Gary Rubinstein teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School. It is one of the best high schools in the nation. It has a competitive admissions process. Students who hope to attend take a standardized test of read and math on one day, no repeats. New students are accepted based on their score on that one test. The school, like other elite public high schools in New York City has often been criticized for the very small percent of black and Hispanic students who win admission. Its student body is primarily Asian-American.\
In this post, Gary discusses the merits and demerits of selective schools like the one he teaches in. He clearly approves, he admits, or he would not be teaching there.
He invites his readers to respond to his thoughts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have always been bewildered that people would rather distort the entire educational system that adopt the pathways used by ethnic and religious groups for many decades. Basically, populations of people who felt the American education system was deficient, created classes for their children to attend after school, In San Francisco, Jews did this, many Chinese did this, and of course, religion classes after school were quite common.
Why this doesn’t suffice for the people behind these bogus “reform movements” is beyond me. Shouldn’t their children become acquainted with the proles they will become lord and master of?
Proles? Sarcasm doe not add anything to solving this real issue.
It’s not that sarcastic to note that our society has been dominated by a neoliberal meritocracy for decades, and that as a result, there is a de facto aristocracy of wealth and privilege ruling over a vast class of people who have no upward mobility at all.
Our society has not been “dominated by a neoliberal meritocracy”. If anything, it has been dominated by the false narrative (that your post helps push) that the problems of our society are the fault of “neoliberal elites” and not the right wing Republican know-nothing party which governs for the 1%.
That kind of posts have about as much truth as saying “the democrats have been dominated by lazy teachers’ unions for decades, and as a result, those lazy union teachers have ruined public schools.”
Speaking of sarcasm, you’re so right, all Democrats are totally awesome, no matter what they do.
Speaking of sarcasm, you’re so right, the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, and all union teachers are totally awesome, no matter what they do.
I don’t understand why you don’t understand the difference between honest criticism and scapegoating. You don’t like it when I scapegoat the teachers union for all the problems with public schools, but when you object to ed reformers blaming the teachers union for the fact that public schools are failing, do you think an appropriate response by an ed reformer who just scapegoated union teachers is to say to you sarcastically “you are so right, Randi Weingarten is totally awesome no matter what she does.”
It isn’t one or the other, so why are you making it that way? There are complex reasons why the teachers union is flawed. There are complex reasons why our country has problems. Scapegoating the union or scapegoating “neoliberal meritocracy” is equally wrong.
I wouldn’t say ‘dominated,’ but yes, ‘meritocracy’ is a lipstick narrative applied by neolib Dems/ Reps, garden-variety Reps and conservatives to the pig of our warped economy. It’s the equivalent of telling folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps while you rob them of same.
But what has all that– including Steve Ruis’ use of ‘lord/masters vs proles”– to do with “whether there should be a Stuyvesant”? Half the kids– including 90% of the 70+% who are Asian– qualify for free or reduced lunch. What am I missing?
Randi Weingarten is so totally awesome. That was amazing when she supported Common Core and charter schools. Awesome. Sarcasticalistic awesomeness.
bethree says “Half the kids– including 90% of the 70+% who are Asian– qualify for free or reduced lunch. What am I missing?”
If the conversation is about Stuyvesant, it isn’t quite accurate to say “Half the kids– including 90% of the 70+% who are Asian– qualify for free or reduced lunch.” For example, at Stuyvesant, which is exclusive to students with the highest SHSAT scores, only 45% of the students overall qualify for free lunch. 55% of Asian students and 17% of white students at Stuyvesant are economically disadvantaged. There are few Latino and African American students, but of the small percentage that are at Stuyvesant, 46% of the African American students are economically disadvantaged and 38% of the Latino students are poor. Bronx Science similarly has disproportionately low percentages of economically disadvantaged students in each ethnic group
Brooklyn Tech is a specialized high school which has some similarly high scoring students as at Stuyvesant, but also includes students with much lower SHSAT scores. At Brooklyn Tech, 59% of the students are economically disadvantaged (that’s 30% higher than at Stuyvesant). At Brooklyn Tech, 72% of the Asian students are economically disadvantaged (30% higher than at Stuyvesant) and 27% of the white students are economically disadvantaged (59% higher than at Stuyvesant).
I’m getting those statistics from the NYSED website — I haven’t seen any statistics where 90% of the students are economically disadvantaged. If anything, economically ADVANTAGED students are disproportionately represented in all groups of students, especially at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. To me, that suggests that there is some correlation between higher income and higher SHSAT scores in every group, including white and Asian students. And when admissions is via a single exam, offering “free test prep” is not the same thing as being able to pay for more expensive test prep.
It would be interesting to see the economic breakdown of the 22,000+ students who take the SHSAT but do not get one of the 5,000 highest scores. I’m guessing there would be a higher percentage of low income students than in the group that gets seats.
I do think to address this problem, it is necessary to have good information, and there hasn’t been enough solid data gathering, in my opinion.
“‘meritocracy’ is a lipstick narrative applied by neolib Dems/ Reps, garden-variety Reps and conservatives to the pig of our warped economy.”
Who are these all-powerful “neolib Dems” who keep talking about meritocracy and poor people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Biden is as mainstream a Dem as it gets, and I don’t hear that. Obama was too conservative for my taste, but I also didn’t hear him use that kind of language. Maybe if someone provided a list of these “neolib Dems” so I could sort them from the acceptable Dems, like AOC, it would be helpful, rather than just alluding to this group that always seems to imply consists of nearly every Democrat.
All over the country, there are many terrific district public school options that do not use any form of admissions tests – whether based on standardized test performance or auditions.
oh that we would hear about and celebrate our many, many terrific public schools every day
Correct, and you will notice that those terrific district public school systems almost never have charters coming in to cherry pick the easiest to teach students while sending the rest back to the district public schools.
Gov. Chris Christie was a huge fan of charters – especially for a largely poor urban city like Newark. But not in middle class suburbs like Highland Park, Cherry Hill, Millburn, Livingston and Princeton — all of whom fought charters who of course thought it would be nice to cherry pick in a far more affluent community. Suddenly Gov. Christie didn’t think charters were such a good idea – for those communities.
The fastest way to undermine a public school system is to let a private operator demand lots of money from the school budget to teach a cherry-picked group of students – with the politically connected charters always guaranteed that the public school system will be the fallback for any student they don’t want to teach.
The fastest way to improve a public school system is to force a charter to teach all the students that the public school system finds too much trouble to teach. That’s what charters were supposed to do — show public schools how to teach the toughest to teach students who were failing in public schools. I don’t blame the charter movement for failing so miserably to figure out a way to teach the toughest students. I blame them for lying about it and morphing into a corrupt movement that fights with every fiber of its being to have an honest discussion.
Can you imagine if people in public school were as dishonest and unethical as charter promoters? They would say “Specialized High Schools teach the same students as in failing public schools and do it better, so not only should specialized high schools expand, but they should be given huge amounts of extra money and their principals paid at least half a million dollars each year as their salary – just like charter CEOs who also have figured out this miracle that turns every student into a high performing scholar.
Fortunately, people in public education aren’t rewarded handsomely for promoting false narratives like some charter school advocates are, so the discussion tends to be one that is actually more concerned with students than with the careers of those who promote and run charters. Their concern is only the students who help them promote their careers and they have no concern for those who don’t. If they did, they would have no need to be dishonest.
Hey, nycpsp, as a NJ’an, just have to chime in with a few corrections. Of the towns you list, only Highland Park and Cherry Hill are middle class, the others are very high income. Charters’ attempted push into NJ suburbs was basically in 2011-12; I believe Highland Park fended off the proposed Hebrew charter. A couple of Mandarin immersion charters keep trying to nose into districts in & around Livingston, but have been unsuccessful. The hisch that will include Cherry Hill applicants was approved back in 2012 but as far as I know still has not opened (or maybe did in Fall ’19?) Princeton’s sole charter school came in under Corzine [1997]. It became controversial [again] in 2017 when proposing to expand by 76 students, which would have cost the district an additional $1million [10% of its discretionary budget] operating under Christie’s 2% RE tax cap.
