A modest proposal for diversity at specialized schools

MARGIN NOTES

March 10, 2010

A modest proposal for diversity at specialized schools

by Philissa Cramer, at 9:31 am

The only way into the city’s seven specialized high schools is a high score on a one-time exam. But while black and Hispanic students make up half of test-takers, but they represent only a tiny proportion of students at the schools, which include Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

A different admissions procedure could ensure a more equitable student body at the specialized high schools, argues a former CUNY dean in the GothamSchools community section. John Garvey weaves personal anecdotes, local history, and lessons from a pioneering college admissions plan in Texas into a proposal for a new way to admit students to the city’s most elite high schools.

Garvey writes:

The woefully small percentages of black and Hispanic students at the city’s specialized high schools is not a new development, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something to change it. Here’s my suggestion: The Department of Education should adopt a proportional admissions plan for the exam schools that would offer admission to the highest-scoring students from each of the neighborhoods of the city.

QueensParent

I’m quite certain such a proposal would be unconstitutional. I don’t support rewarding any student who does not meet the admission criteria for the exam school with admission. Doing so robs the hard work of the other students who did in fact meet the admission criteria. The answer to the lack of black and Hispanic students at the exam schools (in a system that is indeed almost 70% black and Hispanic) is not changing the admission requirements. The answer is preparing them better academically and making other rigorous schools. Exam high schools are not the only rigorous high schools in New York City after all. Finally, Mr. Garvey’s proposal sounds eerily like Patrick Sullivan’s idea expressed in the Village Voice not so long ago that admissions standards to G & T programs change arbitrarily based on zip codes throughout the City, so some kids are “more smart” or “less smart” than others depending on where they live in NYC. I’m still scratching my head about that one.
Lisa

I think it’s quite silly to use one test to determine whether a student is admitted to a particular school. There are so many studies to indicate why one test is not a reasonable measure of a student’s ability or likeliness to be successful. Since the affluent groups benefit most from such an admissions policy, this policy won’t be challenge. It’s only when too many low-income black and Hispanic kids are being accepted is their political pressure and uproar. Affluent white groups still hold the power, and so long as their kids are successful the status quo will remain.
QueensParent

Lisa tests are a fact of life. The admissions tests for the exam schools has been taken by hundreds of thousands of students, including one of my children. Saying tests are unfair does not improve educational outcomes for NYC kids or anyone else’s as again, they are a fact of life. There has to be a standard to measure everyone by, again, a fact of life. My child did not get into Stuyvesant based on his exam scores. He went to a different rigorous NYC high school. We should not change the exam schools’ admission standards to fit our idea of “fairness.” Look at what happened to City College, Brooklyn College, etc any other CUNY schools when politicians did this in the 1970s in service of “fairness.” Those schools were never the same because of “open admissions.”
http://southbronxschool.blogspot.com Teacher In The Bronx

Queens Parent-

Again, lack of facts.
Mitch

I find it amazing that in one of the world’s most culturally diverse cities, a premier school like Stuyvesant, doesn’t have enough African American students to be measured in that sub-group in regards to AYP.
Yellow Peril

To understand this you have to know that Yellow people aren’t diverse. My father may have been an illiterate rice farmer killed by communists, I may have come to this country in rags, but that doesn’t make my kids disadvantaged. Thus the fact that Stuyvesant is only 25% white somehow still means that minorities, (ie.. not yellow folk) are being discriminated against. It couldn’t possibly be that they don’t work hard enough to pass the test. College admissions have the same issue, if you understand that they entire purpose of the admissions process is to limit the number of Asian students, everything suddenly makes sense. In a rational place getting in to college would just be a matter of taking a test. This is actually how you level the playing field, you don’t know what race a person is, what their gender is, just how well they do on the test. These tests are great equalizers allowing poor folk like me and my uncle who brought me here to compete on a level playing field against people with real advantages.

