The problem is that so few black and Hispanic students gain admission to the city’s eight specialized high schools.
As a Leonie points out, “Only 10 percent of students admitted to these selective high schools are black and Hispanic, while these students make up 67 percent of the overall public school population. This year, only 10 black students were offered admission to the city’s most selective of these high schools, Stuyvesant, out of 902 students admitted.”
However, only three high schools are shielded by state law from changes initiated by the city’s Board of Education. The Mayor could direct his board to make changes at five of the selective schools now.
New York city’s selective schools are the only ones in the nation that base admission solely on a single test.
The problems are not limited to three or eight high schools.
“The competitive nature of this process worsened under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. The number of high schools that admitted students through academic screening increased from 29 in 1997 to 112 in 2017, while the proportion of “ed-opt” high schools, designed to accept students at all different levels of achievement, dropped sharply. Even so-called unscreened programs actually do screen students, in covert ways. Moreover, the Gates-funded small schools that proliferated after 2002 initially barred students with disabilities or English language learners from their schools, prompting a civil rights complaint in 2006.“
A major fix would require reducing class sizes in the elementary and middle schools to improve the education of all children.
Back in the days of Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein, the policy of the city was to close big high schools that had varied programs (e.g., music, the arts, advanced classes in math and science) and replace them with small schools. Almost every large high school in the city was closed. One of them was DeWitt Clinton, which had become a dumping ground for the small schools that did not want students with low test scores, English learners, and students with disabilities. In effect, the school–once known for its excellence–was turned into a graveyard.
Klein and his acolytes touted the New York City Miracle, built on testing, testing, testing, and small schools.
At DeWitt Clinton HS in the Bronx, kids who have cut class all semester can still snag a 65 passing grade — and course credit — if they complete a quickie “mastery packet.”
Insisting that students can pass “regardless of absence,” Principal Pierre Orbe has ordered English, science, social studies and math teachers to give “make up” work to hundreds of kids who didn’t show up or failed the courses, whistleblowers said.
“This is crazy!” a teacher told The Post. “A student can pass without going to class!”
The 1,200-student Clinton HS is one of 78 struggling schools in Mayor deBlasio’s “Renewal” program. Last year, 50 percent of seniors graduated, but only 28 percent of the grads had test scores high enough to enroll at CUNY without remedial help.
The DOE’s academic-policy guide says students “may not be denied credit based on lack of seat time alone.” Passing must be based “primarily on how well students master the subject matter.”
Orbe has taken the policy to a absurd extreme, teachers charge.
Andrew Boryga writes in the New Yorker about the changes that made New York City’s specialized, elite high schools more segregated than they used to be. One reason was budget cuts imposed by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“The city’s specialized public high schools weren’t always so segregated. In the nineteen-eighties, the three oldest and most prestigious specialized schools had sizable black and Latino populations. (In 1989, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant were sixty-seven, twenty-two, and sixteen per cent black and Latino, respectively; today, those numbers have fallen to fourteen per cent, nine per cent, and three per cent.) Samuel Adewumi, a Brooklyn Tech alumnus who is now a teacher at the school, recalls that when he was growing up in the Bronx, in the late seventies, the borough had well-funded gifted-and-talented programs that served as pipelines for exceptional students. By the sixth grade, Adewumi said, he and his friends had their sights set on getting into a specialized high school. Most of their preparation for the test took place in school. “My teachers already knew what needed to happen for me to be prepared and worked it into the curriculum,” he said.
“Things began to change in the early nineties, when New York City eliminated many of its honors programs as “tracking”(separating students based on their abilities) fell out of favor. Then, under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, two billion dollars were cut from the city’s education system. Awilda Ruiz, who helped found the middle-school honors program that I attended, within an underperforming school in the South Bronx, and taught math in the program for nearly thirty years, said that during this period funding for test-prep in the program dried up. By the time I first became aware of the SHSAT, at the beginning of eighth grade, the only resource provided by my school was a thin packet of practice problems. I remember very little about sitting for the test that October, apart from feeling overwhelmed by the material, but I know that I wasn’t surprised or upset to learn that I didn’t score high enough to get into any specialized schools, in part because they never seemed meant for kids like me in the first place.
