Samuel Abrams was a teacher at Beacon High Schools and is now a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.
He wrote a few days ago in the Columbia Journalism Review about the insistence by the New York Times that admissions to schools like Beacon are even harder than they are.
Anxiety among eighth-graders and their parents persists about the selectivity of the city’s screened high schools, in no small part because of repeated misreporting by the Times and others. The paper’s coverage—exemplified by a 2017 piece headlined “Couldn’t Get into Yale? 10 New York City High Schools Are More Selective”—has even been blamed for fueling the segregation by discouraging students from underrepresented neighborhoods from applying to many screened high schools on the grounds that admission seems nearly impossible.
He describes his years-long effort to persuade the Times that its reporting is wrong. He has been rebuffed again and again.
Why does the Times insist on exaggerating the data? Maybe it’s a better story than fact-based journalism.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Click bait.
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Basically.
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I have a dream that one day my four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the quality of seats in their selective high school as determined by the number of parents surveyed willing to apply for admission, wrongfully published in the media. — Martin Luther King
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oh, you said it
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of exaggerated data
is for good men to do nothing that STOPS it.
Has the years-long “effort” to persuade the masses that TESTING is
WRONG “persuaded” teachers to STOP giving them?
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Sure. Pick the least powerful category to make a stand. I purposely chose the term ‘category’ because teachers are not a monolithic group who all bow to the same gods. How many different school districts are there? How many different testing policies are there? If teachers were so powerful, we never would have ended up with a test and punish system. As teachers protest/strike and leave the profession altogether, the money men just find new ways to line their pockets and their paid lackeys just keep voting their own pocketbooks.
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It’s part preening for the benefit of its readers, but it’s also part of the constant effort to drive anxiety and division. The more “elite” the schools are, the more the outrage and demands for them to be dismantled.
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“Bard High School Early College, 30 applicants per seat; Baruch College Campus High School, 44; Beacon High School, 19; Business of Sports School (BOSS), 13; Central Park East High School, 37; Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, 14; City College Academy of the Arts, 22; and The Clinton School, 21. These odds translate into acceptance rates ranging from 2.3 percent, in the case of Baruch, to 7.7 percent, in the case of BOSS.”
Is there talk about dismantling Central Park East HS and Baruch, which are significantly more popular by this measure than Beacon or Bard.
This is a phony argument to minimize the fact that many public high schools are extremely popular. Are guidance counselors also telling students not to apply to BOSS and Central Park East?
Are parents not entering the Success Academy lottery because they are advised that there is a waitlist of tens of thousands of students and their odds of getting in are small? Is Eva Moskowitz worried about telling the public how popular her charter schools are for fear that no one will apply? LOL!!
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Yes, there is talk of dismantling the admissions process for every one of those schools.
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What is the admissions process for BOSS, Central Park East and Baruch? Baruch already changed their admissions a few years back to make it a lottery for students who met the minimal requirements, and it still remained very popular.
I definitely doubt that the DOE is going to make it all lottery and allow all public high schools to demean, flunk, punish, suspend any of the students they want and if only 50% of the 9th graders graduate at Beacon or Bard, the president of Harvard will speak at their graduation and praise those new lottery admission high schools for their success.
I don’t think de Blasio would do that, even if the president of Harvard believes that an excellent school is one that that identifies the students who are not worthy and makes sure that those students and their parents understand what failures they are, and eventually gets them to leave.
There will be a new Mayoral election — who do you think will be good on public education?
de Blasio made mistakes and wasn’t perfect, but I am glad he did the following which would not exist if Bloomberg was still Mayor:
Universal pre-k
More diverse schools
Greatly expanding the Discovery program for specialized high schools
Experimented with changes in middle school admissions
No school can serve a wide range of learners unless it has the funds to do so. Most of the best large suburban public schools serve students who happen to live in their catchment whether they are serious students or disinterested or disruptive students. No one has ever thought that making one suburban high school only for the best behaved and easy to teach students and another for the struggling students or those with behavioral problems is the way to solve public education problems.
This is a very complicated issue. There are no easy solutions. And those who – for their own benefit – pretend that no excuses charters are the solution make the problem 100,000 times worse.
