Gary Rubinstein teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Stuy is a selective admissions school. It accepts only the students with the highest score on a standardized test of math and reading that is offered on one day only.
But is Stuy a good school?
The big question for this post is “Is Stuyvesant a good school?” At a first glance this may seem like a crazy question. It’s like asking “Was Mozart a good composer?,” right? Everyone knows that Stuyvesant is not just a good school, but a great one. In the US News & World Report ratings, Stuyvesant is ranked number 1 (tied with one other school) in the country in the category ‘Math and Reading Proficiency Rank.’ There are other metrics by which Stuyvesant is highly ranked. It is the most difficult school to get into since only the highest scorers on the SHSAT are admitted. There are advanced electives offered like existentialism, forensics, and quantum mechanics. The average SAT score is nearly 1500. It is also a very beautiful building that has an Olympic sized swimming pool. Nearly 20% of the graduating class goes on to either one of the Ivy League schools or MIT, Stanford, or the University of Chicago. The school newspaper rivals most college newspapers. Four alumni have won Nobel prizes. Is Stuyvesant a good school? Does a bear SHSAT in the woods?
But do those things I listed really mean the school is great or even good? If having a big pool makes a school good, why not just install one in every school at whatever cost? And if offering courses in existentialism, forensics, and quantum mechanics makes a school good, why not just offer them in all high schools? And the SAT scores and the Ivy league acceptances? Surely 8th grade SHSAT scores will correlate with 11th grade SAT scores and since Ivy league colleges use SAT scores as an admissions criteria, it will result in a lot of Ivy league acceptances.
Of course a school can be good without any of those accolades on its Wikipedia page and even if it, like most schools, does not have a Wikipedia page. So if a school doesn’t need the accolades to be good, could a school be bad even with them?
He asks what makes a good school? Is it the students or the teachers? Of course, any school that is highly selective will have high test scores. But is that a definition of a good school? As I have learned from many parents, New York City has a large number of non-selective high schools that are excellent, where students get a solid education, and are well prepared for college. A student does not need to gain admission to a school like Stuy or Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech or any of the other exam schools to get an excellent education and to thrive in an atmosphere that is less competitive than the exam schools. I am aware of students who went to the exam schools and cracked under the pressure. Students pay a price for the prestige of winning admission.
See the full post here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I appreciate many of the things that Gary has written. That said. I am wondering about his questioning about the role of a school such as Stuyvesant while still teaching at the school. It seems to be a little bit hypocritical to me. I am sure Gary could teach at any school in the NY area, so a question I have for him is why still teach there if he has this many questions about the school. It could be a personal decision. For example, when I taught in DCPS, I taught at brand new city-wide STEM school in a newly renovated building. I admit that at the time when I taught I don’t know if I was ready/prepared to teach in many other DCPS schools. I guess I’d like to see a similar self-reflection from Gary on his decisions instead of just questioning the role of a school such as his.
Is Harvard a good college?
Asking whether a hyper select school is a “good school” is a foolish question. Stuyvesant is a hyper segregated school, by design.
I taught at a comprehensive high school, a wide range a ability groupings, AP classes and shop classes, kids on the way to Ivy league schools, kids heading to CUNY colleges and kids heading to a job, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders were graduates, along with a SCOTUS judge, not bad ….
Screened high schools only further segregate other schools by race, class and ability.
We should return to the 16-66-16 system, kids can apply to any school, let the computer spin and assign kids with a range of abilities, Read Norm Fruchter’s recent blog on the NYU Metro Center blog
“There but for the grace of Harvard go we”
Harvard is great, Harvard is good
Let us thank Him… I mean It for our food.
By It’s hands, we are fed. Let us thank It for our bread
If the students now attending places like Stuyvesant are spread out over all the high schools in the district, no school will find it worthwhile to offer the specialized courses (going beyond any AP class) that Stuyvesant now offers for their students. This change would not improve the education for all students.
How can Harvard be a “good” college when it doesn’t admit students entirely based on their SAT score? Clearly, to make Harvard a superior college, all applicants would be stacked ranked according to their SAT scores, and I believe that there are enough applicants who scored perfect 1600s or perhaps 1590s to fill all of the seats.
And remember that once the seats are assigned exclusively based on the SAT score, the remaining students who are not admitted to Harvard should be viewed as simply equally “unqualified”, whether they got a 1580 SAT or a 900 SAT.
