A plan to increase diversity at NYC’s elite specialized high schools
http://gothamist.com/2016/06/09/specialized_high_schools_diversity.php
So much for the Deep South being the poster child of racial segregation…
A good use of public money? Or would $15 million be better spent improving conventional public schools?
Good use, IMHO.
The article alludes to the problem, and that is especially for Stuyvesant, there is a huge industry of test prep to get kids into the school, to pass the exam with high enough marks to get in. Many of the kids getting in there are from well off families who want their kid to go to Stuyvesant, whose kids generally end up getting into top notch schools. Well off parents spend a ton of money to help their kids get in, and in the Asian community in NYC it is a combination of family efforts, plus there also are community groups in these communities that offer test prep. The other disadvantage that the article doesn’t mention is that in the lower grades, black and hispanic kids are underrepresented in g and t programs and getting into the better schools, so they often are coming from schools that don’t help them much as well.
Basically, they are trying to level the playing field to give kids who don’t have the school programs or family income or whatnot to have a chance of getting in. I think this isn’t a bad idea, it is a lot better than what Diblasio’s schools chancellor proposed, getting rid of the exams and making it a lottery kind of thing, that one went over like a lead balloon for obvious reasons.
“Basically, they are trying to level the playing field to give kids who don’t have the school programs or family income or whatnot to have a chance of getting in. I think this isn’t a bad idea”
I’m a little confused. Is this a program that provides 15 million for test prep to poor students, or just Black and Hispanic ones? What about wealthy students? Can they partake if they have the appropriate skin color, or do they have to be poor?
I’m not particularly enthused about spending huge amounts of money on test prep, because education is far more than that. So you prep people well enough to pass the entry test, and what then? If kids are starting out with a far worse education, will they be able to keep up? It seems like a waste to just prep for passing a test, unless they’re spending a lot of time educating the children, too. What happens if you enter one of these top schools far behind? Do you magically catch up, or do you feel overwhelmed?
even if the schools wind up being 100% asian if those are the students who most deserve to get in so be it. as long as there is not a program in place to discriminate against non asian students. just because black,non hispanic whites and “hispanics” are “under” represented does not mean it is wrong… just like what the ivy leagues do with asian applicants is just wrong in my humble opinion…until asian parents/students/future students become vocal and start blocking the administration offices and admissions office with sit ins and marches, it will stay status quo and I think that most asian americans who would be effected are not of the mind set to become aggressive like that so it will not change.same in NYC unless asian parents and students in NYC make a stand (which many feel uncomfortable about doing…they will start getting pushed out at the NYC elite public’s)
If they want to spend money to prepare the kids for the test, I have no problems with it. But is that test prep only open to black and hispanic students, or will any student, including Asians and whites, be allowed to take advantage of it? That’s where your problems are going to come from. What this and similar programs fail to address is the emphasis the families place on quality education. Many Asian families give up a lot for their children in order to assure them a quality education. Are the other parents going to support their kids in the same way? Until they do, you won’t see similar results or have a ‘level playing field.’
Stuy is ranked #4. Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County, VA, is #1. TJ claims to use a “holistic” admissions process (with certain minimums in GPA and test scores). Still, they are also majority Asian.
80 years ago colleges were desperate to lower the percentage of Jewish students enrolled. There were higher GPA requirements for Jewish students in many cases, or simply a max quota of Jewish students. I also read that the legacy hook was instituted to favor the children of non-Jewish alumni.
Analogous?
Both my kids went to TJ (and I went to Bronx Science). Nothing that has been tried at TJ has worked to increase non-Asian and non-white enrollment. In the end, a hunger to succeed and money will best any tweaking of the admissions process. Only an outright racial quota will guarantee minority enrollment.
I think there is a real risk that offering test prep courses (but no other academic enrichment) to black and Hispanic NYC kids could lead to kids getting into the exam schools and then being unable to succeed there.
Based on my experience in a different community that has selective-entry high school programs:
Typically (though not always), Asian applicants to these programs specifically prepare for the test, either through a formal course or through parent-supervised review of publicly available past exams. These kids also participate in many academic enrichment activities, including summer programs, tutoring (even if they’re not doing poorly in a subject), and parent-assigned homework in the summers to ensure that they don’t fall behind academically during the long vacation. And if these kids get in to the selective-entry programs, they usually do fine, presumably because of their excellent academic preparation, including a lot of time and effort spent on academics outside of school.
Typically (though not always), non-Asian applicants to these programs do little or no test prep. They also participate in few if any academic enrichment activities. And if these kids get in to the selective-entry programs, they usually do fine, presumably because they have what it takes to wing it based on what they learn in school alone, even without outside academic preparation.
Now what happens if you provide test prep to a student who does not have access to the other academic enrichment resources that Asian families usually provide for their kids? Would you end up sending students to the exam schools who don’t fall into either of the categories that I just described? And would the kids be unable to succeed?
I wonder if this policy would withstand a lawsuit, if a poor white or asian plaintiff could be found. Any lawyers out there?
From reading the articles on it, it will be targeted at school districts that are generally under represented at the elite schools, I doubt very much it is targeted at specific racial groups,but the result likely will end up targeting them, since the schools in question likely are mostly black and hispanic. If a kid goes to the school in question, they likely will be able to use the program, and I suspect that it is more about economic disparity than race in admissions.
