City endorses legislative push to diversify elite high schools Chalkbeat New York - June 9, 2014) #Harlem/#WashingtonHeights Education in the News: Adriano Espaillat, New York City Department of Education EXCERPT: Chancellor Carmen Fariña backed a bill on Monday that would require the city’s specialized high schools to use more than a single test score as their student admissions criteria, an effort grounded in the administration’s desire to increase diversity within the eight schools and reduce the emphasis on testing. “As the Chancellor has said before, a student is more than the result of one exam,” Devora Kaye said in a statement. The endorsement comes just hours after state lawmakers unveiled a bill at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters that would allow the Specialized High School Admissions Test to count alongside attendance, class grades, and state exam scores in admissions decisions. It was also the first clear signal of how the city will move forward with de Blasio’s campaign promise to change the admissions standards, since de Blasio and Fariña have offered few details about preferred alternatives in their first months in office. “We cannot have a dynamic where some of our greatest educational options are only available to people from certain backgrounds,” de Blasio said in April. With just days left in the state legislative sessions, the efforts are mostly symbolic. Even the bill’s sponsor, Simcha Felder, who chairs the Senate’s New York City education subcommittee, acknowledged that passage might have a better chance next year. Critics of the single-test standard have long protested that smart students who don’t have access to high-quality elementary or middle schools, or who can’t afford pricey test-preparation programs, are at a disadvantage. And many of the specialized schools, including Stuyvesant High School and Staten Island Technical High School, are among the high schools that perennially serve the lowest number of black and Hispanic students in the city. The specialized high schools enroll relatively few black and Hispanic students, a racial gap that has widened at some of the schools in recent years. This year, 11 percent of offers to specialized schools went to black and Hispanic students, even though they represent nearly 70 percent of the city’s public school student population. At Stuyvesant High School, for instance, just 3 percent of seats were offered to black and Hispanic students. But the schools have many defenders who say the system is a bastion of egalitarianism. “The advantage of using the test is that it eliminates favoritism and offers every child in a simple way to get in,” said Larry Cary, president of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation, which opposes the legislation. A single-test admission system for the city’s specialized high schools has been used, and criticized, for decades. The admissions process for the city’s top two high schools was enshrined in state law in 1971, and lawmakers eventually added one more school, Brooklyn Technical. The city controls the admissions requirements at five of the city’s eight specialized high schools, but officials have said they are waiting for the state to change the law to move forward with their own policy changes. Fariña has said she has already been meeting with principals from the specialized high schools, an area of admissions policies that the administration most wants to change. The proposed legislation would require all eight schools to use a multiple-measure approach. A similar bill was introduced two years ago, but never won support from the Bloomberg administration. Union officials also called on the city to pour money into a summer program to better prepare disadvantaged students who traditionally struggle on the exam. On Monday, UFT President Michael Mulgrew noted that the change would shift the admissions systems similar to those at top high schools nationwide. “If it’s good enough for Harvard and Yale, it should be good enough for the students of New York City,” Mulgrew said. “The idea that we are the anomaly in this country, where we use one single exam as the only criteria for … whether they get into these schools or not, is wrong.” A backlash against testing has spurred some of the most recent criticism. Adriano Espaillat, a state senator running for Congress, said he sponsored the bill because the SHSAT was part of a “high-stakes testing model” that caused too much stress for families and children.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:58:41 +0000
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