Here’s a good summary from a 5/30/17 WaPo “Answer Sheet” article, a cite from the then-president of that Princeton charter school’s board of trustees: “the relationship between charters schools and their parent districts took a turn in 2008, when funding began moving from the state to the districts and monetary caps were set per pupil. The change put more burden on local districts and left charters with their funds per student frozen, essentially, at 2008 levels.”
The reason school budget margins are razor-thin in NJ is not just about charter-funding shifting to local districts and the 2% cap on RE taxes. It’s also because for decades NJ has had ‘Robin Hood’ funding of poor districts: state income taxes are pooled and redistributed where need is highest. So for example my high-income district gets 6% state aid; Newark gets 80%. Any district with a good-to-high-performing school district is going to fight charters for obvious reasons.
Christie never changed his mind on charter schools. During his ‘reign,’ the number of charter school students doubled, and his parting ‘gift’ was to approve five more charters. His charter thrust was always toward poor communities. His/ Cerf/ Zuckerberg/ Booker’s over-the-top charterization of Newark gave them all a bad name among local voters, and provided a big push to Ras Baraka’s successful mayoral campaign & the immediate re-capture of school control to locally elected Bd of Ed after 20 yrs of state control.
bethree5,
Thank you for the corrections and additional information. I think your point is the same as mine — there have been attempts to force charters in middle class and affluent communities against their will, but when people with more political clout than residents of Newark had objected, they never seemed to open. Didn’t Christie change his mind about forcing charters on middle class and affluent communities when those communities objected? He definitely still expanded charters in the poorest urban neighborhoods whose objections were ignored.
Stuy is no different from dedicated magnets set up during the desegregation era. The themes are typically STEM, college prep. or the Arts. Instead of sending my son to the college prep. magnet—Jax had been embroiled in a 40-year desegregation suit—I sent him to the Arts magnet, where he flourished. No way he would have had access to the types of opportunities offered in the Arts magnet had he stayed at the neighborhood school. I knew how to make the system work for him.
—And therein is the issue. If ALL students had access to those opportunities, we wouldn’t even have this discussion. We KNOW that there are vast differences in curricular offerings, teacher expertise/experience & resources.
—And systemically it goes further. Instead of having a plethora of great opportunities in our beloved neighborhood schools, students who don’t pass the state test have been relegated to remediation courses. Our award-winning 200-member band was decimated in a few years because students had to take Intensive Math or Reading AS their electives.
Can we make great opportunities happen for all? Are pathways open for families who don’t navigate systems? If the answers are ‘No’, then the specialized schools probably shouldn’t exist. Would we ever allow that? —Also a ‘No’. Systems like admissions testing ensure that. Are we willing to dismantle a system that benefits us and our own children? Absolutely not.
The schools like Stuy, Bronx Science. Boston Latin, Douglas Anderson & Stanton are here to stay. Parents like me perpetuate such systems.
This is an insightful response. See my comment later on, becasue I thaught in a magnet school
As long as there are these types of schools available to the children of those parents who know how to game the system, no one will be sufficiently motivated to fix what is going wrong in other schools.
Not sure whether they should exist, but I’m pretty sure they should change the name and hence acronym of the entrance exam.
SHSAT is a little too close to SHAT.
For SH SAT
The student sat
And just for that
Their knowledge shat
But STEM nerds tend to be unconscious when it comes to such things.
What does “one of the best high schools in the nation” even mean? Is it one of the “best” because it has the “best” students? And the “best” students are the ones who get the highest test scores? For all your protestations to the contrary, it’s clear that people on this blog still believe in the myth of meritocracy.
Is there anything actually unique about Stuy that you wouldn’t find at, say, BASIS? Is it just heaps of homework stuffing kids full of supposedly every bit of worthy knowledge of Western “civilization” (sic)? It is a bunch of AP-type courses stuffing 800 page textbooks into kids’ heads in the course of 8 months with no opportunity for deep dives and exploration?
Or is it a place where kids can actually explore the world in their own ways? Do students have any say about what and how they learn? Is it really a passionate community of learners, or is it a bunch of teachers frantically filling a bunch of pails, so those pails can go on to the “best” colleges because they’re so much better than the rest of us?
In a world as polarized as ours, the actual best educational experience would be to throw all students together so the insulate elites are actually confronted with the “lazy” “thuggish” “behavior problem” students and then maybe they’ll realize that they wouldn’t last a day in those students’ shoes and maybe they’re not so special after all.
good point… but it doe snot address the issue.
Now that you mention it, “snot” might address the issue (or tissue)
“One of the best high schools in the nation” means the folks at US News crowned you with that moniker.
You are not supposed to question it.
Blue Stuy
Water is wet
Sky is blue
And you can bet
That Stuy is too
“In a world as polarized as ours, the actual best educational experience would be to throw all students together so the insulate elites are actually confronted with the “lazy” “thuggish” “behavior problem” students and then maybe they’ll realize that they wouldn’t last a day in those students’ shoes and maybe they’re not so special after all.”
What? I thought you explained that you sent your kid to a private school. Am I wrong?
Thanks NYCpsp, my response to dee-seventy-seven, went into moderation hell as per usual.
Quote from d-77: “For all your protestations to the contrary, it’s clear that people on this blog still believe in the myth of meritocracy.” end quote What an arrogant and false assertion but very typical of this person. From the comments on this blog, I do not see people believing in the “myth of meritocracy.” D-77 does this quite often, making sweeping comments about the commenters on this blog and lumping them together into one giant blob. It’s really offensive, misleading and bogus. Just make a comment without being insulting to Diane and the commenters on this blog.
Yep.
I don’t think it is a “myth” that students begin high school with different interests, desires, motivations and academic preparation and yes, academic strengths and weaknesses. This isn’t just solved by saying “let’s make every public K-8 school good”. Even at the so-called “good” public middle schools, students still have different interests, desires, motivations and yes, academic strengths and weaknesses and it isn’t because they didn’t get a good elementary school education.
I think testing 4 year olds to determine whether they are “gifted” or not is ridiculous and silly.
But I don’t think that having 9th graders tracked into different classes based on their motivations and skills is ridiculous and silly. I went to a public school that had virtually the same students from K-12. They all had the same K-8 education. But by high school, some students showed an affinity for some subjects and some students didn’t. But just because the students didn’t show an affinity for a subject in 9th grade or even in 12th grade doesn’t mean he or she might not have taken classes in a community college when older and suddenly found themselves loving math or science or writing. I don’t think tracking should ever be more than a temporary thing, with students welcomed and invited to move into classes as they are motivated. Rather than to force all 9th graders to take Algebra 1 (with some of the affluent ones having private tutors), I wish there was no stigma to letting some 9th graders take a much slower curriculum, always encouraging them, and allowing them to move on quickly at the point they realize they like math and are now more motivated to put in the work to learn it.
(I know many teachers here don’t like computer-based math, but I visited a middle school that taught a very diverse group of students with varying math backgrounds and abilities via a “School of One” computer based program, and I thought it was a fantastic way not to permanently track, but to meet each student at their own level, advancing or slowing down as the individual student needed it.)
dienne, browsing wiki’s description of curriculum at Brooklyn Latin School: at least 1 [of 8] promising framework for enabling a passionate community of learners to explore the world in their own ways, at any academic level. My reaction was, why does one need to be a test-taking genius to access this?
But how to ‘throw all students together’ into a diverse class/ race mix? 80% qualify for free/ reduced-price lunch. And it’s the most racially-segregated public school system in the country– presumably because of residential segregation—with schools spread out over many miles of traffic choked streets [buses?] and s-l-o-w transit rides unsuitable for many under age 14 (& some too dicey for older kids). The 5k or fewer students attending SHSAT high schools are a drop in the bucket.
I will be talking about LEARNING in this comment, and about my experience. See my conclusion as I explain what I observed in a 5 decade career.
First, before I became the NY State Educator of Excellence, my major experience was in NYC, but for 12 of those years, I subbed in a NY suburb, teaching in 13 elementary schools, 3 junior highs and two senior highs.