Lisa – you know tests like the SAT or the even the SHSAT can be taken more than once. (Yes you can transfer to Stuy). Sorry you don’t like tests but they really matter, engineers lawyers, doctors, all take really big tests to prove that they can do their jobs before we let them do it. In the real world most things aren’t that high stakes, I understand that, but sometimes they are, and for the people going to our best schools, they are much more likely to have those high stakes moments.

This policy makes a bit more sense in Texas I will say because of the rural/urban divide, small town high schools may not have the resources urban schools, less AP classes etc.. However, in the cities most schools do, its not the fault of one school that another is deploying those resources in the form of metal detectors.

Teacher in the Bronx – what facts are you looking for?
Redpoint

Lisa: affluent white children are a very small minority of kids at these specialized schools. A large percentage qualify for free lunch. Most kids at Stuy and Bronx Sci are Asian. And most kids at Brooklyn Latin–a fantastic specialized school–are black. The affluent are not the one’s benefitting from this admissions policy, it’s hard-working working-class kids.
Redpoint

Also–it would be interesting to see the percentage of black kids who actually put Stuy down on their list. It’s possible the the low number admitted to Stuy is due to the fact that they put Brooklyn Tech, which has a much higher percentage of black kids, first. We won’t know until we see the numbers.
mr b

I can only give my experience as a middle school AP, as a general statement it is not our “best” students who make specialized schools. We had over 40 students who were accepted including 3 of the 17 or so Hispanics who were admitted to Stuy citywide. Many of our Asian students attend school every weekend beginning very early in their lives to cram for the exam. I am not sure I would reccommend that educational approach be shared among all students. Students who were accepted included a fair number with lower averages then you would expect, but just performed well on the test on one day.
Peter

QP: The current long established specialized high school selection process, that is embedded in state law might NOT withstand a legal challenge, will be interest to see whether the upcoming “guidance” from the USDOE Office of Civil Rights mentions admissions criteria at specialized schools, and the “disparate impact” of selection criteria.

Mr b is absolutely right, parents spend big bucks for tutors, there is no incentive for a principal to offer a tutoring course, doesn’t impact his Progress Report grade.
http://www.SpecialEducationMuckraker.com Dee Alpert

A modest, but effective proposal: Let Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg hit their wealthy contacts for donations to a fund to pay for the Kaplan test prep course for the Stuy/Science/Bklyn Tech test. Because it works, whereas the NYCDOE’s program to prep minority and poor kids for this test does not work. I’m not going to go into why it doesn’t work, but the hard fact is, it does not.

As for your “best” students not necessarily scoring well and gaining admission to these selective schools, it puts me in mind of a story I heard from a gentleman who headed one of the very largest private testing firms in NYC years ago. He said that he and many colleagues had volunteered to do work in Newark, NJ public schools to assist in various antipoverty efforts there. He and his colleagues found that about 30% of the black boys who were classified as having disabilities – typically “emotionally disturbed” – were, in fact, extremely bright and got into trouble in school because they were bored … continuously. These certainly were not the “best” of the children according to their schools’ administrators; they were just some of the very brightest. Kids like this exist, in numbers far, far higher than the current NYC education establishment wants to admit, in significant numbers. If you keep them in classes where only grade-appropriate materials are taught, then that’s all they’ll learn and they’ll never score as well as their middle class peers whose parents have exposed them to many things in life well above the education industry’s grade level horizon. (And thank goodness they do.)

I am reminded of another anecdote which bears keeping in mind. Many years ago a certain person got a job heading a highly selective non-public school elementary school program for extremely gifted children in Manhattan. I was told, later, but had no way of checking the information, that she was a patronage selection out of the Mayor’s office, having been forced out of a prior NYC high school administrative position because of a lack of required credentials. This person determined that the school had a deficiency in the number of black boys it admitted. Thereafter, s/he aggressively admitted black boys whose scores on the mandated admission test were far, far below those of the rest of the students admitted. Apparently there was no deficit in high scoring black girls.