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The public schools are not at the top of my list of concerns about the next mayor. My main concerns are the city’s financial health and public safety, including “quality of life” issues. I want to live somewhere where I can step outside without having to navigate junkies, dealers, and unstable, mentally ill people. My wife is sick of getting harassed on the street. I will likely have Garcia, McGuire, Adams, and possibly Yang on my ballot. On education, I will settle for a candidate who doesn’t crap on the specialized high schools and who has an interest in education policy that is something other than obsession of the racial and ethnic composition of “elite” schools. But I don’t have much hope on that front, of any of the other ones frankly, given the headwinds at play.
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“I will settle for a candidate who doesn’t crap on the specialized high schools and who has an interest in education policy that is something other than obsession of the racial and ethnic composition of “elite” schools.”
Given that de Blasio never “crapped” on the specialized high schools AND had an interest in education beyond the composition of “elite schools”, I’m surprised you didn’t like his educational programs.
I certainly hope you are not implying that using criteria other than a single test to admit more African American and Latinx students who are still academically strong students is viewed as “crapping” on a school. No one ever said admission to specialized high schools should be entirely via a lottery that every student – including failing students – could have an equal chance at. But I heard some nasty people implying that any changes to admissions would allow African American and Latinx student who can barely read or do math into specialized high schools. It was never true. It was always about finding strong students. Baruch High School isn’t “ruined” because the students range from above average to very strong.
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I’m with FLERP! on this one.
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Beth,
Not sure what you mean? Are you a current parent feeling anxiety? Do you think parents parse whether it is very hard or very, very hard or “Yale level” hard to get into Beacon or Bard?
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Explain yourself, Beth!
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FLERP! says: ” I want to live somewhere where I can step outside without having to navigate junkies, dealers, and unstable, mentally ill people.”
That is what we all want and no one should have to experience that. I’m sorry your neighborhood and your family is feeling that stress.
The problem is how to address this — NYC seems much better than west coast cities, from Portland to LA. But I have yet to hear anyone actually coming up with a good plan. It’s not just about rounding all those people up and throwing them in jail to rot, although there are certainly Republicans who seem to believe that is all it takes.
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What is there to explain? I agree with his assessment of the situation.
btw @FLERP! – I stumbled upon your Twitter feed yesterday. You’re very funny!
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This is a good article, but to be fair, judging a school on applications versus admissions is the same criteria that the media uses for colleges. Students apply to 15 highly selective colleges, and each of those colleges counts that application regardless of whether that school is the applicants’ first or 15th choice.
And, this is exactly the reporting used by those same journalists when they claim that charters are popular with thousands of students on the wait list of a certain large charter school network. The NYT makes no distinction between a student who is only filling out a charter application as a back-up and one who wants that charter as their first choice.
In my opinion, the harm done by this kind of reporting about Beacon or Bard’s popularity is minimal compared to the harm done by the reporting about the supposed huge charter wait lists.
If the NYT is going to write article after article about the high demand for charters based on EXACTLY THE SAME MEASUREMENT, it should certainly write the same articles about the even larger demand for public schools according to the measurements that the NYT education reporters use to measure demand. Beacon and Bard and many other public high schools have much higher demand and wait lists than charters.
Are the administrators at Beacon and Bard cancelling classes and requiring their students and their parents to attend public demonstrations to demand huge amounts of public money be taken from public schools serving the most disadvantaged programs and instead given to Beacon to set up more Beacons in every neighborhood, based on their “demand”? No, they are not. Even though the NYT reporting which has normalized and basically approved it for charters apparently would approve it for Beacon and Bard.
Beacon and Bard and other popular public schools don’t market themselves based on NYT reporting that there are tens of thousands of students who want their school, nor do they insist that they should be given extraordinary amounts of money to serve the students they choose to teach even if it means that other public schools that aren’t as popular have to do with less. That is because public school administrators aren’t greedy and dishonest. That dishonesty is greatly rewarded in the charter world but not in the public school world.
The problem of students being discouraged from applying because of what the NYT says about a school’s popularity is easily solved because if any guidance counselor is telling students that, they should be fired. The NYC high school computer algorithm is set up so that students can confidently list even the most popular schools at the top of their list and not hurt their chances of being matched with a less popular school they ranked lower.
And I wish that Samuel Abrams would look at the reporting that falsely informs of a high demand for charters, because that is what is truly hurting NYC public school students whose resources are being affected by that false reporting.
This is simply a red herring that is not being used by those popular public high schools as a way to hoard resources and hurt the less popular public high schools.
If Samuel Abrams wants to report on a story that really affects kids, he would be reporting on the false narratives of charters.