Also, relevant to my conclusions — I observed the experience of my own 2 sons, as they moved through the East Ramapo School system — which at that time was ranked third in the state. Its high schools (where I also subbed) had a system of assigning students to classes with similar performance levels: below-level, on-level and above-level. I used the lesson plans of the teachers when I subbed there… and the objectives for learners were very different. I do not wish to discuss the low expectations for students not in the ‘top’ that I observed during that time.
When I began to teach in NYC 1963, it was well known that the performance of students in 2-1 was expected to be more advanced than 2-9. Accordingly, the teaching materials and the methodology was adapted. Remember , we are discussing learning, not teaching.
When this changed (to avoid the ’stigma’ of not being included in the top classes) the difficulty of ’teaching’ to so many diverse learners became the problem of the teacher, but that is NOT the issue I wish to stress. Yes, I had to create groups, and lessons to meet the learning style of very different learners. Yes , it took much longer to meet objectives for any and all lessons, but I want to talk about how this affected the kids.
Do you not realize that low-performing learners in the same room, saw the high performers, and realized that they lagged behind.
In Junior High, MY oldest son, was put into an on-level math class. Apparently, his 6th grade teacher had ‘solved the problem of instructing so many diverse students in a school day, by neglecting the ’top’ group which was.’taught’ by one of the students. MY son did not enter the junior high with the skills he needed, because his friend Gary, taught his group! (BTWGary, in the future, went on to MIT, but it should never have been up to him to teach these 12 year old kids.(
My son complained, “Mom, do you know how long we are on the same problem…2 weeks! I learned what to do the first day.”I hired a tutor, brought him up to par, and insisted he be transferred to the class commensurate with his skills. (BTW, today he is cardiologist.)
One more thing, when I taught my last tenure at East Side Middle Schools — a magnet school where students applied and were accepted according to their performance abilities. The teaching staff made a very special effort to tutor students who showed great desire to learn, but came to us at age 12, without the skills needed. We were not an ‘elite’ private school. We watched applicants, as they sat in our classes for a week before we made decisions to accept or reject. BUT, that said, one of the things that concerned us, was HOW could a child with very poor reading skills, handle our 7th grade biology text — which required genuine literacy skills.
Would not a child, be upset when so many other children were eager to easily answer a question— all those raised hands?
I see the injustice, too, as so many children who apply to Stuyvesant, are privileged to have intensive, private tutoring, which is unavailable & unfordable to the ethnic minorities.
To conclude:
I don’t have answer to what must be done to be inclusive of America’s children by the time they get to high school.
It is clear that all our children must learn the skills they need in the elementary and middle schools, in order to succeed, not —merely to enter an excellent high school — but to perform at their own ’top’ levels.
Large systems have enough students to support specialized schools. Students will find other like minded schools with similar interests in these schools. I do think a test taken on a single day is not a fair way to judge a student. School records and perhaps an interview can be used to judge potential students as well. I also believe the schools should try to balance the specialized schools with diverse students as well. Perhaps these schools should have to take a certain number of students from all areas of the city to provide more balance.
Comprehensive schools often do an excellent job preparing college bound students. Students have the option of preparing for college or technical education. These schools also provide support for students with learning difficulties and for those learning English as a new language as well. Many graduates of comprehensive high schools often complete college and go on to have good careers or own their own businesses. Public systems deliver far more options for students than “one size fits all” privatized schools.
“Large systems have enough students to support specialized schools.”
Agree. I think the question should be approached not just on the benefit for the students in the selective school but whether that is either neutral or beneficial to the rest of the system.
Here’s the thing- public education never promised to be all things to all people. Telling students they “deserve” to have the entire focus be on their individual needs ignores that they live in communities and the needs of other people have to be considered too. That’s part of what “public” is and while it may be a weakness as far as individualization it is a strength in students learning that they’re not the only person who matters.
That’s why the balancing act public schools have to perform is so difficult but “difficult” doesn’t mean it should be jettisoned for a consumer model that says it’s all about individual demand and selecting edu-product. Schools are a community project. They involve compromise.
Specialized high schools can be great. Selective schools cannot.
100% agree.
Wise as usual, leftcoast teacher.
I would venture one exception to this: we know that a few people develop, very early in life, truly exceptional mathematical ability. And some of these people are born into dire poverty. If you don’t know who he is, Google “Srinivasa Ramanujan .” Seriously, take the time to do that. His is a breathtakingly interesting story.
It’s important and valuable to such individuals and to society as a whole that they be identified and given intensive, unique, private instruction early on.
Oh, and on a completely different note, Critical Race Theory made a sandwich in my kitchen and didn’t clean up after itself.
Some selective schools are also specialized where students can “major” in science, business, technology, etc, Students get to study their major in much greater depth in these schools.
With few exceptions, doesn’t every public school system have their own system of “specialized high schools” (albeit within a single school)? I went to a relatively big midwestern public high school in the late 70s and the classes were divided into “college track” and “regular track” with a very small percentage of students choosing a 3rd “vocational” track where they attended a separate school. The main difference is that smaller cities/communities didn’t take all of the students who would be taking honors track classes and put them into a single school.
Also, the main difference is that anyone could choose the honors track and it had nothing to do with passing a standardized test.
Even today, I have seen some large and diverse public high schools in smaller cities that have students whose academic motivation ranges from very low to very high in a single high school that serves the entire community, but there are clearly still tracks, even if the students voluntarily choose them. Is that better? I can see the arguments for both sides.
I always think the terms of discussion about specialized high schools are off. NYC uses a very problematic “single test admission” in which 27,000 students sit for a test, and the 5,000 highest scorers get seats and are considered to be academically superior to every single one of the 22,000 students who don’t get seats. Moreover, some people actually believe that if the 5,000 students with higher SHSAT scores had to sit in classes with students with top middle school grades and good state test scores and an SHSAT score that was lower, that the students with higher SHSAT scores would be irreparably harmed and not get the huge benefit that they are positive all students with suitably high SHSAT scores can only receive when they are in classes that exclude all students with SHSAT scores that are are only the 5,001th highest score. Or the 6,001st highest score.
In the current system, 27,000 8th graders are pitted against each other with the knowledge ingrained into them that if they don’t get one of the highest 5,000 SHSAT scores, but instead get the 5,010th highest SHSAT score or below, that they have been certified by a supposedly “proven” test to be unable to handle any work at specialized high school because not only would they fail miserably, but their mere presence in the school would cause great damage to the far more capable students whose learning would be hurt by having any student – whether he had the 5,001st highest score or the 6,001st highest score – in their classes.
And the result? Test prep. Massive test prep. Because it doesn’t matter if you know all the material because if 5,000 students know how to take a test better than you, then you might get the 5,001st highest score instead of the 5,000th highest, which is the difference between you being certified as “worthy of being in a specialized high school” and “someone who could never handle the work and whose mere presence in that high school would hurt the students who can handle the work which they proved by getting one of the highest 5,000 SHSAT scores instead of getting the 5,001st highest SHSAT score.”
There is a larger debate about how to address the fact that by high school, students exhibit a wide range of academic motivations — from those who hate being in school and want to disrupt, those who struggle with the concepts in Algebra 1 and Geometry, and those who breeze through those concepts so quickly that even a class of college bound students is tedious and boring.
I think there are ways to address this. If we are to have so-called specialized high schools, it would make far more sense to have an exam that is simply about demonstrating academic readiness — something the SHSAT does not do although people in NYC actually seem to believe that it does. Perhaps 10,000 of the 27,000 students would pass that exam. Perhaps 15,000 of them would, or even 20,000 would (remember there are 80,000 students, so 20,000 is only the top quartile of students.)
There would be no need for massive test prep since the goal would not be to outscore most of the other students who are also doing massive test prep.
And as Gary mentions in his columns,the specialized high schools already track within themselves. There are regular math classes and there are honors math classes and there are math classes for students who are gifted in math at a level that most people can’t imagine. But while it is great that those students very highly gifted in math at those high levels can learn together, those students comprise a small percentage of the students in specialized high schools. Most of the students aren’t much different than the ones who would be in honors or AP classes at good public high schools that serve a range of students.
This is true and under-discussed in my opinion.
I have a big rural high school and there are a LOT of options for students. Just the vocational track alone is essentially a school within a school and it is really popular and has been for 50 years. AP courses are almost another sub-school.
