Stuyvesant High School building in lower Manhattan. (Daily News)
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible to schedule the New York City Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) used to select students for the city’s eight elite academic schools. It is an opportunity to rethink the exams and the specialized high schools. The exams, for admission to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, Brooklyn Latin, High School of American Studies, High School for Math, Science and Engineering, Staten Island Technical High School, and Queens High School for the Sciences are usually administered to tens of thousands of middle school students in mass testing sites so they can’t be done given COVID-19 safe social distancing guidelines.
In September, while New York City was struggling to reopen the schools, the Department of Education (DOE) promised it would announce the process for applying to its eight test schools by October and keep the December 4 deadline for applications. That clearly isn’t going to happen.
Mayor De Blasio has hinted that the SHSAT could be administered online. This introduces a number of other problems. Every student does not have access to an adequate computer, reliable Internet, or a quiet place to take the test, particularly students from poorer and minority families. It is also not clear how the DOE could proctor the exam to prevent improper assistance.
There is a push, supported by the current Chancellor of the Department of Education, to reconsider admission procedures for these schools because the testing system basically measures whether an applicant is the offspring of professional parents or comes from a family willing to invest thousands of dollars in otherwise meaningless test prep programs and it has largely blocked African American and Latino students from attending the schools.
Serious questions have also been raised about the validity of a competitive high school admissions test, the artificial limit placed on the number of students who can attend these schools, the function of specialized schools, and whether they are justified given the racial imbalance of their student populations. If the schools actually have a specialized curriculum, why isn’t it offered to all qualified students and why is it offered only at these test schools?
Part of the current problem is that in the early 1970s, conservative groups in control of the New York State legislature and legislators responding to school integration fears of white constituents, passed a bill, the Hecht-Calandra Act, that requires admission to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech be “solely and exclusively” determined by scores on the SHSAT. The other five high schools are not covered by the state law and the city can easily change their admission requirements, if the Mayor and the School Chancellor have the political will.
I think the Mayor and the School Chancellor could also circumvent the law for the “big three” by officially “closing” the schools and “reopening” them with new names and modified admissions policies. It is not clear why New York City still has a high school named after an avid anti-Semite and the largest private slaveholder in colonial New Amsterdam.
A group of education advocacy organizations and individuals, including Alliance for Quality Education, MORE-UFT (Movement of Rank and File Educators), NYC Opt Out, El Puente and Teens Take Charge, has petitioned Governor Andrew Cuomo to issue an Executive Order to suspend the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), at least for this year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo
We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, write to request the issuance of an Executive Order to suspend the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) for the specialized high schools in New York City.
The Hecht-Calandra Act requires that admissions to the specialized high schools be solely and exclusively determined by scores on the SHSAT, which is administered by the NYC Department of Education usually in late October/ early November every year. Nearly 30,000 students take the SHSAT for approximately 5,000 seats across 8 specialized high schools. The test is administered on campus at these schools. Obviously this year with the pandemic and particularly now with the increasing infection rates, in-person testing is infeasible and the DOE has not announced how it plans to administer the test.
The Mayor hinted at offering the SHSAT online at the weekly radio address last week. However, not every student has access to an adequate device or reliable internet connectivity, making the online option discriminatory. In addition to the inequitable access to the digital platform, many of our students are traumatized by the pandemic, having lost loved ones to the disease, facing a new economic reality resulting from parental job loss, or living with the anxiety of a parent who is an essential worker. These traumas disproportionately affect historically marginalized students.
Because the Mayor does not have the power to change the admissions to the specialized high schools, we call upon you to issue an Executive Order suspending the SHSAT this year and allowing the Chancellor of the NYC DOE to develop an alternative method of admissions to the specialized high schools. And given that our estimate of the costs for test administration is approximately $3 Million per year, suspending the SHSAT is also prudent in the face of the fiscal crisis. We believe this is the only equitable path forward.
Alliance for Quality Education
Class Size Matters
Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF)
Community Education Council District 14
Community Education Council District 16
Community Inclusion & Development Alliance
Education Council Consortium
EduColor
El Puente
Families for Real Equity in Education (FREE)
IntegrateNYC
Masa
MORE-UFT (Movement of Rank and File Educators)
NYC Kids PAC
NYC Opt Opt
S.E.E.D.S., Inc.
Teens Take Charge
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