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The New York Times is not alone in taking sides on its editorial Op-Ed pages and misleading its readers/audience. According to Media Bias/ Fact Check, we can trust the New York Times for accurate reporting of the news but we should avoid its editorial pages.
It is a FACT that “Overall, we rate the New York Times Left-Center biased based on word and story selection that moderately favors the left but highly factual and considered one of the most reliable sources for news information due to proper sourcing and well-respected journalists/editors. The failed fact checks that occurred were on Op-Ed’s and not straight news reporting.”
“The notion that reporters should possess Olympian objectivity is relatively recent. In the nineteenth century, most newspapers were explicitly linked to a particular political party and the economic interests of the publisher.”
To learn more read this brief history of Media Bias from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
https://www.hoover.org/research/brief-history-media-bias
The recent movement to attack the media for bias as if bias was worse than outright lies is not taking into account that this is the way the media has been for more than a century, and the media is not going to change.
If you are interested in finding find the least biased media sources, I recommend clicking this next link and sticking to the sources on the list that you will find once you scroll down. It is not a shortlist. You will have many choices, that is if your own confirmation bias will allow you to trust the media on this list.
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Thanks for that last link – great!
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The “NYT” knows its audience, lots of affluent, elitist, helicopter parents that want the “best” for their children. By giving the appearance of scarcity, they contribute to competitiveness of getting yuppie progeny into a selective school.
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And Samuel Abrams “National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education” knows who it wants to please, and it isn’t the middle class public school parents who are at those schools.
Before you make this about so-called “affluent, elitist helicopter” public school parents, you should read this paragraph from Abrams’ article:
“Bard High School Early College, 30 applicants per seat; Baruch College Campus High School, 44; Beacon High School, 19; Business of Sports School (BOSS), 13; Central Park East High School, 37; Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, 14; City College Academy of the Arts, 22; and The Clinton School, 21. These odds translate into acceptance rates ranging from 2.3 percent, in the case of Baruch, to 7.7 percent, in the case of BOSS.”
If you know anything about NYC public high schools, you would understand that these are very different schools serving different kids, but they are all apparently quite popular.
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I am reading about The National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education, which is where Samuel Abrams works.
I find it the height of hypocrisy for this organization that seems to promote the ridiculous claims of so-called non-profit charter chains about their high demand to be suddenly concerned about accuracy in the reporting of NYC public high school demand statistics.
When I see the National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education reporting on the inaccurate reporting about charter school “demand”, I will believe that this organization is an unbiased arbiter of statistical analysis instead of an organization primarily interested in making education reform look “successful” and making public schools look bad.
This organization is the same one that has legitimized the truly racist view that “urban” (code word for charters serving primarily African American and Latinx students) are superior when they are “no excuses”, based on some truly incurious research in which researchers never ask why these supposedly high performing charter schools would have such high attrition rates when high performing PUBLIC schools do not.
Imagine the National Center for the Privatization of COVID-19 treatments not asking why so many patients would leave a hospital providing a COVID-19 cure that was 99% successful and you can see exactly what is wrong with the National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education where no researcher has ever wondered why charters they keep insisting are so superior would have so many parents leaving.
Samuel Abrams believes that it is better if the NYT reports that Beacon and Bard are not that hard to get into and don’t really have a high demand. Why is that so important to him? Why is he unconcerned about the false narratives about the demand for charter schools and their supposed “success” that his own organization helps the NYT promote?
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NYC public school parent,
Please spend some time on the NCSPE Web site. You’ll see news commentaries quite critical of charter schools, especially of the “no excuses” ilk, and working papers by Helen Ladd, Henry Levin, Steven Klees, Sean Corcoran, Jennifer Jennings, and many others quite critical of charter schools and outsourcing in general.
As for my own work, please take a look at my book, “Education and the Commercial Mindset” (Harvard University Press, 2016), reviewed by Diane Ravitch in “The New York Review of Books” here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/when-public-goes-private-as-trump-wants-what-happens/
Also, please read this op-ed I wrote in 2017 for “The Los Angeles Times”: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-abrams-good-business-models-for-education-20170108-story.html Moreover, please see this article I wrote in 2018 on charter schools for the law review of the University of Puerto Rico: http://revistajuridica.uprrp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Abrams-Exit-Voice-Charter-Schools.pdf
This is not an either/or matter. You are right to be concerned about the inflation of charter school wait lists. And that matter has been addressed by Kevin Welner and Gary Miron in a report for the National Education Policy Center: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/charter-waitlists
But that does not mean we should ignore how the Times has repeatedly exaggerated the selectivity of screened high schools. Both issues can and should be addressed.
