Gary Rubinstein teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, one of the most rigorous schools in the nation. Admission is based on scores on one examination given on one day. The top scorers are accepted, as is the case in several other exam schools in New York City.
Gary wrote a series of posts about these schools and their admissions policies. Here is a link to all of them.
In this one, for example, Gary examines the validity of the test that is required, known by its acronym as SHSAT.
In this one, he asks whether schools like his own are “too hard,” which begins:
Of course Stuyvesant is hard. Like climbing Mount Everest is hard. Like training to be an Olympic gymnast is hard.
Back when I started there 20 years ago nobody questioned if Stuyvesant had to be this demanding. The old principal, Stanley Tietel, used to tell the incoming freshman class “Sleep, grades, and social life. You can’t have all three, you have to pick two.”
Several of them deal with the demographics of the students who are admitted. Like this one, which addresses the high proportion of Asian students in the specialized high schools.
It begins:
Are there too many Jews in Hollywood?
Are there too many transgender people in the military?
Are there too many Latino baseball players?
Are there too many Asian students at the New York City specialized high schools?
Did you answer ‘yes’ to any of the above?
Asian students make up 17% of the 8th graders in New York City. They also make up 35% of the students who take the SHSAT and get 52% of the offers to the specialized schools.
Latino and Black students combine to make up 68% of the 8th graders, 32% of the SHSAT test takers, and 10% of the offers.
Statistically speaking, an Asian student is about 16 times more likely to get an offer to a specialized high school than a Latino student or a Black student.
All of these essays are worth reading.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you Diane. The comments in the posts are worth reading as well.
This is an interesting post on the rationing of excellence in NYC. Culture does play a big part in those that value education. Basing admission on the scores of one test given on one day is an extremely narrow criterion for admission. There are no easy answers to this dilemma.
Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s comments were interesting. He sees the “no excuses” discipline in charter schools as an attempt to change culture in poor students. While this type of treatment may “work” for some students, it is wholly punitive while wounding students’ self-esteem. I would hardly label no excuses discipline a resounding success when such schools have super high rates of attrition.
I read Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s comments a little differently. I was hearing that we should not be upset about a school that has a narrow focus, we should celebrate the students who are part of Stuyvesant – regardless of their background. But we also should be focused on tapping into what will make other students just as successful but maybe with a different path. Yes, he talks about charters trying to replicate the types of rigor that the “ecosystems of academic support that leads to high academic performance the Asian students who are admitted may come from.”
But I think the last paragraph of his comment is worth reading twice.
I also felt he thought the admission tests were doing what they were designed to do. I’ve worked with many different cultures. Changing culture is not such an easy task, but it does happen with the second generation in this country quite naturally. In my opinion “no excuses” discipline is a feeble attempt to “change culture,” if it makes students feel worthless.
I agree with you about “no excuses” schools. There is a lot more to his comment than that. I was especially honed in on the last paragraph – which has nothing to do with “no excuses” schools.
I think there are many questions about Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s views, especially given that he offered up a gratuitously insulting assessment of high performing African American and Latino students in reply to one of my comments.
Here is what I posted:
“in 2019, 31% of the 7th graders in NYC public schools who received 4s on their state ELA exam and 28% of the students who received 4s on their state Math exam were African American or Latinx students. So why did only 10% of the seats in specialized high schools go to them? This discussion isn’t about admitting so-called “unqualified” students. It is about the many qualified African American and Latino students whose exclusion from specialized high schools is based on the false narrative that those students are “unqualified” and would struggle if they were there.”
Shockingly, when I pointed out how many thousands of Black and Latinx 7th graders in NYC public schools scored high on their state tests, Dr. Maldonado-Rivera replied “it misses that state tests score of 4 is not really that exceptional…”.
I thought that revealed quite an agenda.
A vital part of the false ed reform narrative is to imply that there are almost no high performing students in public schools except white and Asian students. That way they can cover up their goal of expanding their desire to cherry pick high performing students from public schools.
