Brooklyn Tech, one of eight NYC specialty schools
Last week a group of eight prestigious New York City high schools
re-affirmed that they would use only a standardized test to determine admission. Blacks and Latinos constitute only
12% of the students in these so-called specialty schools, while making up 70% of the city's public school student population.
This decision was announced only days before a study was published showing that ninety (yes, 90!) city schools failed to pass a single black or Hispanic student on state tests.
Click past the Orange Squiggle of Exclusion to see why the schools think keeping the academic standards the way they are is imperative.
The fight over the Specialized High School Admissions Test has raged in New York City for a long time. In 2012, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a federal complaint with the Department of Education challenging the policy of using only the test for admission. (That complaint is still being adjudicated.) In 2013, then-mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio questioned the use of the test as the sole candidate, arguing that it leads to a "rich get richer phenomenon" because wealthy parents can pay for expensive test preparation.
“The school is not for everyone,” said Soohyung Kim, an investment manager and president of the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association. “I don’t think it’s a great experience for kids that can’t keep up with it.”
Larry Cary, a New York City employment lawyer at Cary Kane LLP, believes the policy may ensure academic standards. "If there’s any large number, or even a small number, quite honestly, of kids who can’t do the work, who are admitted because they changed the admissions system, the educators will have no choice but to educate the kids who are in front of them, and that’s going to have a negative effect, unfortunately, on the curriculum and quality of education,” said Mr. Cary, who is also the president of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation.
Despite the campaign for change, the de Blasio administration has done nothing to address the under-representation in the City's specialized schools. A spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, Devora Kaye, said in typical bureaucratic fashion
We must do more to reflect the diversity of our city in our top-tier schools — and we are committed to doing just that while ensuring high academic standards. In the coming months we will continue looking at ways to address the gap that has left so many of our black and Latino students out of specialized high schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
If we want specialty schools that reflect the diversity of New York City, then we're going to have to stomach the unpleasantness that accompanies change like this. Lasting and significant change to the root causes of minority under-representation may come only once change is made that alters the status quo. Perhaps the only thing crystal clear in this debate is that if nothing changes, nothing ever changes.
Mon Sep 08, 2014 at 9:12 AM PT: The original text of this diary misconstrued Larry Cary's comment as discriminatory. His actual quote include no discussion of race, and referred only to academic performance. Based on his comments alone, there should have been no racial connotations.
Mon Sep 08, 2014 at 10:21 AM PT: Cary has argued that the current low number of black and Latino students is utterly unacceptable and more than just “bad optics”, but the way to combat it is not to do away with the test as the sole means of admission. He and the coalition argue that the Department of Education has to more aggressively reach into middle schools or even earlier to identify those youngsters in underrepresented communities who can succeed on the test and in the schools and prepare them better. These students can come from those who score at the high end of standardized tests. He also called for reconfiguring the Discovery Program to give those who fall just short of the cutoff point to have a second chance to do additional work in order to be admitted.
To say that Cary believes that “keeping minorities out is best for the schools” is an utter misrepresentation of anything close to what he believes and what the coalition has spoken of. For one thing, more than 50 percent of students accepted into the eight specialized high schools are Asian-American, who by definition are minority, and that the specialized high schools have far higher percentages of students who qualify for free or reduced-cost school lunches – the measure of poverty used by city schools – than high performing “screened” schools that use the kind of multiple criteria that critics of the test are looking to as an alternative.