After two years of trying to deal with these very nice, but not exceptionally bright boys, the faculty rebelled, almost en masse, because they were simply not able to implement their well-honed gifted curriculum with these children. The low scoring boys, for the most part, simply did not “get it.” The administrator was forced out and the school returned to its stated goal of educating very, very, very bright children, period.

In order to make his/her goal a reality, the official refused to even interview a high number of white males who scored right at the top of the chart. Because my son was one of them, I contacted various civil rights organizations, which subsequently secured the school’s admission data from the State Ed. Dept. I was informed that the fact that there was a racial quota being unconstitutionally implemented was crystal clear, but because of the racial tension in NYC at that time, they were apprehensive about filing what would otherwise have been a suit on account of illegal racial discrimination fully in accordance with their mission.

Rather than waste time seeking other sources for counsel, I contacted a number of parents in the same boat. Thus was started The Anderson Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students. We simply organized to start a program that would meet our children’s obvious, identified needs, and that was that. And while it killed the liberal NYC Bd. of Ed. establishment, the fact is that with legitimate, thorough recruiting, the first few Anderson student bodies were well integrated, racially, ethnically and in terms of family income.

If you mess with the admissions process and criteria for Stuy/Science/Brooklyn Tech, all that will happen is that parents of kids who should have been, but were not, admitted will go and do the same thing we did and that will be that. If you focus on the failures of the NYCDOE’s test prep program instead, the chances that a far higher proportion of students of color will be admitted after having freely competed is very great and worth exploring.
Brooklyn Mom

My son, a nice nerdy white boy who likes math and science, had great grades and attendance and great comments on his report card, was not admitted to any halfway decent middle school in my district, which has no zoned schools. He didn’t meet the mushy criteria that the middle schools used to decide who they wanted. The schools made it clear they wanted to maintain diversity, among ability, male-female ratio, race, etc. Fine, that’s their right and its a laudable social goal. I assume we’ll encounter the same problem at high school level.

I still have to find a decent high school for my son. He’s not a genius but I looked at the SHSAT and I feel certain he will have no trouble scoring high enough for Brooklyn Tech. I for one am extremely grateful that I HAVE ONE OPTION. If there were no admission test, it would be back to the vague, mushy admission criteria. Somehow, one never knows exactly what is “wrong” – why is my kid not good enough? It can’t be academic or behavior or attendance. So what is the problem?

As much as I feel this way, I imagine that Chinese families feel it even more so. As a few commenters have pointed out, the percentage of Caucasian students has not changed at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. (No one seems to focus on HSAS or Brooklyn Latin where the percentage of Asian students is lower.) What changes is the percentage of “Asian” students. This is discussed as a lack of diversity. How can the parents who are lumped into the very broad Asian category not feel this is an attack on their children’s efforts to succeed in the system as best as they know how?

A solution that changes the admission criteria for the specialized high schools to a mushy standard is not desirable. We have enough of that already. There are many good high schools that will receive many applications from students who meet their academic criteria. Then, they will select the students they want, keeping diversity as a laudable goal. My past experience leads me to understand that my son will have a poor chance of being admitted, and since I don’t want to move to Long Island, I am banking on the test. I guess I am not the only one counting on this one good option.

Its not that easy to prep for the test in a year and score well. But it also doesn’t require cramming or a fantastic private school. For the reading comprehension/reasoning part, years of reading is probably key. Having an interest in the world around you. For the math part, some math review is probably advised, plus studying areas that have not been covered in school. I am going to sit with my son this summer while he takes practice tests to make sure he feels comfortable with the material.