If we were to bust that high school up into 4 or 5 schools all it would do is fragment and make each school less resilient, with less funding and fewer economies of scale.
“AP courses are almost another sub-school.” Yes, and there are problems with that as well. It means those schools can be divided (often among class lines) in a way that is less obvious if all students who are academically motivated and capable are together in a single school. I can see arguments for both sides, but I can’t see any good argument to why a single test should be the determining factor.
Stuyvesant goes well beyond AP classes in their mat curriculum and gives those students a gift that would be unimaginable in even a large rural high school: a large group of peers that value education and admire especially gifted students instead of isolating and bullying them.
Test prep is not preparation for the real world. Scores do not show the real merit of person.
Students need a real education that is rich in content that allows them to continue learning whatever the future and the economy throws at them. Students should be able to explore their passions and talents in a positive environment.
Public schools do an amazing job of bringing different types of students together and providing social learning opportunities as well. Most public schools provide experiences that can teach young people mutual acceptance and understanding.
retired teacher,
If you look at Stuyvesant’s math curriculum (https://stuy.enschool.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=127571&type=d&pREC_ID=253243). I think you will be pleased that they offer so many post AP classes where the test prep is for the teacher written tests. These courses include Complex Calculus, Multivariable Calculus, Mathematical Explorations, and a Senior Research project where the end product is a mathematics research paper. Outside of places like Stuyvesant and Thomas Jefferson High School, this curriculum is unavailable to high school students in their high schools.
“Specialized”
Specialized school
And specialized test
Specialized tool
For specialized “best”
Specialized this
And specialized that
Specialized biz
Is where it’s at
Generalized
Generalized school
And generalized ed
Generalized tool
For generalized head
Generalized this
And generalized that
Generalized dissed
For specialized hat
generalized heads: the corporate mind
Gary Rubenstein says “Should there even be a Stuyvesant High School?” I of course don’t mean should there be a building with a sign that says ‘Stuyvesant High School’ in the front of it. I mean should there be a school where the top performing students in New York City learn together? Whatever your definition of ‘top performing’ might be, do you think that it benefits them to learn together rather than be scattered throughout all the other schools?
Maybe you think “yes, in the ideal, but in practice there is no fair way to identify these ‘top performing students’ so no, in the real world.” But for this exercise, I’m not going to accept that answer. It is a hypothetical that begins with “IF there is some way of identifying the ‘top performing’ students (by whatever definition you adhere to for what a top performing student is), in that case should we put them together in a building and hang a sign on the front that says ‘Stuyvesant High School’?”
// End of quotes
Actually, it’s pointless to even pose such a hypothetical.
The fact is Stuyvesant exists in the real world and the question of whether it should exist is therefore necessarily inextricably connected to how the students are chosen, not least of all because the educational experience of the students who go there is directly influenced by the selection process.
“Top performing ” can be defined however one wishes to define it, even to purposefully exclude certain classes (eg, African American) of students if one so desires.
I am not saying this is what is happening in the case of schools like Stuyvessant, just that it is possible.
The SAT in its initial form was actually designed with such a purpose in mind, yet undoubtedly claimed to be selecting “top performing” students.
It is also possible that the means of selection can unwittingly result in the same outcome.
It’s easy to see that the existence question depends on the selection question by posing the question thusly:
If “high performing” students are selected based on race and/or gender, should Stuyvesant exist?
Another way to put this:
The selection process is THE central question and cannot be avoided ignored by simply posing hypotheticals.
SomeDam Poet,
There is a version of the “should there be…” that I think needs to be discussed, because not discussing it has simply enabled charter schools to thrive under false pretenses.
Should there be separate public schools — or separate public high schools — for students who have no behavioral issues and are very motivated (which includes motivated by parental pressure and self-motivated) to learn? And then what to do with other students?
NYC actually has some of his by default, because there is a citywide public school choice system comprised of enough high schools to serve a population of some 350,000 high school students. That’s more high school students in a single school systems than are in some states.
Right now, there are not enough magnet public schools that are exclusively for highly motivated families whose kids have no serious learning issues. So charters have stepped in to fill the void, but unfortunately instead of being upfront about who it is they are serving, they push a false narrative that it isn’t that the families who choose charters or the students who are different, it is that the teachers and CEO at the charter schools have come up with a magic formula to turn low performing students into high performing scholars.
I don’t think charters (as we know them today) would exist if there were public magnet schools filling that void of providing schools that are exclusively for students motivated to learn. Especially if those public schools were highly funded and offered many extras.
But that still leaves open the question of what happens to the other students who aren’t motivated to learn and who may have some behavioral or learning issues, and no one wants to discuss that thanks to charters pushing the absolutely false — and dangerous — narrative that they can turn any of those students (except the young students charters smear as irredeemably violent and unteachable) into high performing scholars. That lie was never pushed by REAL public magnet schools, but it was pushed by many in the ed reform movement who benefited greatly by it.
I don’t necessarily think it is a good idea to have a school system in which the students with few academic and behavioral issues and in one system and the students with many academic and behavioral issues are in the other system. But with charters, we are getting such a system under completely false pretenses. And I think it is a terrible idea to award the franchise to teach the most motivated families to private entities while the public system takes the rest — including all the students who start at charters but who charters decide are too much bother to teach.
“I don’t think charters (as we know them today) would exist if there were public magnet schools filling that void of providing schools that are exclusively for students motivated to learn. Especially if those public schools were highly.”
That’s what the charters want us to think. Follow the money.
“That’s what charters want us to think”
Charters want us to think that they are teaching the students who would be failing if they were taught by union teachers in a public school. At least in NYC, it is the justification for their existence.
No, no, no, no!
No. You remember that sickened feeling you got a few years ago, when you saw the KKK marching in broad daylight? That is the same feeling I get when I see people in selective schools, sickened. I’m not calling anyone racist or KKK, but I wonder how anyone can wind up so far removed from caring about people other than themselves. Shame on you, Stuyvesant High.
First of all, and paramount to all else, since when is segregation tolerable?
It’s not, not under any circumstances or for any reasons, but supporters of segregation via tracking tend to fail to address it. Shrug. Wink. Oops. Oh, well… The argument was made that tracking works in some academic subject courses, like having grade levels. No, tracking is not the same as putting students into grade levels based on their ages. That is a false equivalence. Tracking is segregation within a school, done using markers far less concrete than age. Your birthday is more concrete than your ability to factor polynomials. Tracking means some students get an education, and most students get targeted for meaningless intervention test prep or held back in other ways, based on our opinions of their abilities, abilities that may or may not have yet come to the fore as the brain grows and develops.
The argument was also made — unbelievable — that class size doesn’t matter if you have tracking. Thud.
And comparisons were made between tracking and joining an exercise class or athletics team. Sure, you might want to join the varsity tennis team or an advanced jazzercise class if you’re in great physical condition. It doesn’t matter whether everyone in the country is good at tennis or jazzercise, so that’s fine. It very much matters, however, if one group of people takes advanced academic classes which are conductive to leadership roles in society, and another group of people are turned into Walmart and Amazon floor sweepers on the fringes of democratic participation. Education is more fundamentally important to society than sport.
No, selective schools are not the solution. They are the problem. Dienne is right, people are buying the myth of meritocracy. Even worse when the public is paying for it. Just shameful.
“I’m not calling anyone racist or KKK, but I wonder how anyone can wind up so far removed from caring about people other than themselves. Shame on you, Stuyvesant High.”
This is exactly the kind of argument that simply feeds into the division. Usually I see those kinds of false narratives being made by those who are pro-SHSAT, but your post is an example of an anti-SHSAT position that offers similarly false choices and false narratives and makes no attempt to understand the issues.
This is a complicated issue, and isn’t helped by someone insisting that if all 9th graders are not studying the same math at the same time, it is simply “segregation”. Sorry but if that is what teachers are going to tell parents, no wonder dienne77 sends her kids to private schools that don’t have teachers unions. (I’m sure private school parents don’t avoid public schools because they think all union teachers are bad, it’s just that they believe their own kid is getting a much better education being taught by teachers who aren’t in a union.)