The reason to question whether Harvard is really a “good” school is that there are students admitted who have SATs of 1500 or even 1450 in the very same university as students who have SATs of 1600! They might even sit in the same class together! Clearly those students receiving SAT scores of 1500 or (shock!) 1450 are bringing down the class, and the entire Harvard curriculum has to be redesigned to accommodate the fact that “unqualified” students with SATs of only 1450 are allowed to be present. If only Harvard was exclusively for students with 1600 or 1590 SATs, it would be a really good school, where brilliant students could learn together instead of being brought down by the presence of those “unqualified” students with SAT scores of 1450.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but that’s what some of the pro-SHSAT arguments sound like to me. And it’s taken seriously!
Obviously, the admission criteria and the metrics for good are mutually reinforcing. A good oven consistently produces heat because that’s what it was designed for. But, we need to ask, “Good for what and for whom?”
Does a school prepare active thoughtful citizens?
Does it prepare students to live with respect, responsibility, and integrity is a diverse society?
Does it educate all students equitably?
succinctly finding the central point: GOOD FOR WHAT AND FOR WHOM
When I think back on my own high-school years, I have vastly different feelings and thoughts about “the school” and about my teachers. I associate “the school” with the Assistant Principal who loved nothing more than busting kids with pot and turning them over the the police (he REVELED in this), with the jocks who would flip towels at and beat up scrawny kids in the gym class showers and suffer no consequences from the coaches and administrators who oversaw the PE program, with incredibility ridiculous fear-mongering films on STDs, with pep rallies that were thinly disguised training and indoctrination in xenophobia, war-mongering, and sexism (“What are we gonna do to those Tigers? Kill em! [jump and splits]). But then there was the English teacher, Mr. Long, who took me aside and said, you are a poet. The real thing. So you gotta read this guy (Browning) and this one (Whitman) and this one (Stevens) and this one (Yeats). And there was the wave motion and biology teacher, Mr. Luckinbill, who entertained (yeah, he was kind of goofy) and set perplexing, fascinating, strange questions for us to ponder. And there was the art teacher (forgotten her name) who DID ART WITH US. And there was the psychology and government teacher, Mr. Pettijohn, who showed us that there were several Americas, some of which weren’t very pretty, and there was that crazy Russian history teacher with her Marxism for breakfast, who at least got me thinking.
Yup. What we all remember most are: Was I treated with dignity and respect or humiliation? Was I known and valued or ignored and dismissed?
Yes, Arthur!!! Absolutely.
I didn’t read him as questioning the school’s role. I read this as his raising the question – what do we mean by a “good” school? Ivy League-bound students? Cool facilities?
“Reformers” talk about schools as if they were factories – some producing high-performing kids who go on to make both a “difference” and oodles of money, and some producing a disproportionate number of future ex-cons and poor folk. To explain the differential, they scrutinize the internal workings of the factory: What does Stuyvesant do that the high school in the hood does NOT do? How can we make that underperforming high school be more like Stuy?
But schools are not factories. They are communities. Stuy High gets great results for the
same reason that a lot of schools in poor neighborhoods do not: because it gathers certain kids together – in Stuy’s case, brilliant, ambitious kids with a demonstrated ability to do astonishing amounts of work. Of course that school is going to get great results, and the teachers are almost irrelevant (though of course, because it’s a high status school, the teachers are going to be impressive).
“Reformers” want to rebrand schools not as institutions serving the diverse needs of their local communities (because SOCIALISM), but as factories that take in raw children and process them into successful adults – and whose success rates depend on their machinery. A “good” school churns out highly successful people. A “bad” school churns out future ex-cons and poor folks. But you could take the entire faculty of Stuy and swap them with the nearest “bad” school, and the results of the students would barely budge. You could put a pool in the “bad” school and the results would barely budge.
I went to a high-performing exclusive high school. It didn’t gather ambitious brilliant kids so much as kids from a certain stratum of UK life: well-off, urban, sophisticated – the children of politicians, actors, writers and journalists, who went on to become (gasp!) politicians, actors, writers and journalists. Our teachers were lovely but would have crashed and burned at my daughter’s public high school. It was a great school – for me and kids like me. Not for everyone.
There’s a debate to be had about the merits of academically exclusive high schools. FWIW, I am all for them; some kids really are outliers – and after all, we don’t insist that the NYC Ballet School accept anyone who likes dancing.
But the discussion over “good” schools is really a way of pretending that our school problems aren’t caused by racism, poverty and a refusal to create an equitable infrastructure around education.
I assume you meant that the NYC Ballet is not required to accept students who don’t like dancing.
