Photo courtesy/Flickr Night Owl City.
ast week, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, alleging systemic bias in New York City’s specialized high school admissions process. The complaint’s principal charge is that the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) discriminates against black and Latino students seeking admission.
Admission to New York’s eight specialized high schools depends on a student’s performance on the SHSAT. The NAACP LDF complaint argues that “thousands of academically talented African-American and Latino students who take the test are denied admission to the Specialized High Schools at rates far higher than those for other racial groups.” In sum, the NAACP LDF claims that because so few African-American and Latino students score well enough on the test to be admitted to the specialized high schools, the test is inherently unfair.
This reasoning can be too easily dismissed as circular and reductive. John McWhorter, in a recent Daily News op-ed, claimed low admission rates for black and Latino students has nothing to do with racism. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was even less diplomatic. “Life isn’t always fair,” Bloomberg told the Daily News when asked about the complaint. “We’re not here about equal results. We’re here about equal opportunity.”
As a parent with a student in one of the eight specialized high schools, I believe the admissions process is both biased and flawed. However, NAACP LDF’s focus on the test – and not the entire process – is misplaced.
According to a recent New York Times article about black students at Stuyvesant, the specialized high schools are far less diverse today than they were a decade ago. My daughter’s school, Brooklyn Tech, currently is the most diverse of the specialized high schools, with 10 percent of the 5,332 students identifying as black — but, as the article notes, in 1999-2000, 24 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s students were black. The decline in black and Latino enrollment at the specialized high schools likely corresponds to the increased prevalence of SHSAT prep courses, one of the biggest factors determining student performance on the SHSAT.
Taking an expensive one is almost mandatory for students hoping to do well on the test. The private test preparation industry effectively controls admissions to New York’s specialized high schools. Reliance on expensive, private test prep courses ensures that entry will be gained by only an elite few who have access to information about the best test prep courses, and the financial means to pay for them. My daughter currently attends Brooklyn Technical High School. I paid about $800 for her SHSAT prep course, a sum that would be cost-prohibitive for many New York City families. But having the means to afford such a course isn’t enough.
Information about SHSAT prep courses and tutors is not published by the DOE or shared with students by guidance counselors. This information tends to get shared through word-of-mouth within a family’s interpersonal networks. Families who are not “in the know” about SHSAT prep courses are disadvantaged over other applicants by this information gap, regardless of means.
The City of New York has offered free SHSAT prep courses to low-income students, but a few free prep courses can’t cover all the kids who are shut out under the current system. Moreover, no one seems to have assessed whether the free test prep courses offer similar results to those of the private prep courses. Free courses for underprivileged students also do not help students who do not qualify for the free courses but are unable to pay for an expensive prep course.
Prep courses do more than prepare students for the test — they help students understand and manage the admissions process. For example, students have to rank the specialized high schools in order of preference before they take the SHSAT. Some students who score well on the SHSAT fail to get placed
About the Author
The increasing racial disparities in the NYC Specialized High Schools illustrate the continuing failure of Mayoral Control of education under Michael Bloomberg. While several “remedies” have been suggested, there is no clear statement of the underlying problem. During Bloomberg’s watch, every objective measure of the so-called educational achievement gap between Black and Latino students versus their White and Asian counterparts has increased. Over the last ten years SAT scores of White and Asian students in NYC have increased while the SAT scores of Blacks and Latinos have decreased. The plummeting admission rates of students of color to the elite specialized high schools is just another measure of the continued failure of Bloomberg. The numbers of Blacks and Latinos in the elite schools is at the lowest point at any time in the last 50 years!
I attended Bronx High School of Science “back in the day.” I was a project kid as were the majority of my Black and Latino peers. We received no special treatment and enrolled in no special programs but we sliced and diced the entrance exam. Is the issue the SHSAT or is it that our children are not being adequately educated?
Many tout the racial progress that has taken place over the last decades. This mythological progress is an illusion that too many Americans buy into. If we look at education, health care, employment, economic well being, criminal justice, law enforcement etc, we view an increasingly disparate (and desperate) scenario. Blacks and Latinos are literally being “left behind.”
While I welcome the NAACP lawsuit, the problem is not an entrance exam that Black and Latino youngsters took for years and “passed.” The problem is a lot deeper than that. We must begin to collectively address the myriad of problems that challenge the very fabric of life in these United States. In doing so we must be more scientific and focused in our approach. It is once again time for us to get off our butts and agitate for real lasting change and social justice. I don’t think we have too many other options.