To push their false narrative, ed reformers must pretend that high performing African American and Latinx students are almost non-existent in public schools so therefore charters can’t cherry pick them, and instead charters are turning low-performing students into high performing ones. It is a lie that depends on the implicit racism of white education reporters never to question. When I heard a charter leader claiming she worked miracles because 99% of her students passed state tests, the first thing I did was look at how many students in public schools passed state tests and when I saw that number was many times as high as the number in her charters, I could easily see that it could be cherry picking. Then I did the obvious and checked whether huge numbers of students were disappearing, and once again, I saw that the attrition rates made it clear it was cherry picking.
Specialized high schools are upfront about cherry picking academically strong students. And there are lots of qualified African American and Latinx students who could attend. I have no idea why Dr. Maldonado-Rivera couldn’t simply acknowledge that.
No excuses schools are perhaps related to the schools for indigenous people in the nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Under the guise of charity, Indian culture was systematically swept away by those who considered it inferior.
This is not to be confused with toleration of generalized adolescence attempting to masquerade as culture. Teens have always needed guidance to help them understand that rationalization of stupidity by claiming cultural differences is no way to achieve personal development that leads to a better society.
This post has caused me to take a deep dive into reading additional insightful and thoughtfully written posts on Gary Rubinstein’s blog. Thank you Diane 🙂
“Statistically speaking, an Asian student is about 16 times more likely to get an offer to a specialized high school than a Latino student or a Black student.”
Patently unfair. These schools should be shut down. Every student deserves a great education.
“Patently unfair. These schools should be shut down.”
Shutting down the foundational cornerstone of
bamboozle might cause a nation wide state of shock.
Shocked at the collective political impotence, the
flock might rebel against masters masked as servants.
Imagine being in a suburb outside of the city. Imagine a group of people, a relatively small one, want to segregate their children from the other children in the community because they feel that their children are intellectually superior and will be held back by the other students. They do not just wish to segregate them by classrooms, but rather they want an entire building dedicated to those children. And because the advanced students now reside in their own building, which requires a whole host of cost duplication for the district, there are no longer any advanced coursework at the “regular” school. In fact, there is less of everything, especially the courses and programs that the “regular” kids used to enjoy, but we’re not directly related to Math and English.
We can go on imagining, because it never happens out in the suburbs. Because it would be unfair, classist, and downright unneighborly. However, this seems perfectly fine in NYC. In my opinion, NYC is not a public school system. It doesn’t fit my definition, and I’m not sure if it ever did.
“downright unneighborly” — yes
Bill,
If you want to make an analogy to NYC, it would to like this:
“Imagine being in a suburb outside of the city. Imagine a group of people, a relatively small one, want to segregate their children from the other children in the community because they feel that their children are intellectually superior and will be held back by the other students. They do not just wish to segregate them by classrooms, but rather they want an entire building dedicated to those children.” And DESPITE the advanced students now residING in their own building, THERE IS ALSO advanced coursework in the “regular” school. In fact, some academically strong students remain at the other school and find they get even more attention and more opportunities because they aren’t lost in a sea of academically strong students all vying for those same opportunities. And the academically strong students at the “regular” public school get into the same colleges as the students who go to the high school that has a whole building of only academically strong students.”
That’s the reality.
Some years ago my district had a “gifted and talented” program in our elementary schools. We phased it out because we thought that it was unnecessary, particularly when those selected were generally middle class white students. We also felt that there were many ways for these students to be challenged in the regular classroom. The G&T program was a political nightmare for the district as well with parents complaining about exclusion. None of my Black and brown ELLs made it into the program even though I had some exceptionally bright students.
retired teacher,
I think separating 5 year olds into “gifted” and “non-gifted” schools is absurd.
It is more complicated in high school when – fortunately – the word “gifted” is almost never used.
Most students at specialized high schools weren’t identified as “gifted” at age 5. And it doesn’t matter if they were.