If lack of understanding of the test taking is holding back African-American students, the City should do a better job of explaining how the test works. The first goal should be to make sure that qualified students of all races and genders have access to admission through the test, by having time to practice, learn strategies, fill in gaps. The second goal should be to make sure that students have access to reasonably good middle school education so there are not so many gaps. (Something that I was hoping for when my son was in fifth grade.) Changing the admission criteria to take the top students from each middle school will completely change the schools as the students will no longer have consistent abilities. You can’t make up for a poor education in the lower grades at high school level and still have the school function on the level of Stuyvesant or Bronx Science. This is just letting the DoE off the hook for what they really should be doing, and that is improving the schools. And parents, you are not off the hook either for your kids education. But don’t attack the families who are doing right by their kids.
Poor White Trash

Sorry I’m not diverse. I grew up in the bayview houseing projects, suffered from a ton of racism from the mostly African-American residents, including more than one round of get the honky, you know that kind of thing that would be called a hate crime if I were the perpetrator. My parents are not that bright, we didn’t know a thing about the stuy test, only that some people at school were taking it. I didn’t have a study book, I didn’t know you could buy them, I didn’t know what would be on the test at all, all I knew was that if my friends thought they could pass, we were in the same class and I might be able to also. Both of my neighborhood high schools would eventually be closed because they weren’t performing well, (south shore and canarsie). I was able to escape the poverty of my parents because I passed that test. Because the test doesn’t care what race I was, it doesn’t care about my gender, all it cares about is whether I could succeed at that academic level.

Stop assuming I had some great advantage. I didn’t my parents are completly irresponsible, who since college I have been supporting financially, I have a ton of loans from grad school and undergrad, but I’m successful, all because standardized tests let me shine. If your kid can’t pass the stuy test he won’t pass his step 2′s (medical), or your PE (engineering) exams.

I am sorry if having parents who can’t read and barely speak english who survived horrible oppression abroad doesn’t make me diverse. Tests level the playing field everything else is making excuses. For those who think test prep works I suggest you actually read the literature. Kaplan and the like are frauds, this has been shown over and over.
AJ

I think Yellow Peril nailed it.

To my mind, it would be disastrous if we, as a society, accept the idea that a dearth of black and hispanic students at the elite high schools is, in and of itself, evidence of racial discrimination.

I’m well aware that tests can be, and have been in the past, deliberately designed to favor one ethnic group — usually whites — over others. I have seen sample questions that were clearly written to achieve this goal.

But I have yet to see anyone point to a single instance of this in the test under discussion here.

Not one. And I’ve been looking.

Similarly, as the son of Dominican immigrants and lifelong resident of NYC, I’m well aware of the existence of the white power structure (for want of a better term). But I’m also aware that it’s not as powerful as it once was.

And those who claim the test must be weighted against black and hispanic students have yet to explain why this white power structure would engineer a test that guarantees an overwhelming advantage to asian-american kids.

Such people bristle at the very mention of the possibility that there might be other factors at work here, besides the (in their minds) obvious racial discrimination: things like family environment, work ethic, etc.

As the parent of a kid who spent his entire summer studying in order the pass the exam, I think these potential other factors might warrant closer examination.

Lastly, I keep hearing the argument that “passing a test proves nothing but the fact that you know how to take a test.”

No. Passing a test means that you’re in possession of a specific body of knowledge.

I’ll put it another way: would you willingly take your sick child to someone who couldn’t pass his medical exams?
District 13 parent

Brooklyn Mom said beautifully what I was thinking, and I too have a smart, nerdy child who is, however, not likely to come off well with the middle and high schools that use interviews for admission. Moreover, we live in a district with middle school options that are less than desirable, no matter how our child does in the interviews.

The problem really isn’t why some groups of children aren’t passing the high school exam; it’s why they aren’t prepared to take the exam in the first place. And that’s an issue that starts many, many years before the exam is taken.
QueensParent

Dee clearly you are not aware that the City already spends tons of money on test prep courses for minority students on the SHSAT. So there’s no need for private donations. All that is needed is willing and prepared children to have their parents sign them up. No, cramming for a test doesn’t mean you will do well on it. What the test demonstrates is how much you KNOW, not how much you crammed for. If a student only had crammed test knowledge, they would not be successful at any of the exam schools despite their admission to one.
http://www.SpecialEducationMuckraker.com Dee Alpert

Queens Parent – I’d like to see exactly how much money the NYCDOE spends on sending students to the private test prep outfits rather than to its own incompetent test prep program.