“Pedro Noguera, one of the country’s leading scholars of urban education, believes that the dismal diversity statistics in New York’s specialized high schools prove that the SHSAT is a flawed metric, and that the criteria for admission should be expanded. “There is no college in the country that admits students strictly on the basis of a test,” he told me. “The idea of using a single test is crazy and hard to justify—especially because we know grades are often better predictors of future success than test scores.” (Studies have shown that college students who are accepted to standardized-test-optional schools without submitting S.A.T. or A.C.T. scores perform around as well as those who do.) Noguera, who is a distinguished professor of education at U.C.L.A., and the author of a dozen books on urban education, is an Afro-Latino native of Brooklyn. He attended public schools in the borough and on Long Island, where his family moved when he was in the third grade, and he went on to attend Brown University, even though, as he’s put it, “most students that I went to school with did not go to college.” A big part of the problem with a school like Bronx Science, he said, is that it is overwhelmingly made up of students who don’t even live in the Bronx. “Either you open up Bronx Science to more kids,” he said, “or you create more Bronx Sciences in the Bronx.””
Mayor de Blasio wants to eliminate the exam that determines admission to three top-tier high schools and replace them with another formula that includes state test scores.
I have long been opposed to the dependence on one single standardized test for admission to these schools. No college uses such a narrow, archaic method of admitting students.
My view is that multiple measures make sense: the current test, an essay, teacher recommendations, rank in class, whatever.
Danielle Eisenman, now a student at Harvard, writes:
“Let my people study.”
“A movement to keep the Specialized High School Standardized Admissions Test as the sole criterion for admission to specialized high schools appropriated the line, “Let my people go,” from the African American spiritual, “Go Down Moses.”
“The protesters — mostly low-income, first- and second-generation Asian immigrants — wish to prevent Mayor de Blasio from dismantling what they consider a meritocratic system. They blast de Blasio’s plan, which would instead admit a set percentage of the highest-performing students from each city middle school, as discriminatory; another popular sign says, “End racism.”
“As Kenneth Chiu, NYC Asian-American Democratic Club member, said in an interview on NY1, “They never had this problem when Stuyvesant was all white. Now, all of the sudden, they see one too many Chinese, and they say, ‘Hey, it’s not right.’” (Stuyvesant today is 74% Asian.)
“My mom, a Chinese immigrant, also supports the SHSAT. When I told her I was writing this article, she texted me, “Everyone I know will hate you,” telling me instead to write in support of the test.
“Though I sympathize with these concerns, the appropriation of “Let my people go” reveals how the campaign to keep the SHSAT reeks of irony and ignorance. De Blasio wishes to admit more black and Latino students, who, despite making up 67% of New York City’s public school system, represent just 10% of students offered enrollment in specialized high schools. Stuyvesant is only 0.69% black and 2.8% Latino. It’s hypocritical for protesters to invoke slavery, an experience that belongs to black Americans, when they’re advocating to keep in place a system that denies disadvantaged black Americans an opportunity for social mobility.
“Defenders of the current system, hailing the test as establishing a level playing field, argue that if more black and Latino students truly wanted to attend specialized high schools, they could just study harder. I have repeatedly heard my classmates champion this mindset, implying that black and Latino students are not as hardworking, and, even more disturbingly, not as smart as their Asian counterparts.
“The SHSAT, however, does not measure work ethic or intelligence, but a student’s ability to answer over 100 tedious multiple choice questions in under three hours. It tests for access to tutors and cram schools that teach students the skills they need to answer the questions without thinking.
“I flunked my first practice tests. After a prep class and some tutoring sessions, however, I knew all the tricks. If I hadn’t had access to that class, I likely would not have gotten into Stuy.
“The exam only tests for reading comprehension and math skills — no critical thinking, ambition, creativity or other qualities that predict success at specialized high schools….”
Ben Chapman of the New York Daily News reports on an outrage: Someone at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx ordered painters to paint over a priceless mural created during the New Deal era, in anticipation of a visit to the school by then Schools’ Chancellor Carmen Farina. Farina never made the visit, but the painting by a noted artist was “slathered over” by “high-gloss cotton-candy blue paint.”
“Constellations” by German-born painter Alfred Floegel was installed on the ceiling outside DeWitt Clinton’s library in 1940. It depicted the stars in the heavens alongside another large-scale Floegel mural called “History of the World.”
The paintings, deemed Floegel’s masterpieces, were both used in history lessons. They also appear in the Department of Education’s online art collection, “Public Art for Public Schools.”
“It is a kind of Sistine Chapel of New Deal artworks,” wrote Richard Walker, a University of California/Berkley professor who directs the Living New Deal project, which aims to preserve New Deal-era artworks.