As I explain in my analysis for the “Columbia Journalism Review,” the consequences of this misinformation about screened high schools are substantial. Not only does the exaggeration of selectivity of these schools cause students and parents alike undue stress but it also, more significantly, appears to discourage students from underrepresented neighborhoods from applying to many good schools.
Should you have any questions, please write me at sa307@tc.columbia.edu.
Sam Abrams
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There seems to be a contradiction between your stated concern for the anxiety parents would feel about the supposedly exaggerated selectivity of these schools and your stated concern that supposedly far too few students from underrepresented neighborhoods are ranking those schools.
You say you want more students from those underrepresented neighborhoods to apply, which would clearly make these schools even more selective and increase anxiety! So which one is your real concern?
I also wonder if you did an analysis of how many students from those underrepresented neighborhoods DO rank schools like Beacon but rank them lower than high schools closer to them that are likely to take them! Did you do that analysis? Just because Beacon may be the first or 2nd choice of affluent white students does not mean it is the first or 2nd choice of students who aren’t affluent and live in underrepresented neighborhoods. Maybe those students don’t buy the hype and rank Beacon 4th and get into their first or second choice.
Did you do that analysis? Because this isn’t just about students supposedly being discouraged from applying because the NYT reports on public school demand using the same criteria it uses to report charter school demand. This is about students buying into the hype so that they rank those schools first! Or at least 2nd!
Having more students from underrepresented neighborhoods rank Beacon or Bard first would increase the selectivity and add to the anxiety, right?
Also did you see that the 9th grade class at Beacon in 2019-20 was more diverse and economically disadvantaged than in the past? Still has a long way to go but I am quite skeptical that the NYT hyping and exaggerating the popularity is the real culprit. Parents sign up for charter lotteries despite the NYT non-stop exaggeration of their popularity.
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NYC public school parent,
Please spend some time exploring the Web site of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. It is not at all what you claimed.
You will see news commentaries quite critical of charter schools, especially of the “no excuse” ilk, and working papers by Helen Ladd, Henry Levin, Steven Klees, Chris Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, Gary Miron, and Sean Corcoran and Jennifer Jennings that are quite critical of charter schools and of educational outsourcing in general.
As for charter school wait lists, you are right. The numbers have been exaggerated. Kevin Welner and Gary Miron, in fact, wrote an important analysis of this problem for the National Education Policy Center several years ago: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/charter-waitlists
Yet this is not an either/or matter. Both the exaggeration of the selectivity of screened high schools and of the number of students on charter school wait lists should be addressed.
Regarding the exaggeration of the selectivity of screened high schools, the consequences of the misinformation, as I wrote in my analysis for the “Columbia Journalism Review,” are substantial: not only does the exaggeration of selectivity cause students and parents alike undue stress but it also, more significantly, appears to discourage students from underrepresented neighborhoods from applying to many good schools.
As for my own work regarding charter schools, I encourage you to read my book, “Education and the Commercial Mindset” (2016), which Diane Ravitch reviewed for “The New York Review of Books”: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/when-public-goes-private-as-trump-wants-what-happens/ I also encourage you to read a law review article I wrote in 2018 about charter schools: http://revistajuridica.uprrp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Abrams-Exit-Voice-Charter-Schools.pdf
Should you have any questions about the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education or my own work, please email me at sa307@tc.columbia.edu.
Sam Abrams
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I did review your writings and the website of the National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education before I posted any comments here.
There seems to be a very narrow definition of “privatization” which excludes large non-profit charter networks.
Most people here are probably unaware that someone could claim to be very concerned about “privatization” but not concerned about huge charter networks that are supposedly “non-profit”.
In fact, I saw lots of the same flawed research about how those huge no excuses charter networks were so successful because students learned so much.
I looked to see who the funders of your organization are and I couldn’t find them.
But I do know that many billionaire ed reform underwriters support “non-profit” charter networks that have no local oversight.
Please correct me if I’m mistaken. You do support non-profit charter networks, right?
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^^^I apologize to Sam Abrams because I forgot to acknowledge that he does make many important points. I thought the more recent article “Exit, Voice, and Charter Schools” was extremely informative.
