New York to remove test-based policy for selective public high school admissions
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The Mayor is intent on dropping the driver's license test also since some people don't pass it. Its only fair. Why should only the people that studied and practiced get to pass?
Basically it is a way to admit fewer Asian kids but more black and Hispanic kids.
The Specialized High Schools that require the SHSAT are:
Bronx High School of Science
Brooklyn Latin School
Brooklyn Technical High School
High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College
High School for American Studies at Lehman College
Queens High School for Sciences at York College
Staten Island Technical High School
Stuyvesant High School
The specialized high school reform proposal that Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Sunday triggered an outcry in the Chinese community. Hundreds of Chinese, as well as people from other communities who support the current test-based admission policy, gathered near City Hall on June 5 to protest. Participants say the mayor’s plan would destroy the specialized high school system which is based on rigorous academic instruction. Many academically competitive children would lose the opportunity to receive an education that fits their needs. And many Chinese families may leave New York to seek better educational options for their children.
Ok, let me fix this for you.
Live in New York City and there is already an active thread in that forum on this matter. In fact don't see why a thread was begun in this forum, as it is strictly a local government matter.
New York City is *NOT* removing, changing or whatever the SHSAT exam because mayor does *NOT* have that authority. That lies upstate in Albany with the governor and state legislature, both have said nothing will happen this year, and any changes will be debated sometime in 2019.
Meanwhile governor and entire state legislature are up for re-election in November so who knows who will be around next year.
Finally the governor of NYS and mayor of NYC do not get along (and that is putting it mildly). They have been at each other's throats for better part of four years, so don't see Albany doing this mayor any favors.
Okay I will offer my 2 cents because I actually know something about this, though I fully expect it to be ignored because P&OC. LOL.
I was raised in NYC and attended one of the specialized high schools in the 80s. At the time I went, My school was 25% black and 20% Latino maybe (Tech forever! LOL). It had been that way for decades and would remain that way for a long time, until...
The aftermath of No Child Left Behind. Why? Well when I was in school, every public elementary school had a gifted class, whether it was a school in the "hood" or not. Classes were grouped by ablility level which was determined by the teachers. So if you were tracked into the SP class (or "1" class) you were given an accelerated curriculum and you stayed at level in the following grade as long as you did the work. At middle school, there were "SP" tracks not in every middle school but in enough so that no matter where you lived there was one you could get to by public transportation.
The end result was by the time you go to the 8th grade, there were kids all over NYC who were prepared to take the SHAST because they had been receiving an advanced education for years.
When NCLB was implemented, Mayor Bloomberg and his appointee (I forgot his name) did away with the gifted classes in every school. They changed it to a model where there were gifted schools you had to apply to and many were way outside certain neighborhoods. Plus, not there were less gifted slots available under the new structure. Resources went to the lowest performing students so to help them score proficcent level in state exams. Plus, the new Common Core currculum did not include some of the topics on the SHAST, so you really had to 1. know it was on there and 2. study it outside of school to score high on the test.
As soon as the kids who came up under the old structure washed out of the system, the black and latino numbers started dropping. There were no longer large numbers of kids from every neighborhood getting an accelerated education in K-8, makng them unprepared for the test.
Basically now your kid has to be in a high performing school from jump OR you have to have your child studying for hours outsde of school basically through most of middle school (usually through some kind of for-profit test prep entity) - something immigrant parents have been doing for decades - in order to have a shot at qualifying. But if a smart kid doesn't have savvy parents who know all this, the kid is out of luck.
This diversity problem at the elite highschols are caused by the lack of a gifted track in the public pipeline. The mayor is trying to solve it by changng the entrance criteria when he really needs to fix K-8 education instead. Holding the smart kids back is biting everyone in the arse. Now only smart kids blessed with savvy parents have a shot.
Not to mention there are way too few public advanced hign school slots in NYC anyway. But that's a larger discussion.
I think there is one very important fact that people are overlooking.