Floegel, who was born in 1894 and died in 1976, worked on the paintings for six years, Walker wrote in 2015 on his project’s website. At the time, he was teaching night courses at DeWitt Clinton, school staffers said.
Half of his masterpiece disappeared in November, when construction workers painted over the ceiling mural to spruce up for a visit by then-schools chancellor Carmen Farina, according to school staffers.
Farina never made the visit.
Education Department officials tell a different story — they say the painting was covered over as workers repaired damage to the building.
Whatever the reason, the loss of the mural stunned students and educators.
“It was like if you went to see the Mona Lisa and someone painted it blue,” one school staffer said. “People were devastated.”
This was not a matter of taste. This is bureaucratic vandalism. And no one will admit who issued the order.
Why? Because his biggest campaign funders are hedge fund managers who believe in privatization and want to destroy teachers’ unions.
Now, Cuomo is counting on support from unions and public school teachers in his bid for a third term.
They should ask themselves whether he deserves their support.
This article was written in 2014:
It was a frigid February day in Albany, and leaders of New York City’s charter school movement were anxious. They had gone to the capital to court lawmakers, but despite a boisterous showing by parents, there seemed to be little clarity about the future of their schools.
Then, as they were preparing to head home, an intermediary called with a message: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet.
To their surprise, Mr. Cuomo offered them 45 minutes of his time, in a private conference room. He told them he shared their concern about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambivalence toward charter schools and offered to help, according to a person who attended but did not want to be identified as having compromised the privacy of the meeting.
In the days that followed, the governor’s interest seemed to intensify. He instructed charter advocates to organize a large rally in Albany, the person said. The advocates delivered, bringing thousands of parents and students, many of them black, Hispanic, and from low-income communities, to the capital in early March, and eclipsing a pivotal rally for Mr. de Blasio taking place at virtually the same time.
Mr. Cuomo’s office declined on Wednesday to comment on his role.
As the governor worked to solidify support in Albany, his efforts were amplified by an aggressive public relations and lobbying effort financed by a group of charter school backers from the worlds of hedge funds and Wall Street, some of whom have also poured substantial sums into Mr. Cuomo’s campaign (he is up for re-election this fall). The push included a campaign-style advertising blitz that cost more than $5 million and attacked Mr. de Blasio for denying space to three charter schools.
Charter school leaders had built a formidable political operation over the course of a decade, hiring top-flight lobbyists and consultants. They had an ally in former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but Mr. de Blasio promised a sea change, saying that he would charge rent to charter schools that had large financial backing, and that he would temporarily forbid new schools from using public space.
In public, the mayor largely ignored the outcry. At his prekindergarten rally, before a smaller crowd at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, Mr. de Blasio spoke about the value of early education. Not far away, a much larger crowd of charter school supporters was gathered on the steps of the State Capitol. In an act that his aides later said was spontaneous, Mr. Cuomo joined the mass of parents and students.
“You are not alone,” he told the roaring crowd. “We will save charter schools.”
The move to protect charter schools had begun months before, when it became clear that Mr. de Blasio was favored to win the mayoral race. Charter school leaders were in a panic; a memo circulated over the summer by one pro-charter group, Democrats for Education Reform, had identified Mr. de Blasio as the candidate least friendly to their cause.
Charter schools — privately run, but with taxpayers paying the tuition — have become popular nationwide among Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as with tens of thousands of low-income parents who submit to kindergarten lotteries every year. They are also popular among Wall Street leaders who see charter schools, which often do not have unions to bargain with and have relative freedom from regulation, as a successful alternative to traditional public schools. But many Democrats, including the mayor, have sought to slow their spread, contending that they are taking dollars and space from other public schools. Pro-charter advocacy groups, including Families for Excellent Schools, StudentsFirstNY and the New York City Charter School Center, met regularly to plot strategy. Increasingly, they turned to state officials.
A lot was riding on the debate for Mr. Cuomo. A number of his largest financial backers, some of the biggest names on Wall Street, also happened to be staunch supporters of charter schools. According to campaign finance records, Mr. Cuomo’s re-election campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, Bruce Kovner and Daniel Nir.
Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot who sits on a prominent charter school board, gave $50,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign last year. He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools.
“Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,” Mr. Langone said in an interview. “He gets it.”
It was not until late February, shortly before the rally on the steps of the Capitol, that a full-fledged battle broke out.