However, what seems to be missed is the obvious – that non-profit charters are worthless. NYC has “school choice” with whatever benefits and problems noted. But the big difference that seems to be unnoticed by your organization is that charters are incentivized to lie. They are incentivized to exaggerate.
Beacon doesn’t exaggerate their applications and they aren’t rewarded by bad practices to push out kids to make them look better. And that is because they are a choice that is part of a single system, not choice that is in competition with that system.
Beacon could dump kids, but those students are still the responsibility of the system it is part of. When charters dump kids, their system absolves themselves of all responsibility.
Every advantage of a charter can be present in a choice system. That’s how Central Park East started. There could be more Central Park Easts but instead we have charters that exaggerate their success whose dishonesty harms all students.
And it does seem like your organization does not recognize that these non-profit charters could be choice lottery schools that are part of the system, not in completion with public schools where undermining the public system is rewarded.
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Perhaps for the same reason that US News prints its inane drivel touting one school over another. What is that reason? What drives both NYT and US News (as well as all other media outlets)? Selling news. It is easier to sell news if it is couched i terms that create a sort of competition sounding story. Bob Sheperd has pointed it ut to us often: it is all about the narrative. A narrative that sounds like a conflict sells better than one that is dry and factual. Is this why teachers cannot catch a break from either the democrats or republicans? Do they both need to promote conflict in their narrative?
A bit over a hundred years ago, Victor Hugo made a lot of money selling a narrative to the French (and later to us all) about redemption. Les Miserables caused lines to for around Paris bookstores as readers waited outside to get a new copy of a story that told of redemption and what it looked like in human form. Today, our attentions are always riveted on justice stories. Dateline is always about whether its subject is guilty. Half the country either applauded this week’s Minneapolis verdict or decried its mistake. Where is redemption in our stories today? Who tells the stories of those who sacrifice so that there is redemption from social and economic wrongs?
When the public thirsts for truth and its redemptive power, the news will turn to truth instead of narratives that push conflict on society.
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Why is Samuel Abrams upset about this? The incoming 9th grade class at Beacon in 2019-20 (the last year that data is available) shows that Beacon is MORE diverse than it has ever been.
Back when Abrams was teaching, Beacon was a primarily white school with a low percentage of disadvantaged students. In 2005-6, Beacon was 51% white and 24% free and reduced price lunch. In 2009-10, Beacon was 57% white and 21% free and reduced price lunch.
I checked the most recent data for 2019-2020. The 9th grade class of 366 students was 39% white and 32.5% economically disadvantaged.
Why is he so upset that the NYT is using the same statistics to report on the demand for seats at public high schools that the NYT uses to report on charter school demand?
Has Samuel Abrams ever written about how awful it is that the NYT exaggerates the demand for charter schools using these statistics? Why not?
It seems to me that Samuel Abrams real concern is that the NYT is reporting that a public school is very popular and he is far more upset about that than he is about the NYT reporting that a charter school is very popular.
Is Abrams just looking for a way to minimize how many students in NYC are applying to public schools and not charters? Because it is very odd that he is not at all bothered by the media using the very same metrics to report on charter school demand.
And it is odd that he hasn’t noticed that Beacon is a lot more diverse now than when he was teaching a very affluent, very white population of students there.
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The NY Times has shown itself to be a proponent of test and punish, anti-union propaganda, and charter schools.
Why is it such a stretch to think that they’d extend this mode of thinking/bashing to the most sought after schools? It’s all part of the NYCDOE.
Lloyd’s post is spot on: the media outlets are inherently biased. NY Times is no exception to the rule. I tend to agree with their slant the majority of the time…but their view of education makes me want to move on.
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You thought nyt was your friend hust because they we bagging on trump? Youre going to learn real fast what a catholic dixiecrat is about. Government exists to sell you out to foreign powers to keep power over you. Bipartisanship is two jerks mutually benefiting from ripping you off. Partisanship exists to disenfranchise rational people and exploit them. It’s not rhetoric. It’s everything you used to be a part of. Everything you used to do for your own selfish interests. Like supermarket chains, you never thought a walmart would come along to devour your biz. Tell you what, do like you taught all your fools who are now their fools and not yours, “if you cant beat them, join them.” And hope for hell they didnt go to private school, “if you can’t beat them, lead them off a cliff.” Right now in free fall, that might sound glib, well, it was (:
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I enjoyedd reading your post
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