Thanks for this comment Basir! It’s so insightful that I’d like to use at as a post. Would you mind?
And please don’t believe the myth about kids doing well on the tests because of natural intelligence. Standardized tests do not measure intelligence – they measure subject matter mastery.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/test-prep/articles/2012/09/20/7-wrong-answers-about-standardized-tests
Methods for Improving Standardized Test Scores: Fruitful, Fruitless, or Fraudulent?
Authors: Mehrens, William A.; Kaminski, John
Source: Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, v8 n1 p14-22 Spr 1989
Well, math, reading comprehension, and logic reasoning are relevant and important subjects for aspiring specialized high school students to master.
This disparaging myth that Black and Hispanic kids are not studying as much as Asians students is patently false and is not borne out by the statistics for college attendance. The problem is exposure to the specialized high-school admission process and access to academic resources.
From the Huffington Post Oct 10, 2012 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/minority-college-enrollment_n_1954407.html):
“Enrollment and graduation rates are both up, with Hispanics and blacks showing the largest gains.
Enrollment is up 37.3 percent since 2000. College Hispanics have increased 87.5 percent; black students, 75.6 percent”
I disagree with the supposed fact that one must attend expensive preparatory courses in order to pass the SHSAT with a reasonbly high score . I speak from experience, as I am currently a Bronx High School of Science student, and all I did for preparation for the exam was borrow a random book from the nearest library titled “SHSAT” and study with the book. I had not attended any courses, nor have I recieved any help other then from myself and the book. The test does not discriminate anyone. I understand, that to pass this test, one must only study.
Olivia: “I disagree with the supposed fact that one must attend expensive preparatory courses in order to pass the SHSAT with a reasonbly high score .”
I agree and am relieved to hear it. I didn’t take a test prep course either – I studied for the SHSAT only using a book I borrowed from my local library. I took the test over 20 years ago, though, and with the big fuss made over test prep, I thought perhaps there might have been a generational change since I attended Stuy. It appears the test is still the test.
Excellant article that really hits on the root of the problem. As a black Stuy grad (class of 92) I was amazed to read the NYT article. There was a rich and vibrant blackand latino community when I attended. As a mom of 2 boys, one of whom is currently in a test prep class that he was only able to attend because he won a scholarship from the Stuy Black Alumni Diversity Initiative, I was floored by the lack of knowledge of the specialized schools and the admissions process among my sons peers.
This issue speaks more to the growing lack of info and resources among black and latino parents than it does to out and out racism in my opinion. I’m proud of the work that the diversity initiative is doing to educate families on the schools. I’m hoping their work will help to increase awareness of and our #s at these schools. Our community deserves an equal shot at the oppourtunity to access some of the best free education in this country.
Carolyn,
I agree with you that the “NAACP LDF’s focus on the test – and not the entire process – is misplaced”. Your ideas for equitable fixes in the whole test-taking spectrum are worth considering. For the most part, you and I are on the same page with this issue. However, I have a few thoughts and quibbles.
I agree and disagree with your conclusion that “the specialized high school admissions process will remain neither merit-based nor equal opportunity”. As it stands now, the SHSAT-based rank-order admission is fundamentally merit-based and equal opportunity.
No party to the complaint, including the NAACP LDF, is disputing the exam itself is race-neutral. The SHSAT’s test of math, reading comprehension, and logic reasoning abilities matches the fundaments required of students to successfully engage the exam schools’ math and science intensive curriculae. Those abilities are not race-exclusive traits. The ‘holistic’ admission process requested by the NCAAP LDF to replace the standardized SHSAT is better suited to humanities intensive and arts intensive curriculae, and indeed, we find specialized schools like Townsend Harris and Laguardia already use different admission processes tailored to their programs.
Regarding merit, rank-order placement is a pure, straightforward, transparent form of merit-based selection. (Disclaimer: I use Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, which I assume continue to accept students from the top 3 tiers of ranked scores, as reference; I don’t know the SHSAT admission formula of the more-recent specialized schools.)
Regarding equal opportunity, I believe the difference is our understanding of the SHSAT’s context. The whole process of the SHSAT can be understood as equal opportunity in the context of competition, not in the context with which we normally understand public education as a matter of right. Students must compete for the finite number of seats available at the specialized public high schools. The SHSAT is the arena of competition from which the winners and losers emerge.