The problem with admissions to schools like stuyvesant and the like is that economics plays a big role in getting into the school, a lot of the kids who get into there went to expensive private schools, or lived in upper income districts that had things like G and T programs if they went to public school and the family themselves had the resources to spend on test prep and the like to get them in there. Despite popular myth, these days a lot of the Asian kids going to Stuyvesant are not what they were 30 years ago, many of them come from families that are upper middle income, these aren’t the children of recent immigrants who then were working in sweat shops and restaurants and such that they once were, so economics is playing a role with many of the students there (a friend of my son’s at Juilliard pre college went there, her father was the head of neurology at a major teaching hospital). It would be interesting is Stuyvescant and other programs published a profile on the families of the kids in there, median income and so forth, I suspect a lot of people would be surprised if they did publish it.
How much is $15 million? Is it big in the scheme of things?
The last time NYC offered free test prep only to black & hispanic kids, parents sued.
According to this other NYT article, it’s poor immigrant families that really push their kids to get into these schools, as a stepping stone out of poverty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissions-test-highlights-a-racial-divide.html?_r=0
49% of Stuy students qualify for free/reduced lunch. The upper income families put their kids in private prep schools for HS.
Then they better spend even much more to help them keep up at Stuyvesant. To get in requires very hard work and stay in requires much much more hard work.
I guess, the rest of population at Stuyvesant is not entitled to any help.Many of them are from poor Asian families. They continue relying only themselves and this is the only approach that has worked and continue working…all the way to graduating from whatever the highest education they could obtain, while some parents are not only poor, they speak poor English or none at all and some do not even drive the car. I have witnessed many in medical school class. Surprise - population of this class was also predominantly Asian, just like at Stuyvesant. None of them were help by the government…
As a reference, my granddaughter is at Stuyvesant and my D. just graduated from the medical school. The similarities of ethnicity at these 2 very selective academic institutions are amazing!!
I think the money could be better used to help those students get into college or offer tutoring services for high school courses, no? This makes getting into a selective high school the end goal whereas I think a more effective use of the money would be to help those students who are having trouble with the course material itself or to offer services for students who are first-generation and have never applied to college before. Or heck even offer a mentoring or support program with peer ad visor for students that normally come from underrepresented or low income backgrounds. I don’t know how i feel about these resources being used to help students take a test effectively to get into a single high school, what about the people that get left behind? Are the skills transferable to other areas of their life?
There are a lot of reasons why these targeted students are not currently passing the entrance exams which can’t be fixed by simply prepping them to pass the entrance exams.
@marian:
I think you make a valid point. One of the problems with the specialized high schools is that admissions is based strictly on how you do on the admissions test, by NY State law they cannot take into consideration other factors…which does raise the question, so assuming that test prep gets these kids to where they get a high enough score on the exam, will they be able to do the work? The well off kids I was talking about have often gone to elite private schools or have because their parents are good at working the system, get into G and T programs or schools like the Hunter School plus they do a lot of test prep. First of all, by basing it strictly on a written admissions test, you are making it eminantly gameable, which favors those with resources. Those kids doing summer enrichment programs, the extra tutoring, test prep, have the resources, financial and family, to be able to do those things, but they also likely have gone to good schools so they can handle the load there. I too have concerns about focusing only on the test prep, that they also need to look at whether the kid can do the work. It reminds me of when they made the misguided decision back in the 1970’s to make admission to the senior City colleges, including CCNY, open to anyone with a high school degree, at CCNY, which is the flagship school known for its science and engineering program, it was a disaster (I hear these days that Diblasio and Cuomo have managed, where these schools have rebuilt their reputations, especially CCNY, have starved it financially to the point where they can barely function)…
I think the program will be legal if it is based around socioeconomic factors and not race. The city has a similar problem with the G and T programs, there is a whole cottage industry around getting the kids of well off families into the programs.
About 37% of Stuy students get free/reduced price lunches, a marker for low SES. This is lower than NYC as a whole, but is far higher than a typical upper-middle class school.
https://projects.propublica.org/schools/schools/362058002877
When I was a kid, there was a prep program that lasted all through middle school for students of color to develop the skills to apply to and succeed at the specialized schools. That actually worked well because even the kids who didn’t quite make it into the schools (or chose not to attend), had made huge strides that would serve them well anywhere. However, the race element was contested and the program had to be changed. By the time my kid was in middle school, there was an ad hoc arrangement of prep paid for out of council members’ discretionary funding, and neither race nor SES was a factor. My daughter did the year-long program, was accepted at Stuyvesant and was able to make a different choice because she was a “one percenter” that year. That program didn’t really work and petered out pretty quickly. I do think it’s a problem, Staten Island Tech has had zero black admittees in a given year several times recently. I’m not a giant fan of separating people out by race with the use of public dollars, but I, personally, perceive this be a big problem and fully support spending even more than this to create a large-scale program to help children of color get into and succeed in these schools. The reason I support that in this instance is that admissions has become a very hardball, aggressive industry in NYC, almost thuggish in some ways, and kids who aren’t part of the machine can easily be ground up and spit out. It’s one thing to say “pass the test,” but it’s another thing for poor kids of color without the clout and unification of purpose to be able to compete with products of that machine.