Mr. de Blasio, reviewing plans for school space, had decided to deny it to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a high-performing network founded by Eva S. Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman. While he allowed the vast majority of charter schools to continue using public space, many supporters of Ms. Moskowitz’s schools were outraged.
Daniel S. Loeb, the founder of the hedge fund Third Point and the chairman of Success Academy’s board, began leaning on Wall Street executives for donations. Later this month, he will host a fund-raiser for Success Academy at Cipriani in Midtown Manhattan; tickets run as high as $100,000 a table.
The governor and his staff worked with Republicans in the State Senate and others to come up with a package of protections for charter schools in the city. He was already said to be displeased with Mr. de Blasio for rejecting his compromise offer on prekindergarten funding.
Mr. Cuomo did not mention charter schools in his State of the State address, but now, with Mr. de Blasio under assault and charter advocates behind him, he pushed for a sweeping deal.
The proposed legislation included provisions to reverse Mr. de Blasio’s decisions on school space, and it required the city to provide public classrooms to new and expanding charter schools or contribute to the cost of renting private buildings. It also suggested increasing per-pupil funding for charter schools and allowing them to operate prekindergarten programs.
Leonie Haimson is a true school reformer, unlike the hedge funders, tycoons, and entrepreneurs who have falsely claimed that title. She is a dedicated education activist who has led the fight over many years for fully funded public schools and student privacy.
In this video, she talks with veteran journalist Bob Herbert about the mistakes of those in power who rely on standardized testing as the sole definition of success, about segregation, about the damage wrought by charter schools, and about the changes that will benefit all students.
Very few African-American or Hispanic students gain admission, which is based entirely on passing the test. They ar3 70% of students in the city’s schools but only 10% of those in the specialized high schools.
“While just 16 percent of public school students are Asian, they make up 62 percent of students at the specialized schools. White students also make up a disproportionate share of the students, though by a much smaller margin. They are 15 percent of the system overall and 24 percent of students at specialized schools.”
Mayor de Blasio ultimately hopes to eliminate the test and use other criteria for admission. The Mayor prefers to judge applicants by such metrics as class rank at their middle school and scores on state tests. However, to make these changes would require approval by the State Legislature. Alumni of the selective schools in the Legislature have prevented change in the past. In addition, de Blasio has enemies in Albany. The odds of a victory in Albany are slim. It may seem strange that the Mayor needs to get the Legislature’s okay to change admission requirements to selective high schools, but defenders of the school put this into law many years ago.
New York City public schools include eight high schools that admit students on the basis of a single score, a rigorous test that all applicants musty take. That requirement is set in state law.
“The city’s specialized high schools — considered some of the crown jewels of New York City’s education system — accept students based on a single test score. Over the last decade, they have come under fire for offering admissions to few students of color: While two-thirds of city students are black or Hispanic, only about 10 percent of admissions offers to those schools go to black or Hispanic students…
“Right now, we are living with monumental injustice. The prestigious high schools make 5,000 admissions offers to incoming ninth-graders. Yet, this year just 172 black students and 298 Latino students received offers. This happened in a city where two out of every three eighth-graders in our public schools are Latino or black.
“There’s also a geographic problem. There are almost 600 middle schools citywide. Yet, half the students admitted to the specialized high schools last year came from just 21 of those schools. For a perfect illustration of disparity: Just 14 percent of students at Bronx Science come from the Bronx.”
In the past, efforts to change the admissions requirements of these specialized high schools have been blocked by the Legislature, which includes a number of graduates of the specialized schools.
Chalkbeat summarized the specifics of the mayor’s plan:
“De Blasio’s solution, laid out in an op-ed in Chalkbeat, would set aside 20 percent of the seats at the eight schools for students from low-income families starting next school year. Students who just missed the test score cut-off would be able to earn one of those set-aside seats through the longstanding “Discovery” program. Just 4 percent of seats were offered through that program in 2017.
“The mayor also said he plans to push state lawmakers to change a law that requires admission at three of the schools to be decided by a single test score. That’s something de Blasio campaigned for during his run for mayor in 2014 but hasn’t made a priority since.
“Most significantly, de Blasio says for the first time that he backs a system of replacing the admissions test with a system that picks students based on their middle school class rank and state test scores. The middle-school rank component is especially notable, as an NYU Steinhardt report found that the only way to really change the makeup of the elite high schools would be to guarantee admission to the top 10 percent of students at every middle school.