Please explain how this is complex: The demographics of the New York City school system is 41% Latino, 26% Black, 16% Asian, and 15% White. The demographics of Stuyvesant High School are 74% Asian, 19% White, 4% Multiracial, 3% Latino, and 1% Black.
leftcoastteacher,
Your percentages are correct. Not sure how they relate to anything you said in the post about the “myth of meritocracy”.
Are you saying that if 58% of the Asian students and 4% of the white students left Stuyvesant, it would be better? What if the 58% of Asian students you think need to leave are disproportionately poor?
As I say, this is a complicated issue, and it is not helped by telling Asian American parents that the vast majority of their kids who are in a school should not be there and how dare they believe in the “myth of meritocracy” and believe their own hard-working kids deserve their seats when they don’t.
Also, I don’t understand why you think all 9th graders should take the same math, because you didn’t offer any explanation of how that would be done.
You don’t have to put someone on a whole separate track just because of a math class. You can take 9th grade algebra II and still take English with students who take 9th grade algebra or geometry. Math is different than other subjects.
Agreed. Please also see response to Roy T
I am not saying that if 58% of the Asian students and 4% of the white students left Stuyvesant, it would be better. I am saying that Stuy should be open to all students in the vicinity. It’s a public school. It’s supposed to be open to the public.
leftcoastteacher,
I’m sorry, I must have misunderstood your point. You do think having more accelerated class for math is okay?
There are lots of ways to track. It doesn’t have to mean tracked entirely on ability. But I was just pointing out that for 50 years or more, the reality was that nearly every large public high school system — whether the students are mostly poor or mostly affluent or middle class — seems to offer more accelerated classes in multiple subjects for students who are most motivated to learn.
Please ask yourself what the purpose of learning math is. Why do we teach it? Is it taught so that a technocracy can rule over the rest of society with algorithmic data analytics? I think not. Is it taught so that voting citizens can understand the science behind such things as vaccine effectiveness versus vaccine efficacy? I think so. We want to provide society as a whole with valuable knowledge. Higher education is the level at which specialization occurs.
Ideally, no, an accelerated math class is not what I would want for a child of mine. I accept, however, that extreme tracking is how math instruction has evolved in the world. I see how. Math teachers think in numbers. But yes, an accelerated math class is tolerable, as long as it doesn’t force the entire school to be divided into tracks for every subject. A little compromise, right?
Leftcoastteacher,
Can you school offer any post AP calculus class to a classroom of students? I am thinking of multivariable calculus or differential equations? Telling some students not to work up to the edges of their intellectual curiosity does not make for a better education for all.
I noted that you looked at the racial breakdown of Stuyvesant schools, but not the free and reduced price lunch rate. 46% of students qualify for free or reduced price lunches (37% free, 9% reduced price). An awful lot of floor sweepers are sending their kids to this school.
Free and reduced lunches at the school are what compared to NYC?
As for AP classes, they are not functionally or ideally a good idea. That’s a whole other can of wax, a whole other ball of worms.
Leftcoastteacher,
It is true that not all of the children of floor sweepers send their kids to Stuyvesant. Because not all do, does that mean that none should be allowed to send their children to Stuyvesant?
I am not sure why are you are talking about AP classes. The Stuyvesant math curriculum goes well beyond ANY AP math class. Do you think schools should be allowed to help students pursue their intellectual interests to the best of their ability? If so, I think that schools like Stuyvesant are a way to provide a better education for all. Do you have a different idea of how to accomplish that goal?
Telling some students [that they will] not [be able to receive an education in which they are enabled] to work up to the edges of their intellectual curiosity does not make for a better education for all.
Sorry about the awkwardness introduced by that edit, but it was made to clarify what I think you meant, TE.
I agree. How to avoid that–that’s a problem. I have long favored honors classes because of this.
AP courses are just test prep for standardized tests. They are the opposite of effective. Test prep is not authentic instruction. If you pass an AP calculus test, you should still take that calculus class in college because the AP class did not prepare you for the following level of calculus. Standardized tests like the SAT and AP misrepresent what students know.
In no way, shape, or form am I saying there shouldn’t be opportunities for students to pursue their interests and abilities to the highest levels possible. Walk into my English class and you’ll see some students reading grade level material and some students doing college level, independent research reports and literary reviews. A student who struggles in math might be in my honors English class, and a student taking geometry in middle school might be in my regular English class. And it doesn’t really matter which English class they’re in, as long as the class size is small enough to allow me to tailor instruction individually or in small groups.
The point is that all my students are learning at their own levels together, in the same school. Integrated.
AA few years back, former Stuyvessant principal Jie Zhang was asked about the selection process and what she said was honest and very revealing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-stuyvesant-principal-questions-proposed-changes-to-school-admissions-1531841841
As a justification , she basically said that admitting lower scoring students might cause difficulties for the teachers and might require adding “academic intervention resources” to bring the students up to speed.
“Ms. Zhang expressed concern about how Stuyvesant’s faculty would handle a broader ability band. “I worry about their training for teaching a completely new population,” she said. “I don’t think the teachers in specialized high schools will be ready to adjust quickly.”
“If the top 7% of each middle school got into specialized high schools, she said, “I would really worry,” though perhaps admitting the top 1% or 2% would be feasible. If the mayor’s proposal passes in the state legislature, she said, Stuyvesant would have to dramatically expand its academic intervention services for struggling students.”
Both of these may well be true.
After all, as pretty much every teacher understands, it IS easier to teach “advanced” students — especially those who have already been exposed to the material in some form or another.
But whether someone requires extra help to do the work and whether they are even capable are two very different questions.
And rejecting students simply because they might require additional effort and/or resources on the part of the school seems to be a very lazy approach, essentially saying “we can’t be bothered, so don’t bother us with those students!”
“Ordinary” schools and teachers don’t have the luxury of saying “you need extra help and sorry, but we can’t help you”
And that seems to be a very weird philosophy for any public school to have.
Then again, maybe it’s just me.
Maybe i just don’t ” get” the “specialized” philosophy.
Anchors away!
You’re slowing us down
An oil tanker
You’re waaaaay downtown
A heavy anchor
We just can’t bring
You up to speed
And here’s the thing:
You just impede
Not incidentally, the idea that an eighth grader who has done well in his or her classes but did not score sufficiently high on SHAT is somehow so far behind that they are simply incapable of doing the work at a high-school like Stuyvessant is just not credible.
It’s not like they already have to know calculus, physics, chemistry, biology and the rest BEFORE they go there.
Most middle schools don’t even teach math beyond algebra 1 or science beyond introductory physical science, so it’s actually ludicrous to claim or even imply they are so far “behind” the high SHAT scorers in math and science that they can’t be brought up to speed.
It’s also not at all clear that the “academic intervention services for struggling students” would have to be “dramatically expanded” to bring such students up to speed.
It appears that there is more than a little exaggeration involved.
SomeDAM Poet says:
“he idea that an eighth grader who has done well in his or her classes but did not score sufficiently high on SH[S]AT is somehow so far behind that they are simply incapable of doing the work at a high-school like Stuyvesant is just not credible.”
Ding Ding Ding. Thank you.
I don’t know why this discussion has veered so far from the reality of what NYC specialized high schools are.
In the discussion of specialized high schools, that fact should be stipulated first. But instead the discussion so often begins with a false belief that a test that stack ranks students — every student from 1 – 27,000 receives a “score” that reflects ONLY where in the 1 – 27,000 ranking he is — provides any revealing information whatsoever about how many students could do the work at specialized high schools.
If 27,000 3rd graders took the SHSAT, the 5,000 who missed the fewest questions would receive exactly the same scores as the 8th graders do, with the top 5,000 3rd graders apparently being “qualified” for a specialized high school and the other 22,000 being unqualified.
If 27,000 MIT and Cal Tech students and alums took the SHSAT, the 5,000 who missed the fewest questions would receive exactly the same scores as the 8th graders do, with the top 5,000 MIT and Cal Tech students and alums designated as “qualified” for a specialized high school, and the remaining 22,000 said to be “unable to handle the work”.
If 10,000 high achieving 8th graders in the country and 17,000 random 3rd graders (27,000 students total) all took the SHSAT one year, the 5,000 students with the highest scores would be deemed qualified for a specialized high school, all the rest would be placed in the same category of “not able to handle the work” whether they were one of the high achieving 8th graders who didn’t get one of the top 5,000 SHSAT scores or a random 3rd grader.