The only thing that matters is whether a student is motivated and academically strong enough to learn in the classroom. Most American high schools offer advanced classes in many subjects for students who want them, and those students don’t have to be labeled “gifted” to take them and thrive.
Somehow things got warped and people got mixed up.
They became convinced – without a shred of evidence – that one exam identified “the best” when the exam did not identify “the best” but did identify some of the many academically talented students in NYC.
And because those people were so certain that the exam identified “the best”, they concluded that all students who didn’t have one of the 5,000 highest scores were inferior to “the best”.
Take away that false narrative and the discussion about specialized high schools becomes very different.
Bill,
No imagining needed. At Scarsdale High 0% of the students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. As people here like to say, this kind of segregation in traditional public schools is a feature, not a bug.
Are Asian students smarter than Black, Latinx or White students? If the answer is “no,” what’s the purpose of exam schools?
To segregate?
Which high school graduated three US Senators?
An ordinary neighborhood school …
A lot of wealthy parents make huge donations to Ivy League colleges in exchange for admission of their less talented offsprings. Jarrod Kushner graduated from Harvard. His entrance came with a $2 million dollar donation from his family.
Public schools should be open to all students.
Yes.
It might be helpful to examine the divide that matters instead of the divide that most easily captures our attention. There exists a generational ruling class. They go to Ivy Leagues. There exists a generational bourgeois managerial class. They go to Stuy. There exists poverty. They get shafted. The oligarchy must be broken, and ending elitism in schools is a great place to start.
LeftCoastTeacher,
About 36% of the students at Stuy qualify for free lunch and 9% qualify for reduced price lunch. Apparently the generational bourgeois managerial class is not being very well paid.
TE,
That is a low percentage in NYC, where over 70% of the students qualify for free lunch.
NYCPSP,
I just looked up the figures for Rye High School (2% of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch) and Scarsdale High School (0% of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch).
Wouldn’t those be the schools to talk about if one was really concerned with issues of giving low income students access to strong schools?
I sometimes see people driving Mercedes Benz sedans for Uber. The middle class is certainly not getting paid very well — better than the blue collar class, but still not well by any measure. Parents and their children are working themselves to exhaustion for scraps, to avoid the most dire poverty. CEOs are running away with everything. The bar for entry to live in the American dream class keeps being raised. Standards. Rigor. Proficiency. Ratings. Salaries don’t keep pace with productivity. Look at how hard the students work. Look at how hard their parents work. Look at the average life span decline. Look at how tuition puts people deep in debt for life. Watch white collars take second jobs. The existence of exclusive schools is doing worse damage to society than just adding to racial injustice; they are driving the young people who get admitted into manic lifestyles. There is a simple solution. Eisenhower taxes and full integration. End selective education now.
Sorry for the grammatical error, folks.
LeftCoastTeacher,
TeachingEconomist does bring up a good point — your premise that a “generational bourgeois managerial class” comprises most of the students at specialized high schools is not the reality.
What is the reality is that many students have lives that those in the “bourgeois managerial class” can’t imagine. They are the primary caretakers for younger siblings or older relatives, act as translators for their parents who speak or read limited English, work long hours at jobs, sometimes at their family’s small business.
And there are also students from the “bourgeois managerial class” who start to understand their own privilege because those other students are all around them every day and are their closest friends, teammates, lab partners, or maybe just the helpful older student who gives them advice on the quickest way to get to their next class.
Gary Rubinstein wrote a remarkable and informative series and I thank him.
But the problem – which he never fully addressed — is why he believes a test that stack ranks students with only the top 20% of scorers “passing” and the rest “failing” has any validity at all.