The SHSAT provides the equal opportunity of a level playing field. But similar to PSAL competitions, the inequality of the SHSAT stems not from the sport, gym, or the officials, but from the competitors themselves with their unequal levels of natural potential (talent) and preparation (training and practice). When PSAL athletes compete, the opportunity provided to them by the PSAL is equal, although their athletic abilities vary by a lot.
We expect our best PSAL athletes to be naturally talented and to have trained with coaches, intensely practiced on their own, and competed outside of school teams, often starting years before high school. Yet when our best PSAL athletes overpower their competition resulting in disparate impact, we accept the merit of their achievements as a result of fairly won competition. Is it fair then for the NAACP LDF to accuse and degrade the achievements of talented, trained, practiced, and therefore able, public school students on the SHSAT, rather than accept their ranked scores as fairly won in competition?
Food for thought. The NAACP LDF advances the assumption that black and Latino students are not winning seats at Stuyvesant in higher numbers because their families cannot afford test prep. However, lower-income Asian families are sacrificing, scrimping, and saving to pay for test prep, so the financial bar for test prep cannot be unreachable for similarly lower-income black and Latino families. How many black and Latino families who do not invest in test prep are making or would make an equal or greater investment in their children’s athletic activities, perhaps from an even earlier age than needed for SHSAT test prep?
To stretch the competitive SHSAT-sports comparison further, the best PSAL athletes must try out alongside their less athletic classmates to join PSAL championship teams. The champion teams are the best only because they accept athletes who demonstrated they were the best in try outs. Stuyvesant and other top schools are only elite because they take students, like your kids, who demonstrated they were academically superior in their SHSAT try-out. If we forced PSAL champions to take lesser athletes to cure disparate impacts in athletic competition, the teams would no longer be PSAL champions. Nor would they provide sufficient conditions for our most talented PSAL athletes to hone their abilities for higher-level competition where the athletes are just as talented but perhaps better trained and prepared. The specialized schools are designed with the same championship concept. Regarding ‘holistic’ admissions for math and science schools, a try-out that’s tailored for baseball would be an inefficient selection device for a championship football coach, despite that the two sports have significant overlap. Athleticism is athleticism, but the two sports are not the same. Smart is smart, and while Stuyvesant has scientists who are creative writers and Townsend Harris has creative writers who are scientists, the two schools still choose their students to match their different curriculae.
As I said, your ideas for equitable fixes to the process are worth considering. However, can the tax-paying public afford them? Does the city have the resources (money, teachers, facilities, etc) to expand programs like SHSI-Dream to encompass all students? I believe the SHSI-Dream program limits acceptance to students with sufficient test scores, not by a quantity cut-off (eg, a lottery). In other words, NYCDOE will provide the training, but only to students who have first demonstrated they have sufficient natural talent to compete on the SHSAT. I can’t think of a fairer way to allot public resources for SHSAT prep. By the same token, I wouldn’t ask the city to expend the amount of resources that would be needed to train every wannabe PSAL basketball player like Stephon Marbury (he was the best PSAL baller in my time).
The SHSAT is fundamentally competitive. It’s well-tailored to the math and science intensive schools. Attending the specialized high schools isn’t a civil right like access to the non-specialized schools. Just as in sports, equal opportunity in the SHSAT comes from a level playing field, a straight game. Merit is decided by the winners and losers, and that’s the rank order. As with any competition, disparate impact on the SHSAT is inevitable due to the differing talent, practice, and training of the competitors.
I think if the NAACP LDF can accept that disparate impact is an inevitable result of the fundamentally competitive nature of the SHSAT, then we can begin to identify reasonable and fiscally responsible ways to identify and train all of NYC’s sufficiently talented students. Many lower-income Asian parents who would otherwise sacrifice to pay for test prep would be grateful for more financial assistance from the city.
I’ll make a final comment that’s outside the scope of your post. The NAACP LDF harbors the misperception that the exam schools are making the students. As a Stuyvesant graduate, I understand the equation actuallly works the opposite way: just as the best athletes make for the best teams, the best students make for the best schools. The specialized schools are special only due to the quality of their students. Diluting the quality of the students would dilute the specialness of the schools. Stuyvesant’s infrastructure, resources, and faculty are not actually substantively better than other NYC public high schools. This was especially the case when I attended Stuy in the old, small, overcrowded, falling-apart building on 15th Street. But even today in the larger (no longer) new building, Stuyvesant’s resources and carrying capacity are stretched very thin by the expanded student body (+1000 since I attended in the early 1990s). Stuyvesant and the other exam schools only work because the quality of the students allows for efficient utilization, if not maximization, of the school’s resources and faculty, such as they are. If less qualified students are shoehorned into the specialized schools, they won’t be helped. Instead, the resulting inefficiencies will drag down qualified students like your kids.