I just meant that they get to select on the basis of ability. They’re about dancing, not about student development, if you see what I mean; they have no obligation to foster love of dance in the gen pop – they’re training prospective dancers. And that’s ok, but it’s not a model for schools generally.
But schools are not factories. They are communities.
Can I hear an Amen to this?
Amen.
THE WRONG QUESTION WIL NEVER GENERATE THE SOLUTION.
Again, I repeat WHAT DOES LEARNING LOOK LIKE?
THIS is the ESSENTIAL QUESTION, which was my prime take-away’s when I was the NYC Cohort for the authentic research by Pew on The Principles of LEARNING” (thesis by Dr. Lauren Resnick , Harvard) and which were the core of the **authentic, genuine ,NATIONAL STANDARD RESEARCH IN THE NINETIES. (love the adjectives!!!)
You see, this funded research search looked a 60,000 teachers in districts across the nation in order to discover what was the core principles found in all the practices of *most successful teachers.”
There were four.
So, the question: “which is the best high school?” is the wrong question.
Like all EQs the answer to an essential question offers the only solution.
And of course, because the media controls the ways in which our people find answers– it talks forever about ‘teaching,’ and not about learning, and points to schools’ test, test, test.
Many schools can easily foster learning if they ‘get it’ — what must always be there for all children to learn?
1- Cleat Expectations from day one as to what is expected.. This sets the standards of performance. Kids know. Parents know, too… which accounts for th success of my weekly “Dear Parents,’ and my weekly Dear Boys & Girls letter, and the weekly assessment skills sheet–which stunned Harvard.
2- Rewards for PERFORMANCE … which in my classroom was not a grade on a test., because the skill I enabled was writing, and only their writing in portfolio demonstrated that this skill was acquired. My students came in writing as 6th graders, and left, writing like high school students. Their success posted in the halls and classroom bulletin boards demonstrated this.’
3- YOU will love this one…note the adjectives..”*Authentic** Evaluation, and Genuine Assessment!” A multiple-choice test DOES NOT. evaluate a skill. You cannot take a test to determine how to play a violin or even to ride a bike. PERFORMANCE IS THE ONLY WAY.
4- The LAST requirement was that a highly educated, experienced ,professional TEACHER. in that room… I guess some trained TFA who will ‘teach the ‘Gates curriculum crap’ does not meet that one.
There were 4 criteria /principles for the administration, who provides, staff, organization and material to SUPPORT* LEARNING.
Did I Say IT IS **ALL ABOUT LEARNING!
So, yes dear friends, teachers, parents and colleagues who read this blog by the brilliant, dedicated educator, Diane Ravitch, every high school can be just want the neighborhood children need to learn.
But as the corruption destroys America at the top, where corrupt people are appointed to the school boards, who then mandate policy to the local board, the conversations will be directed by the. zillionaires who own the state legislators, and own the media so they can fool all of the people all of the time.
Where I grew up, far from NYC, I never heard of Stuyvesant, or “specialized high schools.” People attended the public school in their local catchment. I believe the same is true today for the overwhelming majority of students in public schools. Yet we continue to have this national debate about a tiny segment of schools and students. I’d be even more bored and annoyed by it than I already am if I didn’t live in NYC.
The debate is driven by planned inequitable resources across NYC schools and planned segregation of students, so that only some student can access high resource schools. Hence, there is forced competition for limited resources. In addition, the segregation means that students with additional life challenges are clustered in some schools. So, we fail to mediate poverty and racism, and then declare schools for the privileged as “good” and the rest “bad.” It’s a planned, not an inevitable natural outcome.
The specialized high schools like Stuy, Science and Tech are kind of like those old European health spas like Marienbad where people came to take the waters. They were hospitals for people that really weren’t all that sick. Well, if the test culls out of a rather large population of 8th graders a very small group of children who’ve been test prepped to death and tend to come from families with more resources the outcomes will look fantastic but it tells you absolutely nothing about the school. These kids will generally end up doing just fine. As full disclosure I’m a Science grad and, sad to say, I had some pretty awful teachers and most were mediocre. We even had on staff a known advocate of pedophilia and a fair share of drunks and a lot of hitting on young girls. We survived by in truth the specialized high schools are just about as good as any zoned high school in a wealthy school district. They contribute little to social justice and use a flawed single measure for entrance. There were more people of color at my high school reunion a number of years back than were admitted that year. It’s a scandal.