The NYT actually took seriously a ridiculously idiotic study that their education reporters believed was very, very important – a study which took the “average” high school performance of the 5,000 students with the highest SHSAT scores and compared that with the “average” high school performance of the 22,000 students with the lowest SHSAT scores, and declared that because the “average” of the top 5,000 students was higher than the “average” of the bottom 22,000 students, that proved the SHSAT exam was a superior method of choosing students!
And anyone who doesn’t understand what is wrong with that study should not be reporting on education.
The 5,000 students with the highest SHSAT scores could have turned out to be lower-performing than the 5,000 students whose SHSAT score was next highest. But that would never be known because the GPAs of students 1 – 5,000 were NOT averaged and compared to the average GPAs of students 5,001 – 10,000. Instead the students 1 – 5,000 were only compared to the average of the huge group of students 5,001 – 27,000.
(There was a 2nd study done that actually did compare smaller cohorts of students with various SHSAT scores and clearly showed that except for the very highest scorers (perhaps 30% of the students in specialized high schools or even fewer), there was little difference between students who scored above a cut off and those who scored somewhat below. That study was ignored by the media.
Agree with you about “ordinary public schools & teachers don’t have the luxury of saying you need extra help & sorry but we can’t help you.”
Another problem with schools that use academic tests for admissions is that their students do not see, do not go to school with youngsters who may have great talent, but in fields not measured by standardized tests….such as art, or music or computer repair or auto mechanics.
As a student in the Wichita, Kansas public schools, it was very valuable for those who took some advanced English classes to be in, for example, wood shop classes. We saw clearly that there were some people with very strong talents – unlike ours but very talented.
It also was valuable to be in some classes with students having special needs. Put my own life in perspective. Valuable life lessons.
“Agree with you about “ordinary public schools & teachers don’t have the luxury of saying you need extra help & sorry but we can’t help you.”
This is true about ordinary public schools and teachers.
On the other hand, charter schools do have the luxury of saying “you need extra help & sorry but we can’t help you” to students that they want to say it to. And, Joe Nathan, the ed reform movement rewards those charters who ruthlessly cull students, incentivizing everyone else in the charter school movement to either copy their “best practices” of saying “sorry we can’t help you” and reaping the rewards of “success”, or simply remaining silent and complicit and pretending that the existence of specialized high schools somehow justifies a privately operated system of publicly funded schools who are free to say “sorry I can’t help you” to students they just don’t want to teach. Because their obligation to that student ends the moment that student agrees to leave their school.
Real public schools — which includes magnet schools — are part of a system where the obligation to the student remains whether that student is in a magnet school or not.
Pretend public schools use public money to teach the students they want to teach and their obligation to that student ends the moment they can convince their parents to pull them from the school.
Why doesn’t the ed reform movement care about high attrition rates, instead of rationalizing them or more frequently, hiding them?
high attrition rates for students and faculty are a concern to me where-ever they occur. I think (have have recommended to policy-makers) that this be one of the pieces of information available publicly about every public school.
“every public school”?
The attrition in real public schools would have to be attrition in real public school SYSTEMS. It is irrelevant that a student moved from one public school in the system to another public school in the system, just like it is irrelevant if that public school system has to pay for a private school for special needs to educate that student.
But as you know, charters are incentivized differently, since every student they get rid of is no longer their concern. Period. Charters don’t use the tens of millions of dollars their billionaire donors give them to pay for private schools for all the kindergarten children they claim need to be suspended because of their violent actions that can only be addressed by removing those supposedly horrible charter students from the presence of their superior charter teachers.
Stop covering up for the highest performing charters who push out children and stop enabling the false racist narratives that the students who win their lotteries have disproportionately violent natures (at age 5) or that a disproportionately high number of children who win the lottery turn out to have awfuyl, terrible parents who don’t want their chidlren to turn into high performing scholars and that’s why thjose awful parents piull their chjildren from thje very hjighest performing charters that advertise and market to trhose parents that they turn 99% of their children into high performing students. You promote the lie that it isn’t the chartyer who is dishons=est, it’s jut rthe uncaring parents who prefer their child be aq failure.
Do you really care about attrition rates, or do you really care about rationalizing charter’s high attrition rates by comparing attrition rates of a lavishly funded top performing charter filled with motivated parents seeking out the best education for their kids, to the attrition rates of an underfunded, low-performing public school?
Are you willing to push the false narrative that there’s nothing incriminating about large numbers of caring and motivated parents pulling their kids from a high performing charter to attend a lower performing public school, because that is exactly the same as large numbers of caring and motivated parents pulling their kids from a failing public school to seek out a higher performing public school?
It isn’t the same. And if those disappearing charter students were white and middle class, those who enable the lies of charters would never be able to smear their parents by scapegoating them for the failure of the charter to teach their children and charters would never be able to get away with making false innuendoes that those white kindergarten children were disproportionately violent due to their violent natures. And if it was a top performing charter filled with white students, charters and their enablers could never get away with the false innuendoes that the many white parents who pulled their children from the charter just didn’t want their kid to be a high performing student.
A little truth goes a long way. But the ed reformers aren’t looking for truth. If they were, we would already have attrition rate information about charters, and the ethical and moral charters — the ones who kept most of their students but had less stellar test scores — would be celebrated. But you seem more fearful of calling out reprehensible charters whose “high performance” comes with high attrition rates than you care about having a truthful discussion that would also benefit charters that actually want to keep and teach every student that wins its lottery.
^^I apologize for the many uncorrected typos in paragraph 3, but I think the gist of that paragraph is clear despite those typos.
Unless you want children to grow up with jaded opinions of each other formed by their juvenile selves, having a place for children who want to learn without catching s&$t for it is a good idea. My daughter regularly reports on the negative attitudes of students who would obviously be elsewhere, and has constantly to put up with behavioral tics incompatible with classroom learning. She does not understand that these children will grow up to regret their lassitude. She does understand that some of them will be full of belligerent attitudes and end up storming the nation’s capitol building in support of a fascist.
School should ultimately allow students all to learn. We should do all we can to teach them. But we should never create the space for students who are militant about their ignorance to impede their peers.
Roy, our colleague John Merrow, a former teacher who was for many years the McNeil/Lehrer PBS news hour education reporter has what for me are important insights. He has written that schools should NOT seek to show youngsters how smart they are. Instead schools should seek to help youngsters understand HOW they are smart.
Both research and my own experience over 50 years in and with public schools show that when youngsters experience success and receive recognition for their talent, they are far less likely to disrupt and disrespect other students. I’ve seen students who had previously been quite disruptive become very positive, supportive young people when educators help them identify one or more areas in which they have have, and help them develop those talents.
In your experience teaching?
Yes, I taught in Mpls public schools for a year was a teacher and administrator in St Paul Public Schools for 14 years.
Joe Nathan says:
“when youngsters experience success and receive recognition for their talent, they are far less likely to disrupt and disrespect other students.”
Wow, so what you are saying is that a charter school where 18% of their kindergarten and first graders are acting out so violently in class that an out of school suspension is the only option is clearly not giving those youngsters any kind of recognition for their talents and more likely are making those youngsters feel so terrible and awful about themselves that the youngsters are disrupting and disrespecting other students is shocking high numbers?
That was always something I thought was quite possible, as well, so it’s interesting to hear you confirm it with your knowledge of education. A teacher has great power, especially over the youngest students, and any school handing out frequent suspensions to their very youngest students for behavioral issues is a school where those students are experiencing distress and humiliation.
Yes, I’d be concerned about any public school where 18% of kg-1st graders are suspended.
“schools should seek to help youngsters understand HOW they are smart.”
Yes, yes, yes. A thousand thousand times yes.
This should be the job. Figuring out how to run schools that do this and do it well is a MAJOR and TRULY DIFFICULT problem, solutions to which will have to be continuously in development.
As it is now, a kid can have perfect pitch and go through our entire school system without having anyone ever notice this. One small example of a huge, general problem.
Joe Nathan says:
“Yes, I’d be concerned about any public school where 18% of kg-1st graders are suspended.”