“If all of these changes were implemented, de Blasio says that 45 percent of the student bodies at the eight high schools would be black or Latino.”
In 2013, when Bill de Blasio ran for Mayor of New York City for the first time, he was an outspoken supporter of public schools and an equally outspoken critic of charter schools. Taking him at his word, he won over many public school parents and advocates by his willingness to break with the Bloomberg policy of favoring charters over public schools. At the time, he met with me, sought my endorsement, and won it based on his firm commitment to stop privatization. I feel betrayed after reading the story that follows.
His first schools chancellor, Carmen Farina, a high-level veteran of the Bloomberg administration, walked a fine line, trying not to antagonize either side. The public schools enroll over 1.1 million children and the charters enroll 114,000 students. The charters are the darlings of the financial world and Wall Street and the big donors.
The new chancellor, Richard Carranza, visited three charter schools yesterday and embraced them as “public schools,” not “publicly funded private schools,” which is what most people see with their own eyes since they are operated by private boards and make their own rules about admissions and discipline and other matters.
Leonie Haimson, in a note to her listserve, asks these questions:
If they are public schools, why do they refuse to follow state law when it comes to suspension and expulsion policies? Why do they refuse audits from the state comptroller, and refuse performance audits from the city comptroller?
Why do their Charter Management Companies refuse to comply with FOILs or Open Meetings Law?
Why do they have the right to access space at the city’s expense, while more than half a million public school students are crammed into overcrowded buildings with no hope of relief?
The reality is that charter schools are private corporations that use public funding, and use their backing from billionaires to demand special privileges from elected officials, while refusing to follow the same rules or submit to the same oversight as public schools that are governed by public bodies.
There is an emerging body of law which is challenging the notion that charter schools are public schools. See The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law by Preston Green and Bruce Baker. The reality is that charter schools claim to be public schools when that advantages them in terms of funding or PR, and claim that they are private entities when that advantages them in terms of being able to ignore laws pertaining to student discipline, building code regulations, fair labor practices, fiscal and performance transparency, and a host of other issues.
I have some questions: If charters are public schools, why are they allowed to close school and send their students, teachers, and parents to political rallies in Albany and at City Hall? Will Chancellor Carranza authorize all public schools to do the same or will he forbid the charter schools from using their students as political fodder to get more money for the charters? If charters are allowed to control their admissions and discipline policies, should other public schools get the same approval to do so? If deregulation is important for those “public schools,” why aren’t all public schools similarly deregulated? If charters are public schools, shouldn’t they be subject to the same legal requirements as other public schools? Or are they private contractors who are not state actors, as charters have repeatedly said in their defense in federal courts and before the NLRB?
Sharon Otterman of the New York Times wrote:
New York City’s schools chancellor signaled on Wednesday that he wanted to usher in a new era of détente between the Department of Education and the city’s charter school sector, which have often been at odds under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio over issues like finances and the pressures of sharing public school space.
“Charter Schools are public schools,” Richard Carranza, the chancellor, said in the cafeteria of the Bronx Charter School for Excellence, as he wrapped up a day of visits to three charter schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx, to which he had invited reporters along. Even that simple statement was likely to make waves among charter school opponents, who prefer to describe charters as privately run, publicly funded schools.
“The question about charters versus traditional public schools,” Mr. Carranza added, addressing reporters around a cafeteria table, “is a red herring.”
“I would say that the more dialogue we have around building a portfolio of good choices for all students in the city, and the less we emphasize a dialogue about ‘us versus them,’ the better it is for all the children in New York City,” he said.
Crossing what was once a white-hot line for the de Blasio administration, Mr. Carranza said he would visit a Success Academy charter school “in the next few weeks.” Mayor de Blasio was elected in 2013 vowing to take action against the aggressive expansion of charter networks like Success Academy, which is led by his former political rival, Eva S. Moskowitz, and which now runs 46 of the 227 charter schools in the city.
“Time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place,” Mr. de Blasio said while campaigning in 2013. “She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.”
In February 2014, Mr. de Blasio reversed a decision by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to provide space in city public school buildings to three charter schools, all part of the Success network.
In the political fallout, state legislators, with urging from the governor, passed a law requiring the city to pay much of the rent for new charter schools if it denied them free space, effectively curtailing Mr. de Blasio from removing more schools.
Chancellor Carranza “said he was happy to hear all three of the charters he visited hired only certified teachers, but he steered clear of the divisive political issue at play: that most charter schools in New York City are not unionized.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 