As for what these courses manage to teach and what one learns from them, I can speak from personal experience and experience as a parent of a kid who took the Kaplan prep course for the Stuy/Science/Bronx Sci test. Worked for me, bigtime. Worked for him, bigtime. If the NYCDOE would release the results of its own test prep program for these tests for the poor and minority groups who take them, we’d know what works and which works better. These private courses offer great opportunities to learn, taught by effective staff, a lot of things that one doesn’t really “get” in regular NYCDOE classes. The curriculum used by these outfits is what they’ve found, pragmatically, to be effective, rather than ones subject to the NYCDOE’s various ideological afflictions. If one private prep outfit’s courses work better than another’s, word spreads and the less effective ones would start losing business bigtime.

Been there; done that, and if my now-grown-up son was taking these tests in the future, I’d have him signed up for a private prep course in a New York minute.
QueensParent

I don’t see why you’d call the DOE’s program “incompetent.” Private does not mean “better.” Kaplan and those firms only release massaged statistics for the “success” of their prep programs. My son used to the DOE SHSAT prep program and I was satisfied with the review. He didn’t get into Stuy but he got into another rigorous high school. In the end, if the private program was that much more important than the DOE program, then I think families should just pay for it.
Redpoint

I think it naive to expect that most kids who don’t score well enough to get into the specialized school would thrive in them. Has the author toured the schools? I have. These kids are doing simultaneous AP classes in Physics, Calculus, and beyond, along with extracurricular activities such as Robotics. Just to include kids in the name of racial diversity will not be doing them any favors if they aren’t ready to do the work on the same level as the other kids.
http://www.SpecialEducationMuckraker.com Dee Alpert

QueensParent – What is the data re the NYCDOE’s prep programs? I don’t think it makes much sense to put down whatever data there is from the private prep programs without at least seeing the NYCDOE’s comparable data.

If all you want to do is go by the success of people in your family, then I’d have to say that my son’s experience w/Kaplan was terrific, both for the hs test prep program and the SATs, and my personal experience w/the Kaplan prep program for the SATs was excellent, so does this mean that I have more votes than you do? No. It’s individual anecdotal information. We need the large scale serious numbers, with PSAT scores for the prep programs’ kids (public and private) and then the scores of the same kids on the specialized high schools’ tests. While the private test prep outfits can massage their numbers, so can the NYCDOE … if it released them at all. But it doesn’t.

I’m going to say that after watching the NYCDOE’s pattern of releasing and not releasing data it clearly has in its possession, where data is positive, it gets released and where data is negative, it gets suppressed.
Laura

According to the NY Times article originally posted on this issue (don’t have the link at hand, but it was by Jennifer Medina and was a blog posting), the DOE program results were “lackluster,” but the same article reported that 21 percent of Hispanic students and 19 percent of African-American students who took the DOE course were offered a slot in a specialized school. Meanwhile, if you work out the math using numbers from the DOE press release it appears that about 22 percent of all students who took the test were offered a slot citywide. It seems to me like the DOE program is doing a fair job at leveling the playing field. And I’m not surprised because frankly I think the most important thing that any of these test prep programs provide is familiarizing kids with question types they might not have seen before. Obviously, there are test taking strategies (process of elimination, etc.) that help as well, but I bought one of the prep books for my son as he prepared for the test and found that the most helpful thing was just having him work through the sentence scrambles and logical reasoning problems that he’d never previously been exposed to.
District 13 parent

