The Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, reported on a major court decision affecting New York City’s public schools. The battles over segregation began in the nation’s largest city in the 1960s. Until the mid-1960s, the city’s public schools had a white majority. From that point forward, the white enrollment steadily declined and is now slightly less than 15% of one million students. While racial balance in every school would be impractical, given the great distances that students would have to travel, demands for desegregation have been replaced by demands for equitable access to the city’s elite high schools. Admission to these schools is based on one test given on one day. Despite perennial protests against the selection process, it can only be changed by the state legislature. There, alumni of the selective high schools oppose any changes. The greatest beneficiaries of the test-based admissions system are Asian students; they are 16.5% of the enrollment, but win 54% of the offers to the elite high schools.
These are the latest demographic data from the NYC Departnent of Education:
In 2022-23, there were 1,047,895 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:
- 14.1 percent of students were English Language Learners
- 20.9 percent were students with disabilities
- 72.8 percent were economically disadvantaged
- Race or ethnicity:
- 41.1 percent Hispanic
- 23.7 percent black
- 16.5 percent Asian
- 14.7 percent white
- 140,918 were in charter schools
The Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, issued the following press release:
Last week, the Appellate Division, First Department, issued a striking school desegregation decision. The Appellate Division unanimously reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the case IntegrateNYC v. State of New York , ruling that plaintiffs could proceed to trial to prove their claim. The plaintiffs allege that New York City’s examination system for selecting students for its elite high schools and its systems for choosing students for gifted and talented programs (beginning as early as age four), deny Black and Latinx students their right to the opportunity for a sound basic education.
IntegrateNYC, Inc., is a youth-led organization “for racial integration and equity in New York City schools.” They are joined as plaintiffs in this case by two parent organizations and current and former public-school students. The defendants are the state and city government entities that oversee New York City’s public education system: the State of New York, the governor, the New York State Board of Regents, the New York State Education Department, the New York State Commissioner of Education, the mayor of the City of New York, the New York City Department of Education, and its chancellor.
The defendants are expected to appeal this decision to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court. If the Appellate Division decision is upheld by the Court of Appeals, this case will be the first legal challenge to the selective high schools examination system established by state statute in 1971. In 2021, Black and Latinx students comprised nearly 70% of the New York City school system, yet they received, respectively, only 3.6% and 5.4% of the specialized high school offers, while white and Asian students received, respectively, 28% and 54% of the offers.
The Appellate Division decision, written by Justice Peter Moulton, also established an important new precedent in holding that claims of racial segregation, if proven, would constitute a denial of students’ rights under Article XI of the New York State Constitution to the opportunity for a sound basic education. That right was established by the Court of Appeals in Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. State of New York in 2003. That case held that a denial of adequate funding for students in the New York City Public Schools constituted a constitutional violation. Subsequent court rulings that have relied on CFE seemed to indicate that claims of a denial of the opportunity for a sound basic education would be limited to allegations of inadequate school funding. Justice Moulton’s decision in IntegrateNYCnow shows that such claims can also be based on allegations of intentional segregation.
New York is now the second state in which a state court has held that school segregation may constitute a denial of an adequate education under the state constitution. Earlier this year, the Minnesota Supreme Court held in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota that the racial imbalance in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school systems would constitute a violation of the state constitution’s “thorough and efficient” education clause if plaintiffs can show at trial there is a causal link between such racial imbalance and inadequate education.
These state court developments in New York and Minnesota may constitute significant precedents for school desegregation reforms. They could open opportunities for advocates throughout the country to promote school desegregation claims that have been stymied in recent years by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that have substantially restricted the scope of desegregation claims under federal law.
This decision is many decades too late, the “segregation” occurs in the eight SHSAT testing schools, and, screened schools, there are most 500 highs in NYC. The various plans would increase the number of Asian students and increase numbers of Black and Hispanic students and would impact local elections, were a year away from the mayoral and city council elections, a major campaign issue for conservative voters in the primary and general elections, Cuomo must be salivating…
“New York is now the second state in which a state court has held that school segregation may constitute a denial of an adequate education under the state constitution.”
First, a school is not “segregated” because its student body is not representative of the ethnic or racial makeup of the entire school system. Every NYC student may apply to these schools, regardless of their ethnicity, race, religion, sex, or where they live in the city.
Second, the idea that black and Latino students have been “denied an adequate education” because a handful of schools with 1%-2% of the students in the entire NYC system have student bodies that do not mirror the racial/ethnic makeup of the system as a whole is a bit of a stretch, to understate it.
It’s that time of year again. The specialized high schools soon will announce their admissions data, and Chalkbeat and the NY Times will recycle the stories they print every year about how only X number of black and Latino students were admitted to Stuyvesant, and how this “segregation” is a terrible, terrible thing.