Many people seem to be ignorant of the fact that the SHSAT is exactly like one of those (hated) college classes where the professor begins the class by saying “the students who have one of the top 20% of the scores on my final exam will pass and the other 80% will fail.” Students are told to look around and see that they must outperform 80% of the students in the class to be considered competent in the subject. It doesn’t matter if they get a 95 on that exam, because if 20% of the students get a 96 or above, those who got 95 are considered to be the same as those who got a 50 — they are all “failures”. There is no standard of assessment except “did you score higher than 80% of the other students in the class? If not you are unqualified and you fail.”
SHSAT-only admissions presupposes the false idea that in a large group of motivated students, a test in which the top 20% pass and the rest fail is a great way to choose students. No, it’s not.
It is a great way to stress out motivated students by telling them that it doesn’t matter how much they study or prepare, if they aren’t among the 20% with the highest score, they are considered unqualified to be at the school. It is a boon to the test-prep industry.
To use an example that Gary might relate to, it is like giving the SHSAT to every teacher at Stuyvesant and – using the ridiculous “stack rank” SHSAT scoring system – concluding that 20% of the Stuyvesant teachers are qualified to teach there and the other 80% are not and their presence at the school is detrimental.
I assume that Gary knows that drawing an arbitrary line at “only the 20% of teachers with the highest test score are competent and the other 80% are no qualified to teach” is nonsense.
Whether or not there should be high schools exclusively for academically strong and very motivated students is a separate question. As is the similar question of whether high school students in any public schools should be allowed to be in advanced math (or other) classes or should all students in the same grade be randomly assigned and learning the same math at the same time.
But SHSAT admissions is about the completely flawed system that so many people – even Gary – seems to misunderstand.
There is plenty of evidence that if you give an exam to 1000 students, the 5 students with the very highest score are very likely to be better students than the 5 students with the very lowest scores. Unfortunately, too many people believe that allows them to conclude that the student with the 200th highest SHSAT score is wildly superior to the student with the 220th highest SHSAT score. But that is an utterly false conclusion, as every decent scientist knows, and yet those are the kind of studies defenders of the SHSAT use as “proof” of how valid it is.
It is just as flawed as giving a test to the Stuyvesant teachers to determine which 20% are qualified to teach and which are not. If Stuyvesant teachers tried to point out the absurdity of using an exam whose validity is based on the premise that only 20% of Stuyvesant teachers are qualified to teach, it would be beyond absurd to reassure those Stuyvesant teachers that they would all get free test prep and because all Stuyvesant teachers get access to free test prep, that means the system where they all take the same test to determine which 20% of them are qualified is absolutely “fair”.
I hope everyone realizes the huge flaw in that argument.
Would Gary ever say “as long as we give Stuyvesant teachers all the free test prep they want, I support having them all take a test to determine which 20% of those Stuyvesant teachers are most qualified to teach here, with the other 80% being deemed unqualified to teach here.”
So why does he think that is a good system for students? The problem isn’t access to test prep! It is a system in which it is already pre-determined that only 20% of a large group of teachers are qualified and the rest are not and embraces the idea that those teachers should all take the same test to determine which 20% of teachers are qualified and which 80% of teachers should not be allowed to teach because their mere presence ruins the experience of Stuyvesant.
There are plenty of good ways to determine which students can handle accelerated learning, but stack ranking a group of students because you have decided in advance that only 20% of them can handle accelerated learning is absurd.
There are plenty of good ways to judge which teachers are qualified to teach, but pre-determining that only 20% of them are qualified is absurd.
There are a lot of wonderful things about specialized high schools. I don’t advocating abolishing them, although I know some people do. But I do advocate making admissions based on reality instead of the truly absurd premise that the SHSAT is a good way to determine which students are qualified and which are not. That false premise has done so much harm to so many students, and I include the students who spend thousands of dollars and many hundreds of hours doing test prep so that they outscore the other 80% of students, most of whom are also doing test prep.
There are better ways. Just like there are better ways for professors to teach than to pre-determine that only 20% of the students in their class will pass and the rest will fail.
Can’t help but read SHSAT as SSHAT = Students Shat on by Hard-Assed Test.