I’m curious about one thing in regard to race and the specialized school admissions. Many of the African American children in my child’s middle-class, neighborhood preschool went to private school, many with financial aid. Similarly, many high-achieving African American students at our current public school go the private school route for middle-school, and I’ve heard many parents talk about Prep for Prep. Is it possible that many of the high-achieving children–most, admittedly, with educated parents–who might otherwise choose the specialized high schools are going the private school route? Has anyone looked at exmissions from Phillippa Schuyler, a gifted and talented middle school that is nearly 100% African American and Hispanic, to see what the breakdowns of high schools are, i.e. specialized, private, boarding, other selective public? Just as there are cultural patterns leading to large numbers of asians testing in to the specialized high schools, I wonder if some study would reveal whether cultural bias on the part of those parents who could be reasonably expected to have their children prepare for the SHSAT finds other options more appealing? I’ve always heard this anecdotally, but I don’t know if it’s true. I also wonder if African American and hispanic 8th graders are ranking Brooklyn Latin over Stuy, etc. so as not to be an extreme minority in their school.
http://www.SpecialEducationMuckraker.com Dee Alpert

Laura – There’s a very big difference between giving a kid a test prep book and having the kid sit through a good test prep course. For one thing, the test prep course staff are extremely knowledgeable and answer questions and if they need to explain a whole process, they do so.

From my experience at Bronx Science (back in the day when it was the No. 1 selective NYC high school) and my son’s experience at Stuyvesant, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if children of black and Hispanic middle class families decided on private high schools rather than be part of a very small minority at Stuy/Bronx Sci. I don’t recall seeing at Stuy or Sci that there were strong programs to support these kids – I don’t mean academically, because they got in – I mean socially/emotionally.

For what it’s worth, Stuy/Science rest on their students’ laurels. I’ve yet to hear much about these schools really conferring any meaningful added-on value for students. High scorers go in: high scorers go out. The complaints from the kids – when you can get them away from their parents, who are concerned with chatter that might take down these schools’ reputations – are the same now as they were back in the day.

However, for many extremely bright kids, what Stuy/Sci really do is give them a place where for the first time in their entire educational careers they’re not bored out of their minds, and where they’re with other kids who … understand their jokes. This is not something to be undervalued. Not at all.
Redpoint

Dee Alpert–also Stuy/Sci/Tech have the most amazing science facilities I have ever seen in a high school. If a kid is interested in science, he/she does has unparalleled access to science labs that none of the other kids have. That’s also not to be undervalued.
anon

Dee Alpert-> …. Queens Parent – I’d like to see exactly how much money the NYCDOE spends on sending students to the private test prep outfits rather than to its own incompetent test prep program.
….

SHSI is a NYC DOE run program:

http://schools.nyc.gov/ChoicesEnrollment/Middle/SHSI/default.htm

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/gap-persists-in-test-for-specialized-high-schools/

…..At a test-prep institute created by the city to improve the performance of underrepresented minorities, the gap was still striking: 16 percent of Hispanics and 23 percent of blacks who had intensive tutoring earned admissions offers this year, compared with 63 percent of Asians and 41 percent of whites……

So, apparently, certain sub-groups are doing well at SHSI.
http://www.SpecialEducationMuckraker.com Dee Alpert

This data would appear to document that the NYCDOE’s SHSI program is incompetent in terms of adequately prepping black and Hispanic kids for the specialized hs tests, while it is more competent for prepping kids in other groups.

Looks to me like the SHSI program is expensive to run. NYCDOE should do an experiment – randomly select kids who would be eligible for the SHSI program; assign half of them to the Kaplan SHSI prep program and half to the SHSI program and see which produces the best results in terms of objective, positive outcomes for the kids. If the SHSI program does better, fine; if the Kaplan (or one of the other private providers) does better, then as long as the private program(s) cost the same, or less, than the NYCDOE’s SHSI program, the SHSI program should be terminated and replaced with the NYCDOE paying for these kids to attend one of the private providers.