THIS IS ABOUT PUBLIC MONEY FOR PUBLIC USE, THUS THE USE OF THE MONEYS THAT WOULD OTHERWISE GO TO THE DISCUSSED PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS CAN & SHOULD BE USED FOR AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE & ENERGY EFFICIENT PUBLIC TRANSIT, which would be good for the economy when directed toward the business & commercial districts, as well as overall environmentally.
I think there is one very important fact that people are overlooking.
THIS IS ABOUT PUBLIC MONEY FOR PUBLIC USE, THUS THE USE OF THE MONEYS THAT WOULD OTHERWISE GO TO THE DISCUSSED PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS CAN & SHOULD BE USED FOR AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE & ENERGY EFFICIENT PUBLIC TRANSIT, which would be good for the economy when directed toward the business & commercial districts, as well as overall environmentally.
What the h*ll are you talking about?
New York City like every other urban area has many pots of money to pull for education, and spends more than any other similar sized (by population) city in the country.
The MTA/New York City Transit is a hot mess (this despite many, many *MANY* revenue streams besides fare box; up to and including a vast and bewildering array of taxes, surcharges and fees.
Problem with transit in New York City is what it always has been; political interference. No one wants fares to approach anywhere near what they ought to be to bring in needed revenue.
Balance of your post makes no kind of sense and obviously does not apply to NY state or city.
Publicly funded schools should be open to any and all person residing within the district boundaries.
My state requires it and it is extremely good that they do. Before it was required there was a clear relationship between, canvassing and successful application. And even then the districts had to be forced to make the required lotteries more public and more open.
The result? any kid who applies can win a seat through random lottery. The reality is that most Parents who have bright kids that are willing to work apply and parents who are not interested or whose kids would find it too challenging don't apply or don't accept the position when they get it.
that is the reality of an open system. And let me be clear my district's "lottery" school consistently places in the top 10 to 50 high schools in the entire united states. Thus completely crushing the lie that opening the school to all pupils will destroy it.
To be clear, my local lottery based High School finishes in the top 1-50 public high schools in the USA, and does that without being able to "select" their students. any kid can put their name in the hat and they have been doing that for many years....
I agree with pretty much everything you have said in this post. However, is there a link to some sort of information proving that your claims about your local high school is legitimate. I only ask because I don't know you, nor do I know where you are from, so there is no way for me to confirm this information for myself. I do know that the "lottery" schools in my area tend to post better results each year than normal high schools, and I live near Raleigh, NC. But without knowing where you live, I have no way to check the validity of your statement for myself.
I agree with pretty much everything you have said in this post. However, is there a link to some sort of information proving that your claims about your local high school is legitimate. I only ask because I don't know you, nor do I know where you are from, so there is no way for me to confirm this information for myself. I do know that the "lottery" schools in my area tend to post better results each year than normal high schools, and I live near Raleigh, NC. But without knowing where you live, I have no way to check the validity of your statement for myself.
The New York City specialized high schools are not like lottery/charter schools. They administer a test to the whole school district. Just to give you the scale, the whole city school district for NYC is 1.1 million students in over 1,700 separate schools...it is by far the largest school system in the country.
The nine public specialized high schools draw from this pool of students based on standardized test (SHSAT) with around 6,000 slots every year. Majority of the students in these specialized schools are actually from Asian poor/working poor families.
New York City like every other urban area has many pots of money to pull for education, and spends more than any other similar sized (by population) city in the country.
The MTA/New York City Transit is a hot mess (this despite many, many *MANY* revenue streams besides fare box; up to and including a vast and bewildering array of taxes, surcharges and fees.
Problem with transit in New York City is what it always has been; political interference. No one wants fares to approach anywhere near what they ought to be to bring in needed revenue.
Balance of your post makes no kind of sense and obviously does not apply to NY state or city.
What does not make sense?
The money going to those specialized schools are already public money; money that could be well spent on making public transportation toward the commercial districts affordable, accessible & energy efficient.
What's so radical & controversial about that?
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