There is nothing wrong with having schools like this. Teaching in Philadelphia, as well as a graduate (1960) of a regular senior high, I am more familiar with the SDP system of teacher appointments. Any certified teacher can get appointed to Central High, as an example of a similar school to Stuyvesant. I didn’t teach at Central but am very familiar with it and it’s staff. The staff is the same at any other high school, it’s the students who make it. Teachers adjust to the needs of their students. Every high school in Philadelphia has teachers, officially or not, just because they care, do the best they can, to be sure each child gets the best education possible. The real limits that the children have are the limits placed upon them by situations of poverty, not ability.
“Does a bear SHSAT in the woods?”
Apparently grammar is not a major emphasis at Stuyvesant.
Should be “Has a bear SHSAT in the woods?”
“Four alumni [of Stuyvesant] have won Nobel prizes.”
What, precisely, is that supposed to imply?
How many years have we spent trying to de-obsess people with their school ranking ways? Is my school better than yours? It’s like asking if JFK is better than LAX. Silly question. As Madeleine Murphy wrote above, a school is a complex community, not a factory. There is no valid method, no algorithm, no dashboard of survey and test score data for rating a school or a teacher. Ranking schools is a trap. It’s a hazard. Watch your step, folks. Don’t fall.
Do, however, ask yourself if a public school is fulfilling the true mission of public education, which is to educate the public, the whole public. At the beginning of Reign of Error, Diane noted what John Adams wrote in 1785, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it.” The mission of public education is not to create an élite. So, if a public school has selective admissions, no matter what size its swimming pool, it is failing to fulfill the needs of the public. Stuy is a failing school.
Is Stuyvesant better funded than other HSs in NYC? Are all NYC schools funded at the same level and have equivalent facilities? If not, I view that as a real problem. Please excuse my ignorance, but my experience has been with small districts that have a single HS.
Yes, it is. For some inexplicable reason Stuyvesant and the other 7 SHSAT schools receive a little more than an extra $1,000 per general-education student per year—$1,055.22 in the upcoming 2021–2022 school year, to be exact.
Specialized high schools – for the students who score high enough on the SHSAT – can be amazing places to learn for many students. I think there is a flawed admissions process, and I think the specialized high schools could be even better if that changed, but the thousands of disadvantaged students who benefit can’t be discounted. Those students are so impressive — they often make long commute, juggling all kinds of family responsibilities and work responsibilities that are unimaginable for most middle class students.
My 2 cents is that a lot more students who aren’t white or Asian deserve to be included in that group. What makes the kids at specialized high schools “special” is not their extremely high SHSAT score but their motivation and desire to challenge themselves academically. Some students will be true geniuses, some students will be incredibly hard working, some will be interested in some classes and barely get by in other subjects. But I don’t think there would be any loss — and there would be a lot to gain – if the admissions process was changed to include students who did not receive one of the top 5,000 SHSAT scores. (For one thing, the whole test prep industry would end.) The other thing is to create new LARGE specialized high schools, because it is the size that offers the advantages. I have no idea why Bloomberg decided that having a bunch of small specialized high schools that aren’t much different than the selective public high schools was a good idea, but the best reason to have specialized high schools is the economies of scale, because large class sizes, while not ideal, aren’t as much of an issue when all the students in them are highly motivated to learn.
I also think that the ideal of comprehensive high schools serving a range of learners is not always as good in practice as it seems. I have seen smaller cities with very large comprehensive high schools that serve all students in a diverse community, and there is a big division (often a class division) between the motivated students taking more advanced classes and the students who don’t want to take those classes. Those types of high schools also have problems.
I think all high schools should be “good”, but no matter what, 50% of the students in the US are going to be below average and 50% will be above average. No matter what, 50% of the students will be among the half that learns the most easily and are the most motivated, and 50% of the students will be among the half that doesn’t learn as easily. It doesn’t matter how “good” a high school, because that just moves the median up, and there will still be 50% above it and 50% below it. One reason I am so opposed to charters is that the ed reform movement has dishonestly used their success to push false narratives about how every student can be above average if they just experience the secret sauce of a charter. Those lies do nothing for schools, but do help the careers of those promoting charters.
There are wide ranges of SHSAT test scores for students admitted to the specialized high schools. I have repeatedly asked the DOE to compile statistics to see if there is a correlation between these test scores and students’ academic records in middle school. I also requested correlation statistics between test scores and report card grades of graduates of these schools. These statistics would shed important information about the reliability and validity of these tests. It would also demonstrate if they accurately reflect the actual prior academic accomplishments of the applicants and the actual report card grades when the students graduate. .I also asked for standard deviations of each schools test scores since the DOE does not compile the range of scores for each school nor how the scores are distributed.