There isn’t a public school in NYC where 18% of the K-1st graders are suspended. The suspension rates for the very youngest students in public school are so low as to be barely detectable.
But if I look at the suspension rates of some supposedly “high performing” charters – which aren’t real public schools because their only oversight is by people who are committed to having high performing charters — I am shocked that at one charter, 23% of the students were suspended the year that the oldest students were first graders. (NYSED data, 2014-15, report card suspension data for SA Fort Green Charter School 2013-14)
The oversight agency – perhaps better identified as the cheerleading agency — was so concerned with this high suspension data that they awarded more charters to that network.
And the next year, SA Springfield Gardens suspended 18% of their Kindergarten and first graders. (NYSED data, 2015-16, report card suspension data for SA Springfield Gardens 2014-15)
Given that the charter network has never disavowed this practice but instead has defended it as good and necessary during the very rare times they are asked about it (as John Merrow did, after which they intentionally used their political clout and PR to try to destroy him and a very young child), no one knows whether they are still giving lots of 5 and 6 year olds out of school suspensions or if they are just using other reprehensible practices to make so-called “undesirable” children feel so awful about themselves that their caring parents (who believed the lie that the charter welcomed all students and would turn them all into high performing scholars) realize it is better remove them.
No one in the ed reform movement wants to know, which is why we have no good attrition rate data that would allow researchers to compare high performing charters to lower-performing charters. But ed reformers will spend unlimited money looking for struggling, underfunded public schools serving the most transient at-risk families that have equally high attrition rates to keep pushing the false narrative that it is the parents of charter students who are to blame – or the children themselves – because the high performing charters are miracle workers and should be lavishly rewarded for their success.
having a place for children who want to learn without catching s&$t for it is a good idea.”
I agree but there is an obvious problem with giving a few “select” students an escape route while leaving lots of others who are just as interested behind to fend for themselves.
Such a policy acts as an excuse for not dealing with the actual problems: classroom disruption or even bullying of students for being “studious”.
When I was teaching high school most recently (I recently retired after a lifetime as a textbook editor and writer; I taught at the beginning and end of my career), I had five preps and 6 classes and so 20 or so unique class sessions to plan every week. Altogether, at any given time, I would have about 180 students.
To compound this problem, I had in my classes students with vastly differing knowledge and ability, and, of course, there is no single general intelligence (Spearman’s G), nor are there six or seven “multiple intelligences”; rather, there are thousands and thousands of distinguishable cognitive and perceptual abilities that individuals have to a greater or lesser degree and that vary throughout life based on age, learning, automatic acquisition, experience, and so on. People, including little people, differ A LOT. My youngest son is not a scholar. But he is a breathtakingly talented guitarist, and he has exceptional spatial conceptualization abilities that make him a great tinkerer, and he has a savantlike ability to remember the exact directions to any place that he’s ever been.
Now, given all that I just mentioned (except the stuff about my son), I would often have administrators who would blithely say to me, “Well you JUST HAVE TO DIFFERENTIATE YOUR INSTRUCTION.”
Let me say up front that I am EMPHATICALLY NOT one of these educators of the kind being turned out by schools so commonly today who believe that students should mostly be left in groups to teach themselves. I believe that it’s extremely important for teachers who know more than their students do to plan, very closely and carefully, what exactly students are to learn and to do–n whole and small group, in projects, whatever–in such a way as to ensure that the students walk away with some of what the teacher knows that the students themselves didn’t know before. In other words, I LOATHE and find WHOLLY LAUGHABLE to approach to education described to me by a job application once, who attended a very exclusive private school: Well, the truth is, they didn’t teach us much; we mostly sat around in a circle and bulls**ted about gender relations. I think that gender relations is an extraordinarily interesting and important topic, but much of what passes for small-group, guide on the side instruction doesn’t justify the appellation “instruction.” Not long ago, I asked the daughter of a friend who recently returned from college how she liked it. She said, “It’s a great relief. We have professors who stand up in front of the class and teach us stuff we didn’t know. We don’t just sit around in groups and listen to other students BS about stuff that they know nothing about.”
So, if I was going to use small-group instruction, I was going to make sure that there were guided, step-by-step things for kids in those groups to be doing that would result in their having learned things they didn’t know before–having acquired new discursive and/or procedural knowledge. And that meant that a group’s activity had to be carefully planned.
If I am already planning 20 classes a week, am I supposed to plan, instead, 60 classes, so that I can have highly specified instruction targeted to differing ability levels? Am I supposed to give 180 STUDENTS each tons and tons of quality, one-on-one time targeted to their knowledge and ability levels?
When an administrators says that you JUST have to do x, he or she is usually simply parroting utter hooey. You JUST have to differentiate.
Yeah, and I JUST have to bring about world piece and cure the thousands of constantly mutating diseases known as the Common Cold.
My comment is in moderation. Guess I should not have used the word “hooey.”
Nope. That wasn’t the problem.
On a completely unrelated note:
Look, if we don’t fix Global Warming, our precious Earth is not going to be livable by our kids and grandkids. This has to be addressed NOW.
We absolutely don’t have the luxury to spend ANY time listening to outtakes from a rally by a clueless old criminal windbag like Donald Trump or to any of his legion of Mini-Me’s. Doing so would be like spending your time polishing the bright work on deck when there is a gaping hole in the hull.
Enjoy the Ride
If global warming doesn’t kill
Then Kuiper comet surely will
So might as well enjoy the ride
Cuz something’s bound to get our hide
An asteroid or nuclear war
A virus that escaped the door
We can’t avoid our final fate
Whatever time is just too late
Anyone who thinks I am being overly pessimistic need only look at the way we responded to the pandemic over the past year — which, lucky for us, was nowhere near an existential threat.
We humans are simp!y incapable of doing what is required to survive such an existential threat.
Homo sapiens ?
Ha ha ha.
And the US, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of human development (according to we Americans , at least), showed itself to be one of the most backward societies on earth.
The rocky shore is near and tge ship is being piloted by monkeys
Agree re the Pandemic. Does not bode well.
And it may already be too late on the warming.
Homo ignorans
Bananas in the Crows Nest, Everyone!
A Brief History of Homo Igorans of Planet Earth
“Homo sapiens ?
Ha ha ha.”
My preferred taxonomic moniker is “Homo Supposedly Sapiens”.
You are on a roll, SomeDAM!
It’s worth noting that NASA climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress 33 years ago (!!) that humans were having a significant impact on earth’s global mean temperature from fossil fuel burning.
And the very best that we are now doing is to sign back on to measures like the nonbinding Paris Accord, which is woefully inadequate.
Basically a feel good measure so we can pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.
The whole thing is a charade.
Exactly, SomeDAM. One wonders what it will take. Australia freaking burning to the ground? California as well? A West without water? Oh, those things have already happened, or close to it.
I will have checked out of this asylum before we hit the wall, but it’s there, ahead, for anyone to see.
The whole thing has me so upset that I am mixing my metaphors like a crazy person (or like Willie Shakespeare). LOL.
True, Bob. Two generations from now people are going to be struggling just to survive on this planet. Given the state of things, I hold out extremely little hope that fixing this problem will get done. It will take a whole reconstruction of our global society to do it. All I ever hear about is the childish notion of how people want to “get back to normal” which tells me that the changes that are coming are going to be pretty bad. When you are struggling to find food, water and a place to live, advanced math won’t mean a thing.
Don’t know much (apologies to Sam Cooke)
Don’t know much trigonometry
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about algebra
Don’t know what a computer’s for
But I do know Earth’s a warming stew
And I know that “It’s the CO2”
What a nightmarish world this will be
Have no fear, the Quantum Mechanics are Here”
The Quantum Mechanics will save us
With all their waves and i’s
With all the math they gave us
With all their e’s and Pi’s
The Quantum Mechanics are working
To save the human race
From every threat that’s lurking
In every single place
Never fear, the Quantum Mechanics are here (2)
The Many Worlds will save us
With all its forks and splits
With all the paths it gave us
’twill save us from the pits
The human race will stay alive
Buy even if we die
There’s still a world where we survive
Cuz physicists don’t lie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Schroedinger’s Cat
Schroedinger’s Cat
Alive and dead
Imagine that
A Zombie head
So don’t you fret
You might just be
Already dead
Implicitly
Prob’listically” might be better
So sorry, an edited version of that mess I posted above:
I recently retired after a lifetime as a textbook editor and writer. I taught at the beginning and at the end of my career. When I was teaching high school a couple years ago, I had five preps and 6 classes and so 20 or so unique class sessions to plan every week. At any given time during my recent stint as a teacher, I would have about 180 students.
