of top officials from the failed Klein regime.
He gave up his campaign against charters as soon as he got pushback.
His Renewal program was a failure.
Yes, he has made noise about segregation. But very little has happened outside of District 15.
I expect my comment will send you into a tizzy, defending DeBlasio. It doesn’t matter. His Presidential campaign bombed. He won’t be mayor much longer. He will fade away.
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LOL! I’m not in a tizzy. I just find it amazing that you focus on only on where de Blasio could have been much better and sort of completely dismiss the areas where he did things in 6 years that Bloomberg did not even begin to address in 12 years. I find that in the media, too. It’s as if everything he did accomplish was supposedly so easy and simple that it isn’t worth mentioning but he should have also been able to totally integrate NYC public schools in 6 years!
To me, de Blasio went out on a limb to fight for things that were good for public schools. He didn’t win a lot of battles, but he certainly tried and the accomplishments he did achieve – which were actually quite admirable — are shockingly minimized.
“Yes, he has made noise about segregation. But very little has happened outside of District 15.” Made noise? That to me is an insulting and demeaning term to throw out at a politician that has actually gone out on a limb — which he knew would get him attacked as it did — to actually do something. I wish there were some other politicians willing to “make noise” that they knew would open them to attacks.
I do think it is odd that you characterize what de Blasio has spent a lot of effort to do with his fights against the SHSAT, expansion of the Discovery program, re-zoning efforts and district wide integration as “making noise” in such a dismissive manner. It is huge to have a Mayor willing to take on — even just a little — this third rail of public education.
Which potential Mayoral candidate is even talking about any of these issues? I hear lots of criticism about how de Blasio is going about it “the wrong way” as if there is some “right” way to achieve integration and end SHSAT-only admissions to specialized high schools that they are keeping secret but will tell us if they ever become Mayor.
These are two things you did say that I believe are simply not true:
“He gave up his campaign against charters as soon as he got pushback.
His Renewal program was a failure.”
The Mayor did the smartest thing in the world after the “pushback”. He made it his mission to change Albany. I bet if you asked Cynthia Nixon she would not agree with your characterization that de Blasio only opposed charters for the first 3 months of his term, after which he did nothing at all but kowtow to their wishes. It’s just not true. Is that really what Cynthia Nixon believes? That de Blasio has been the toady of the charter movement for his entire term except the first 2 months when his opposition was used to force NYC taxpayers to subsidize charters with tens of millions of dollars we could not afford?
I don’t want to go into the efforts de Blasio started immediately to turn Albany more progressive, but it was a terrific idea even if it ended up being taken up by others before it worked.
Just like the Renewal program was a terrific idea and calling it a “failure” because it only helped some failing schools and not all failing schools seems quite harsh and inaccurate. It is possible to criticize the things that the Renewal program should have done better while not calling it a “failure” as if the good things that it did do for the most disadvantaged students didn’t happen. There have been some good articles written about it that contain a lot of criticism but also recognize what was working. The NY Post and ed reform PR has spent a lot of effort to get people to call it “a failure” and I do believe that when progressives start repeating that kind of sweeping attack, public education loses.
No one will be happier than me to get someone who is better than de Blasio on public schools but since all I see are cowards who – unlike de Blasio — are terrified of going out on a limb.
The one thing I like about de Blasio — and there are certainly things to dislike — is that he wasn’t afraid to fail. We tell students that it is okay to fail, and viciously attack politicians who try things that don’t work perfectly and claim they have wasted our money in a program that was a total failure.
De Blasio went out on a limb when he ended stop and frisk. De Blasio went on on a limb when he visited all the places the Ebola doctor visited to tell NYC residents it was safe. De Blasio went out on a limb when he fought for universal pre-k. De Blasio went out on a limb when he tried to stop charters from evicting severely handicapped children. De Blasio went out on a limb when he directed millions of dollars to Renewal Schools to try to improve them with wraparound services instead of closing them like those in power were demanding. De Blasio went out on a limb when he tried to change SHSAT-only admissions or enacted his District 15 wide integration plan this year.