My own position remains the same, which is that I have no problem with the idea of a handful of high schools designed to enroll the highest achieving students in a school system, however that achievement is measured, and I do not care one bit what the ethnic or racial demographics of that school is, as long as it is not discriminating. But regardless, people should remember, these are just 8 schools out of more than 500 in the system. There are a lot of very good high schools in the city. And not one of them bars black or latino students, either on the basis of race/ethnicity, or based on their zip code.
I agree. There a lot of good schools around without having a cow about a few best schools. School is about matching the program to the student. Being a benchwarmer on a great team is not as good as being a player on a good team (I was a benchwarmer on a bad team). There are many ways to help people become their best selves besides schools that believe they are great.
It is segregation if anyone can take a language test that stands as a barrier to admission. Think about the Jim Crow “literacy” tests Black people had to pass to vote. It’s segregation and that’s de facto. You once asked me, Flerp, to explain why language tests are racially biased, and I did, using specific examples of released questions from the test used to segregate Stuvy High, and you seemed satisfied with the explanation and thanked me for clarifying. Language tests are not fair. Language, like religion and dress, is part of culture. If you have ever been to England, you should understand. The fact is that even you Stuvy grads don’t really speak English. Let your grandchildren grow into a world without de facto segregation based on cultural-linguistic barriers.
Literacy tests were imposed with the intent of denying black people the right to vote. These tests do not care what your ethnicity or religion is. And students who are not admitted to Stuyvesant (or Harvard etc.) are not being denied a fundamental right under the Constitution.
I recall thanking you for clarifying your view and for taking the time to do so when you didn’t really seem happy about being asked to. I definitely do not agree that the main standardized tests used today are racially biased. Remember that a lot of the kids who go to Stuyvesant are the children of immigrants who do not speak much English. If the language portion of the SHSAT (the test used for admission to specialized high schools in NYC) is “unfair” to anyone, it’s unfair to them. Yet there they are at those schools.
Language tests may not be “fair” in the big scheme of things. But I can’t think of anything–literally not a single thing–in life that is fair. And while fairness is important, it cannot be the overriding principle behind all our policy decisions. The question is whether the goal behind the tests — here, the goal is to have schools that identify the students who are most proficient at mathematics and English language — is reasonable and consistent with the content of the tests. I think it is reasonable — i.e., not irrational — to have a handful of schools, in the massive system that is NYC’s public schools system, for the students who have demonstrated the highest proficiency in those core subjects. And I think the tests do a reasonable job of identifying those students. Could schools have other goals? Yes! But that doesn’t mean that this goal is unreasonable or irrational. Is it “fair” that some students will do better on the tests than others will? No! But it’s also not fair that some students are wealthier than others, or better looking than others, or smarter than others.
Well there’s the problem. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is proficiency.
Maybe “fair” wasn’t the right word for me to employ. How about “legitimate”? I am comfortable and confident that when I visit my doctor, she will take accurate measurements of my height, weight, blood pressure, and heart rate. I expect my doctor not to give me a wildly inaccurate IQ test and try to measure my brain functioning. If she does a neural MRI or CAT scan, I expect her to be looking for organic damage, not functionality. That would be highly unscientific. Standardized tests are as accurate as political polls. They’re not. How the questions are framed matters. Ability is in the eye of the beholder.
There’s something else I’ve been avoiding for a long time. I know a number of Stuvy High grads and a number of Harvard University grads. Princeton too. When I discuss education with them, I always get the same impression: not that smart but that snobbish about it. Sorry.
Nothing is fully “legitimate.” Every assessment has flaws. But yes, I have high enough confidence that someone who aces the math section on the SHSAT is very good at math.
I’m not a math guy. English teacher here.
Why can’t K-8 teachers get black and brown children to be proficient readers and writers of English? Many of the Asian students are NEW to this country. The teacher’s colleges are a joke and don’t prepare teachers to teach reading, writing, and grammar; they are great at teaching grievance, which is a help to no one.
I am not sure I can answer the question, but I have worked with immigrants from many cultures. Asian families will work extra jobs to pay for tutoring for their children outside of school. Many of these children are programmed for success and spend hours outside of school learning at home as well. They are often very driven, and the family expectations are high.
jacquilenhardt– Just to answer one part of your question: Chinese, S Korean and Japanese children start learning English in school no later than 3rd grade, some earlier. Pakistani children, in K. India, in 5th grade.
Although the Dominican Republic starts English instruction in 2nd grade, and Cuba in 3rd, half of our Spanish-speaking immigrants come from Mexico, where Eng starts between 7th-9th grade. And Venezuela and Guatemala not until 9th grade.
African American kids are immersed in English from birth, though.
Thanks for the opening F!”however that achievement is measured”The inherent invalidities involved with standardized testing render any decisions based on such a flawed process, as N. Wilson puts it, “vain and illusory.” That alone should invalidate the process.Not to mention that nothing (quite literally) is actually being measured. Correct answers are tallied/counted but that is not “measuring.”