Carolyn,
Your belief that “the private test preparation industry effectively controls admissions to New York’s specialized high school” is wrong. It’s not the private test prep centers that control admissions, it’s the (merit-based) SHSAT that does.
I have been both a SHSAT-prep student and prep-class teacher (after graduating from Stuyvesant). I can tell you firsthand that only a few of the teachers I’ve had in both middle school or private test prep centers were able to significantly help a student with the SHSAT. Simply said, some of the students in my classes (the smarter ones) were able to do problems quicker and with better approaches than some of these teachers. At times, a teacher might call on me or a friend of mine to show the class how to do a problem, when they were stuck. Not to sound arrogant, but a good number of Stuyvesant students are simply naturally intelligent.
From my experience teaching at several test-prep centers, I can say that not everyone who takes the classes will benefit. There are always students who are lazy, who cannot control themselves, who do not listen, or simply can’t do a 3-step problem. And then there are those who understand the problem when I explain it, but cannot do it themselves, or don’t take it upon themselves to review or study. For those, students, there is little hope of getting into a specialized science high school, where they may struggle with the standard classes.
A child’s education in the classroom depends on both teacher and student: if a great teacher is paired with a great student, the student will learn a great deal; if a great teacher is paired with a student who does not care or want to learn, the student will only learn what he/she is receptive to; if a bad teacher is paired with an intellectually-curious student, the student will usually take it upon him/herself to find resources elsewhere (online, or try to get into another class, etc.) and satisfy that intellectual hunger.
Ultimately, it’s upon the student and the support they get from their families. But Asians who make it into Stuyvesant aren’t there simply because they get more test-prep, it’s because our parents sacrifice more to make sure we can appreciate the opportunities that many of them did not have. People can’t blame culture or background, so they try to attribute the number of Asians getting into Stuyvesant to money spent on test prep. But there are a great deal more wealthy New York Caucasians than Asians: you don’t see them saying the system is unfair.
And whereas Latino and African-American students make up 71% of the 8th grade population in New York City, together they account for 45% of the number of SHSAT test-takers. There are no people or special-interest groups keeping them from taking the test. If Latino and African-American students don’t even show up on test day, is that something that’s unfair? Something that can be blamed on $5 for a two-way MetroCard ride? Sorry to the NAACP that the truth is so blunt.
Sshat is not racially bias, prep courses are not the answer .Why the descrepency ? Simple Blacks and Hispanics don’t study as much as Asians.
It’s not a socio-economic issue as some have mentioned. If one is to do well on this test preparation should start in elementary school , no t the summer prior to the test…..
Marco,
Setting aside the racial stereotypes, your basic point is correct. All the cliched coachisms in sports (see my reply above) apply to competing on the SHSAT, too: work ethic, commitment, discipline, perseverence, wanting it more, will to succeed, etc, all factor into competitive academic ability, just as they factor into competitive athletic ability.
I’ve known – and I would bet Carolyn and her readers have known, too – students who had sufficient smarts to be in the same class but were far from the brightest in the class, yet succeeded nonetheless and even outpaced many of their more naturally gifted classmates because they maximized their talent by outworking and outstudying smarter classmates. Stuy has those kids. Stuy kids are all smart, but they’re not all geniuses.
The competitive nature of the SHSAT means that students are not only being tested on the math/reading/logic content on the exam. Their ability to handle the rigor of competing for a rank-order placement on the SHSAT, and winning a seat, carries over directly to their ability to take on the rigors of Stuyvesant. A Bronx Science kid quoted in one of the newspaper articles said it right: it’s simple, if you can’t handle the test, you can’t handle the school.
In my experience, some of the most naturally smart kids at Stuy struggled the most in school because before Stuy, they were always able to coast. They didn’t have to study as hard for the SHSAT, either. But once in Stuy, for the first time in their lives, they were competing with kids who were close enough to them in natural academic talent, or were smarter than them, so that study habits mattered. Some of these kids developed the necessary work ethic and went on to realize their full potential, others continued to coast and plateaued. The same phenomenon of immensely talented but lazy athletes failing to realize their potential happens all the time in sports, too.