We tend to forget that all of de Blasio’s successes would have been characterized as utter and complete failures if even the smallest bad thing had happened. A slight uptick in homicides after de Blasio ended stop and frisk. Another case of Ebola. A new pre-k class where something bad happened to one of the kids or a computer glitch that made the system place students incorrectly. A backlash in District 15 because something happens to one of the kids who is in a more integrated school. de Blasio walks a very fine line where every problem makes the program “a failure”. It has to work right away and work perfectly.
I get that de Blasio has problems and imperfections, but I truly don’t think they are any worse than the problems that every single politician has. And he is working for the right things and willing to go out on a limb to support things that are just as likely to “fail” as be successful in a very short timeline. I would love to see more politicians going out a limb like that. Maybe de Blasio is terrible at executing the ideas he has or maybe he has been constantly thwarted by a negative PR campaign hyped by the rabidly pro-charter NY Times, NY Daily News and NY Post. (Is there even one media outlet that isn’t pro-charter in NYC? I don’t think so.)
If you think what I wrote shows I am “in a tizzy”, then so be it. I certainly hope you are right that the next Mayor is going to be the strong fighter for integration, for ending the SHSAT, for shutting down charter schools that you seem to believe. I won’t hold my breath because I haven’t seen any candidates doing anything but be afraid to take a strong stand for any of those issues. de Blasio was one of the few politicians I have seen willing to go out on a limb and fight to enact his ideas for making NYC more progressive.
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Almost anyone would be better than Bloomberg, who didn’t know what he didn’t know.
I endorsed deBlasio in 2013, he eagerly courted my support. Once he was elected, I ceased to exist.
I think he is over.
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“I think he is over.” Well he is definitely only going to be Mayor through the end of 2021 (assuming he doesn’t step down for some reason). And his campaign for President is close to being over, although I liked him being at the debates to hold the other candidates’ feet to the fire on charters.
But that gives him more than 2 years to continue the efforts he is already making in making both specialized high schools and other NYC public schools more integrated and he shows no sign of stopping that effort. I already have e-mails about the new rezoning efforts which are specifically designed to help integration efforts. There are currently many hundreds of new 9th graders who will enroll in specialized high schools this September who came from the most disadvantaged middle schools that almost never send students to specialized high schools.
I don’t think de Blasio’s efforts to make NYC public schools more integrated are over and I welcome a new Mayor who is willing to go out on a limb and take those efforts even further than de Blasio did as one of his or her very first actions. And if any of the new candidates for Mayor are willing to even mildly criticize powerful charter school CEOs, I will respect them even more. I won’t hold my breath on that one.
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In a Mayoral- Control City, especially when the mayor is running for president education policy and politics are intertwined – appeal to “progressive” voters around the country w/o alienating progressive voters at home. There are “screened” schools across the city, most created by Bloomberg/Klein, very attractive to progressive, mostly white middle class parents, deBlasio/Carranza has done very little to remove the screens and integrate schools by race and economics.. as far as the Specialized High Schools, colleges and magnet school elsewhere all use multiple measures, in NYC, a single test, and, yes, you either “pass” or “fail” the test … no matter how you parse the process.
Less than 1% of the “offers” went to Black students …
Maybe when deB drops out of his ill advised presidential bid education will, excuse the expression, trump, political decisions.
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What “decision” on education did de Blasio make that you claim is “political”. I really want to know. Was it fighting to expand the Discovery program so it prioritized students from the most disadvantaged middle schools?
And no, you don’t “pass” the SHSAT. I know you are knowledgeable about education issues, but as a parent who understand the process, I find it insulting that you keep insisting that using the term “pass” is even close to being accurate.
Does the student who only ranks Stuy because that is the only specialized high school he wants “fail” the test because he doesn’t get an offer with his score of 540?
Does that student who gets a score of 600 and ranks Brooklyn Tech first “fail” to get into Stuy?
“Less than 1% of the “offers” went to Black students …” Which is exactly why de Blasio and Carranza greatly expanded the Discovery Program this year. Are you aware there are hundreds of students from the most disadvantaged middle schools attending the program this summer?