To compound the problem that I faced having all those students and preps and classes, I had in my classes students with vastly differing knowledge and abilities. And, of course, there is no single general intelligence (Spearman’s G); nor are there six or seven “multiple intelligences” (Gardner’s list); rather, there are thousands and thousands of distinguishable cognitive and perceptual abilities that individuals have to a greater or lesser degree and that vary throughout those individuals’ lives based on age, learning, automatic acquisition, experience, mentoring, and other factors. People, including little people, differ A LOT. My youngest son is not a scholar. But he is a breathtakingly talented guitarist, and he has exceptional spatial conceptualization abilities that make him a great tinkerer, and he has a savantlike ability to remember the exact directions to any place that he’s ever been even once.
Now, despite all that I just mentioned (excepting the digression about my son), I would often have administrators who would blithely say to me, “Well you JUST HAVE TO DIFFERENTIATE YOUR INSTRUCTION.”
Let me say up front that I am EMPHATICALLY NOT one of those educators being turned out by some schools today who believe that students should mostly be left in groups to teach themselves. I believe that it’s extremely important for teachers who know more than their students do to plan, very closely and carefully, exactly what students are to learn and to do (with, of course, room for learning that goes beyond the specification)–in whole and small group, in projects, whatever–in such a way as to ensure that the students walk away with some of what the teacher knows that the students themselves didn’t know before.
In other words, I LOATHE and find WHOLLY LAUGHABLE to the to education described to me by a job applicant once, who attended a very exclusive private school: “Well, the truth is, they didn’t teach us much; we mostly just sat around in a circle and bull***ted about gender relations.” Now, I think gender relations an extraordinarily interesting and important topic, but much of what I’ve seen passing for small-group, guide on the side instruction doesn’t justify the appellation “instruction.” Not long ago, I asked the daughter of a friend who recently returned from college how she liked it. She said, “It’s a great relief. We have professors who stand up in front of the class and actually teach us stuff we don’t know. We don’t just sit around in groups and listen to other students BS about stuff that they know nothing about.” What an indictment of her high-school “education”!
So, when I used small-group instruction, I tried to make sure that there were detailed, guided, step-by-step instructions for what kids in those groups were to do–instructions that would result in their having learned things they didn’t know before–having acquired new discursive and/or procedural knowledge. And that meant that a group’s activity had to be carefully planned.
If I am already planning 20 separate classes a week, but those have to be dramatically differentiated to meet the needs of dramatically differing kids, some, for example, whose native language isn’t English and some who are in my high-school classes only in body and some who are years behind their peers and some who have terrible home lives and some who are cognitively challenged and some with IEPs and some with 504 plans, what am I supposed to do–prepare, instead of 20 separate classes, 60 or 80 or 100 separate classes, so that I can have highly specified instruction targeted to these differing students? And am I supposed to give 180 STUDENTS each tons and tons of quality, one-on-one time targeted to their knowledge and abilities?
When an administrators says that you JUST have to do x, he or she is usually simply parroting utter hooey. You JUST have to differentiate.
Yeah, and I JUST have to bring about world peace and cure the thousands of constantly mutating diseases known as the Common Cold and talk sense into Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis.
Class size matters.
It certainly freaking does! One would have to be an idiot on the subject of education one the level of, say, Bill Gates, to think that it doesn’t. Ofc, the notion that class size is irrelevant routinely pops up on the site of the Fordham Institute for Securing Big Paychecks from Oligarchs like Bill for Officials of the Fordham Institute.
How would five preps and six classes equal 20 or so unique preps? Wouldn’t it be 5 x 6 = 30? Well,, no. I had an A/B schedule. Some of my classes met for long sessions twice a week.
cx: In other words, I LOATHE and find WHOLLY LAUGHABLE the approach to education described to me, once, by a job applicant who attended a very exclusive private school: “Well, the truth is, they didn’t teach us much; we mostly just sat around in a circle and bull***ted about gender relations.”
One of my kids graduated from Stuyvesant on Friday. It’s been four difficult and stressful but rewarding years.
Yes, Stuyvesant should exist, and I’m glad it exists. To the extent there are more students capable of handling the workload at schools like Stuyvesant than there are seats at those schools –and I think there are — than more schools like Stuyvesant should exist.
I’m not sure everyone wants four difficult and stressful years for their children. Stress in adolescence is even more dangerous than stress in adulthood. It can be deadly.
I’m absolutely sure that not everyone wants this for their kids. It’s not for everyone.
Congratulations to your kid on their graduation.
“To the extent there are more students capable of handling the workload at schools like Stuyvesant than there are seats at those schools –and I think there are — then more schools like Stuyvesant should exist.”
Which brings us full circle to the topic that everyone keeps avoiding. Is SHSAT-only admissions — which is what distinguishes specialized high schools from other selective public high schools or regular high schools with honors programs — the best way to allocate seats, especially if the result is a very large public high school with arguably the best facilities of any specialized high school where students who aren’t white or Asian are barely present?
NYC PSP,
I think the depth of the curriculum, at least in mathematics, also distinguishes the specialized high schools from other high schools. Honors programs do not have multiple semesters of math classes that require BC calculus as a prerequisite.
Obviously, this is a decision that should be made by teams consisting of educators, parents, and the children, not based on a standardized test score. If a test is necessary, as a practical matter, in order to winnow enough at the outset to make the selection process workable, then the test should be one designed to select students meeting minimum, baseline criteria. THEN, the decisions should be made by such teams.
Bob,
I think that’s obvious, too, but the discussion seems to always devolve into: “if we don’t admit only via the SHSAT, lots of “unqualified” students would be there and the curriculum would have to be “watered down” for students who just aren’t ready.
And then the discussion moves to “it’s not admitting students via the SHSAT, it’s the fact that the K-8 schools are really sub-par and we need to improve them so more students can score higher on the SHSAT and qualify for those high schools”.
And sometimes it is “and to be fair, we also need to provide more free test prep to poor kids”.
But as long as it is SHSAT-only admissions, it doesn’t matter if 99% of the students are high performing, because only the ones who are able to outscore 80% of the other high achieving students on a single exam will get seats.
This has already led to a massive test prep industry — with so many resources devoted to helping students to outscore 80% of the other students who take the same exam.
Teachingeconomist,
You make a good point that in mathematics, students can take very advanced math classes in their school with other students gifted in math instead of at a nearby university as often happens with students who live in other regions.
But what percentage of the students at specialized high schools take advanced math classes beyond Calc BC? You may be surprised to know that many students at Stuyvesant don’t take any AP Calculus math class until their senior year (many take precalculus as juniors). It would certainly be worthwhile to see statistics on that, because if 50% or even 75% of the students are not taking math beyond Calculus BC, then it doesn’t seem a useful argument for why students who may score lower on their SHSAT (but performed well in middle class math classes) need to be excluded. They would feel right at home with all the other specialized high school students who don’t take those unusually advanced math classes beyond Calculus. And some of them, in fact, may turn out to love math and take those classes.
MYC PSP,
For many students there may not be a nearby university or parents that are able to pay the tuition for a high school student to attend the university as a special student. Luckily my middle son was able to attend the local university as a special student while in high school, but his friend did not, largely because of the tuition fees.
Given that more students wish to attend Stuyvesant than there are seats available, there will need to be some rationing mechanism. If you were to admit students who performed relatively poorly on the SHSAT but were awarded good grades in math classes, you would need to decide who among the students currently admitted you would not admit. From what I have seen, the SHSAT admits students who are capable of thriving at Stuyvesant. Could there be students who could thrive there who are not admitted? I am sure there are. That, however, is an argument to expand the number of seats available, not an argument to add a capable student to Stuyvesant by kicking out a different capable student.