We routinely praise winning prep athletes who have worked longer and harder than their age peers. Yet the NAACP LDF degrades the academic success of “either white or Asian American” students who have worked long and hard in order to out-compete their age peers on the SHSAT. By implying that the ‘winners’ on the SHSAT have succeeded only by somehow cheating or rigging the game, and that the game itself is worthless, the NAACP LDF is sending exactly the wrong academic message to the very same impressionable young black and Latino students that they are purporting to help.
From campaigning to replace a race-neutral selection device with race-based preferences to degrading the academic and personal fundamentals that underlie student success on the SHSAT, the NAACP LDF’s misguided campaign is rife with unintended consequences.
Eric,
Some of your statements are contradictory. You wrote:
In my experience, some of the most naturally smart kids at Stuy struggled the most in school because before Stuy, they were always able to coast. They didn’t have to study as hard for the SHSAT
And:
“either white or Asian American” students who have worked long and hard in order to out-compete their age peers on the SHSAT.
Which is it? Do successful Stuy admits really outwork other candidates? Or are successful Stuy admits just naturally smarter than the rest? Being that the test is the only criterion by which the candidates are judged, you are being presumptuous in assuming that work ethic is the determining factor here. Additionally, when you wrote “white and Asian” you, for all intents and purposes, meant “Asian”. Stuyvesant is currently 72% Asian. Hmm. How did that happen? Is that good for the country? Steve Sailer referenced an article in the NYTimes that noted:
a student with a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal would have been admitted to Stuyvesant High School – the most coveted specialized school – but a student with a 97 in math and 92 in verbal would not.
Hmmm. That’s strange. I’d call that rather bizarre, even for highly technical schools like Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. I stumbled upon a report that drew some critical conclusions regarding the efficacy of the SHSAT:
The SHSAT has an unusual scoring feature that is not widely known, and may give an edge to those who have access to expensive test-prep tutors. Other reasonable scoring systems could be constructed that would yield different results for many students, and there is no evidence offered to support the validity of the current system.
And:
in all the years the SHSAT has been the lone determinant of admission to these schools, the NYCDOE has never conducted a predictive validity study to see how the test was performing. In addition, it has never been made clear what the objectives of the SHSAT are. Absent predictive validity studies, there’s no way to know if any test is providing useful information; and without well-specified objectives, it’s not even clear what the test is supposed to do or predict.
The points I raise here are not to support the actions of the NAACP. The NAACP would oppose any standardized test in which blacks (and Hispanics, curiously) did worse on average than whites. But the Hecht-Calandra Act (passed in 1972 by the NY state legistlature to insure standards were not lowered at the schools) was a bit odd. I understand why it was passed, but the test does have its quirks.
RR:
“Which is it? Do successful Stuy admits really outwork other candidates? Or are successful Stuy admits just naturally smarter than the rest?”
It’s both. No contradiction at all. It takes talent, training, and practice to out-score one’s age peers on the SHSAT. If you have more of 1 or 2, you need less of the other 1 or 2 to master the SHSAT, but that’s also in comparison to competing test takers.
Throughout this thread, I’ve been using competitive sports as the analogy to explain the competitive nature of the SHSAT. In any elite-level sports league, there are differing levels of talent, but even the ‘blue-collar, lunchpail, scrappy’ players who work ’110%’ just to make it onto a team roster are more talented athletes than the average person. In the same sports leagues, the most gifted athletes (the 1st round draft pick types) have to train and practice, too, but not not as much as the scrappers, and relative to the scrappers, can ease into the league. But in order to win once they’re in the league and competing against other top talents, even the most gifted athletes have to learn to train and practice hard. That’s how it works at Stuyvesant. All Stuy kids are smart but some are smarter than others. Most Stuy kids had to study hard to ensure they would make it into the top rank of scores to win a seat at Stuy. Their SHSAT study habits carry over into Stuy. Some Stuy kids, however, achieve mastery of the SHSAT without needing to study hard but discover once in Stuy that they need to improve their study habits in order to compete at Stuy. Just like sports: so-so work can be enough for a top talent to get through the same door that demands superior talent and superior work from most others. But so-so work won’t make a top talent a winner after he’s through the door.
I had a broken link to the report I referenced. The link is listed below:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/pb-feinman-nyc-test_final.pdf