Do that for a year and then see how effective the prep program is in terms of improving kids’ scores on these tests and gaining admission to one of the selective high schools. If such a small proportion of black and Hispanic kids still are present in incoming classes, then it’s time to get serious psychometrics professionals – not ideologues – to look at the tests and see whether they’re testing for racially or ethnically connected knowledge which might negatively skew results.

If you start doing quota admissions of lower-scoring kids, no matter what you call it, these selective schools will simply insure that kids are placed in classes according to scores and the lower-scoring kids will wind up in a few obvious classes, and will predictably do poorly because there is no way that Stuy/Sci are going to assign their very best teachers to classes of worst scoring kids. And you’ll get huge flunk out and drop out problems. It will be tracking without the name – which these schools already do to some extent anyway although they’ll die rather than admit it.
anon

Dee Alpert> …”This data would appear to document that the NYCDOE’s SHSI program is incompetent in terms of adequately prepping black and Hispanic kids for the specialized hs tests, while it is more competent for prepping kids in other groups. ….”

You may want to look at the citywide data/stats on the 7th Grade NYS ELA/MATH testing (especially the ELA) – The tests were given last year Jan, 2009 – this is the current 8th Grader and the same kids that took the SHSAT exam Nov 2009 and received the SHS results last month. The level ’4′ (highest) on the exam are the kids performing at least 1 grade above the average (according to NYS standard) and the numbers do seems to match (close to) the numbers of offers received by Blacks, Hispanics and whites

The 2009 for 7th Grade ELA – numbers for level ’4′ are as follows: whites – 1037, blacks – 337, hispanics – 445

The number of seats offers to Specialized HS are as follows: whites – 1201, blacks – 296, hispanics – 357

The correlation here isn’t that each kids that received a ’4′ on the ELA exam received an offer for SHS BUT statistically (ie: means, mode, etc), the correlation’s maybe that currently, certain sub-group are better prepared for the exam than other sub-group. The ‘education prepareness’ before the 7th Grade maybe a factor. Knowing which District/schools has these level ’4′ and which kid received an offer to SHS will provide a better idea of the prepareness.

Here’s the link to both data:

http://schools.nyc.gov/accountability/Reports/Data/TestResults/2009/ELA/2006-2009_ELA_Citywide_by_Ethnicity_web.xls

http://gothamschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/picture-4.png
Tom

There was an article in the NYTs a couple of years ago (sorry, I don’t have the link) that decomposed the criteria for admission to the magnet high schools. What the article highlighted was that while the tests themselves may be fair and reasonably unbiased, the admissions criteria are not. To illustrate this, and as the article documented, consider two students: the first gets scores in the 95th percentile on both math and ela while the second gets a 99 on math and a 65 on ela. The criteria are set up so that the second kid would get into a school like Stuyvesant but the first would not.

Hence, the high percentage of Asian students in the specialized high schools.
Pingback: Discipline is the Key | rosimon.com

Our Twitter Updates

Despite some tense confrontations between protesters and police, nothing ever got physical and a lieutenant just said there were no arrests. 3 hrs ago
He's been frozen in that stoic position all night MT @lisafleisher: A protester speaks with his middle finger. http://t.co/xLar4NRU 3 hrs ago
Last of the occupy protesters just walked out together, shouting expletives and insults on their way out. #toughcrowd 3 hrs ago
Frank Thomas, DOE spokesman just told me no arrests have been made tonight at PEP despite confrontation between protesters & police earlier. 4 hrs ago
RT @leoniehaimson: It's been shown repeatedly that as one schl closes another overwhelmed w/ high needs kids that small schls won't take 4 hrs ago
More updates...

GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

MARGIN NOTES

March 10, 2010

A modest proposal for diversity at specialized schools

Tips, questions, feedback?

Follow GothamSchools

Feb. 10: You’re invited!

Recently Posted Jobs

Chalk It Up

Recent Comments

Events Calendar

RSS Feeds

Our Twitter Updates

Archives

Copyright Notice

February 2012
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Jan
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29