I’m glad de Blasio was the one candidate bringing up charter schools in the debates. I will be sorry that the issue of charters will likely never again be mentioned — except for vague support for “good public charters” — in any debate until the election. That’s what I saw in 2016 and I have no doubt that without de Blasio it will be a repeat of vague platitudes about supporting public education if it is mentioned at all.
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^^To be clear about the SHSAT for those who are not in NYC:
The SHSAT score “stack ranks” students. And it “stack ranks” students according to whether you happened to miss fewer or more questions in each section of the exam. There is no “passing” score. I repeat, there is no “passing” score. The term “pass” implies that there is some score that denotes a proficiency and that is the opposite of what the SHSAT is all about.
A student who misses 10 questions total during the exam will receive a wildly different score depending on 1. which version of the exam he took and how the other students who happened to take that version of the exam did. 2. whether he missed 5 questions on each section (which would give him the very lowest score) or whether he missed 3 questions on one section and 7 on the other (which would give him a higher score) or whether he missed 9 questions on one section and 1 in the other (a much higher score).
Furthermore, a “cut-off” score is totally different than the notion of “passing”. The “cut-off” score at a small school with 170 seats will almost always be higher than the “cut off” score at a large high school with 1700 seats! It has nothing to do with “passing”.
The reason this is so important for people to understand is that there are too many folks who ignorantly believe that admitting any student who scores below the “cut off” means admitting a sub-par student who can barely do academics and has “failed” a test that the students who really deserve to be in those schools have “passed”.
But it doesn’t work that way. A student might score below a cut off who missed fewer questions overall than a student who scored above them. Understanding that far more than the top scoring 5,000 students are qualified for specialized high schools is part of the beginning of getting the public to support reforming the SHSAT-only system of admission. By implying that all students but the top 5,000 “failed”, you are doing a great disservice.
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Ed,
I also should have said that I thought most of what you wrote in that post was a brilliant analysis and was very helpful to me as a parent. You offered some excellent suggestions to the Chancellor.
I am all for criticism and holding the DOE’s feet to the fire as you so correctly do.
I think your entire post was different than the one sentence that I was reacting to, that seemed to imply that Carranza and de Blasio had done nothing at all.
Anyway, thank you very much for your thoughtful posts on education and fighting so hard to make things better for public school students. as a parent, I really appreciate it.
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I’m a public school teacher in the Bronx. Neither Carranza nor deBlasio has given anything except platitudes to the regular school in the system. Every year since I began teaching in 2010 we hear how the budget was cut once again. We are told to do more with less and less. This year I will once again return to class sizes of 34, 35, 36, 38.
Once again we will file a grievance and either wait for some DOE lawyer to tell us some BS as to why this is legal or we will shuffle kids around in October. DeBlasio is all about his political optics and Carranza knows where he and his cronies bread is buttered.
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RL,
That is terrible that you are told to do more with less and handed huge class sizes of 38. Maybe I am naive but I can’t believe that de Blasio and Carranza actually know that there are public schools with class sizes of 38 and have no interest in changing it, especially if those are struggling schools. And are you saying the administrators in your school, the district Superintendents and everyone else in the layer of administration that comes between a specific teacher’s classroom and the Chancellor are all complicit?
What you are talking about demonstrates a corruption that seems well beyond Carranza but that is aided by huge numbers of complicit high level DOE employees who are essentially breaking the law by forcing larger than allowed class sizes. Is the corruption really that deep? I support the teachers’ union because their reps are supposed to be protected from reprisals so that they can tell the truth about working conditions, etc. Is the union complicit, too?
One thing that I don’t understand is why everyone seems to believe that de Blasio and Carranza are “all about political optics” when de Blasio is always attacked by all sides for his policies that either don’t do enough or do the wrong thing. If he is governing entirely for “political optics”, he is certainly doing a terrible job of it. But he is making some (albeit not enough) changes anyway. I am appalled that the conditions at your school are not being addressed by anyone, from your school’s administrators to the district to the Chancellor to the Mayor. Thank you for your service to students and you certainly deserve better.
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