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course, but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.”
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Those supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
Which is exactly what the NYC admission test does.
Hey, we NEED excellence in education, not socialism. It’s not “fair” that my mom was a single mother of four, and we never had all our utilities on at the same time. It’s unfair that I didn’t know how to use a library, so I stole books from bookstores. It’s not fair that my brother and I melted snow, so we could fill our toilet tank once a day.
I want my cancer surgeon to have a hight GPA and SAT score. I want my pilot to have the same.
This nonsense is providing cover for the FAILURE of k-12 public Paulo Friere, education.
Ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ah ha ha ah ha ad infinitum.
You have no clue about what public education is about. Thanks for opening your mouth and letting us confirm that.
The unit of learning being measured (yes, measured) by a particular test depends upon what the learning is. For a particular test on the times table, the unit of learning is individual products of pairs of single-digit individual natural numbers. I have explained this again and again (every time you post this stuff). Also, it is simply silly for Mr. Wilson to claim that no intellectual equivalent can be measured. That’s like saying that a bank being a side of a river, it would be silly to put money into it. Different, related uses of the same term. That’s how language works.
Yes, and I’ve explained how your explanation is off base. Answers on a test are not “measuring devices. as you insist with ”the unit of learning is individual products of pairs of single-digit individual natural numbers”. What you suggest is just counting right answers and has nothing to do with measuring. It may have to do with evaluating, assessing and/or judging but is nowhere near an actual measurement. . . not to mention all the other invalidities involved with the whole process.
You’ve admitted that you haven’t read and don’t understand what Wilson is saying so your opinion on what he has to say is the same as someone basing their opinions on FoxNews. When you have read and understood what Wilson has to say, then perhaps I will lend some credence to what you say.
And your “bank” example actually points out the fallacy of your opinion.
I read enough of Wilson’s work to see that he was an utter crackpot. Guess you didn’t follow the example I provided.
Choose the closest analogy.
Wilson : Assessment as
A. The Song of Songs : The Song of Solomon
B. Ignatius L. Donnelly : Ancient Geography
C. corpus : lexicon
If you answered B., congrats.
The terrible thing about the drek produced by Wilson is that it muddies the water. It lessens the impact of actual rational, logical critiques of common varieties of testing, like the invalid federally mandated standardized tests in ELA, by causing people to conflate those rational critiques with utter nonsense of the kind produced by Wilson, which simply involves Wilson engaging in a lot of semantic errors and NOT understanding that words have multiple meanings and related meanings. Measurement and assessment are used as nearly equivalent terms in educational jargon. One cannot say that measurement doesn’t exist in education simply because it has a slightly different usage in physics. That’s just silly and irrelevant. It’s like saying that you can’t you can’t use incline as a firm because it is a noun meaning a slope or right with the meaning correct because it is the opposite of left. LOL.
It’s important to keep some distinctions clear. There are some intellectual attainments–like mastery of the times table or of the Level 1 kanji–that are easily and precisely measured. There are some things–like most of the Common [sic] Core [sic] “skills” bullet list items–that cannot. One cannot use the answers to a couple questions to determine validly that a student has proficiency in something as broad and/or vague as “making inferences from text” or “understanding the multiple meanings of words” or “using punctuation correct.” Crap like that from Wilson obscures such VITAL distinctions between the operationalizable and testable and the not-actually-operationalizable and thus untestable. This critique goes to the core of why the Common [sic] Core [sic] and its associated testing is pseudoscience, and the Wilson stuff ignores and obscures it. So, it’s extremely counterproductive. It PREVENTS the sane critique of the CC from getting out and it ENABLES people to dismiss the testing as fringe lunacy. that’s because Wilson’s stuff is fringe lunacy, but there are actual rational critiques of the testing that are not.
You shouldn’t put your dollar bills in a river bank! That’s pure LOGICAL INSANITY!
ROFL
cx: that you cannot use incline as a verb simply because it is also a noun meaning “slope.”
“But I can’t think of anything–literally not a single thing–in life that is fair.”
Think of death. Everyone no matter who you are dies. As fair as it gets, eh.
In the long run it’s very fair, but it comes to each person at unfair intervals.
Also, Diane, to be accurate: the court did not order a “desegregation plan.” It just reversed the trial court’s decision to dismiss the complaint on the pleadings. That means it goes back to the trial court and enters discovery. No decision on the merits until either the defendants win at summary judgment or there’s a verdict after a trial.
Thank you, FLERP.
Whatever is finally done, the students all deserve the attention of the schools. I once had a conversation with a lady who described desegregation in Savannah, Georgia. She said her African-American friends were often sent to schools where they got lost from their community because of the de-segregation. She was not against the integration of schools per se, she was just wishing that the traditional school experience within the community had not been so harsh on students who needed to be taught by people in the community that knew them personally.