Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his fellow progressives and socialists at City Hall, who often promise to change our politics and improve society, should direct some of that idealistic energy toward attacking the shameful, entrenched segregation of New York’s public schools. Specifically, they should end the use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test as the sole criteria for admission to Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Tech, and the Bronx High School of Science.
New Yorkers know a hustle when we see one, and the recent news that Stuyvesant offered admission to only three Black students this year is the latest example of a grotesquely obvious hijacking of public benefits, cynically disguised as a fair, merit-based outcome.
“We are being locked out. This is segregation,” Queens borough president (and pissed-off parent) Donovan Richards told me. “We often will say, ‘Let’s not perpetuate the same policy that we see Donald Trump doing at a federal level as he attacks diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ And yet here in New York City, three Black students out of 777 were accepted to Stuyvesant High School. Something is wrong. The laws of statistics even say something is wrong with this, and we need to fix it.”
An obvious solution would be to have educational professionals evaluate whether the SHSAT, which is not used by any other school district, is the best or only way to measure student ability. The multiple-choice test is enshrined as the sole basis for admission to Stuyvesant, Tech, and Bronx Science under a state law passed in 1971, which includes a vaguely worded requirement that a “scholastic examination” be used for admissions.
Pretending that the SHSAT is a solid, irreplaceably reliable standardized test is where the hustle starts. Defenders of the test often confuse and conflate the largely unvalidated SHSAT with the similar-sounding but entirely different, deeply researched Scholastic Aptitude Test used for college admissions.
“As someone who used to be responsible for managing the SHSAT contract for the DOE – it’s not a particularly strong or predictive test,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, a former deputy schools chancellor, said on social media back in 2018. “A multiple-measures approach that looks at both qualitative and quantitative data is long overdue.”
Jonathan James Taylor, who examined tens of thousands of SHSAT records for his Ph.D. dissertation about the exam, concluded that additional measures, like the state achievement tests administered to seventh-graders, enhance the ability to detect which students will thrive at specialized schools.
“The fact that the combination of SHSAT and achievement tests predicted better than either one alone suggests that the abilities they measure do not totally overlap. Clearly, multiple criteria are better than the SHSAT alone,” Taylor writes. “Middle-school grades may be the best predictor of all, because they measure a larger sample of student accomplishment across a wider range of domains, use a greater variety of assessment formats, and may also capture student motivation, study skills, and engagement in ways that standardized tests do not.”
“That admissions system is broken,” David Bloomfield, a professor of education leadership, law and policy, at CUNY, recently told Spectrum News. “It shouldn’t be based on a multiple-choice test that people can study for, for years, in order to get in. It selects for test prep; it doesn’t select for brightness.”
Supporters of the SHSAT often cynically pretend that paying for tutors to do a little extra preparation for the test would create an even playing field for Black and Latino kids. In reality, as many of the “concerned” advocates know, a cram-school industry sells intensive tutoring and test strategies to families for big bucks.
The lower end of the price for these schools is $7,000, and in some cases the extended family of a bright child organizes lots of relatives to chip in for tuition. I have met parents and children who spent every weekend, every vacation, and every summer — for years! — to get ready for the SHSAT. The operators of these schools are explicit about the product they are selling: entry to the specialized high schools.
Among other things, cram-school students learn strategies optimized for the famously quirky way SHSAT scores are calculated: As Taylor notes, the English and math portions are scored separately, then lumped together. “This procedure has the effect of giving an advantage to someone with an extremely high score on one portion and not very high on the other,” he writes. “For example, in 2005, a student with a math score in the 99th percentile and a verbal score in the 49th percentile was admitted to Stuyvesant, whereas one with a math score in the 97th percentile and verbal in the 92nd percentile was rejected.”
Parents, educators, admissions officers, and politicians have tussled for decades over whether standardized tests or a portfolio of schoolwork are the best measure of a student’s ability, and there’s an equally spirited debate over how to build a diverse, stimulating learning environment. (As weary admissions officers at Harvard regularly point out: Top schools could easily fill every class with kids who got perfect SAT scores, but it wouldn’t be a very good way to pick tomorrow’s leaders.) After a few years of making SATs optional for admissions, many universities have returned to requiring it as one of many measures.
The SHSAT is Exhibit A in the argument for mixing standardized tests with classroom performance, since most middle schools in the city don’t even teach the full range of concepts tested by the SHSAT. And as a writer who has taught journalism and political science at the college and graduate level for more than 20 years (at CUNY, Columbia, and NYU), I find it stunning that the English portion of the SHSAT includes no writing sample, something that was common on the validated, more respected SAT until 2021.
It’s fundamentally unfair to test kids on material that they’ve never been exposed to and laughable to pretend you can assess a teenager’s English skills without asking them to write a paragraph. It’s unwise to base admissions on a test with lopsided scoring that ranks a 99/49 math/English split higher than a more balanced and impressive 97/92 (which would you consider the better student?).
And we should all agree that expecting kids to sacrifice all their free time and thousands of dollars of family money to master a single test is not the best way to allocate important public-school resources.
The fortunate few students who squeeze through the testing gauntlet get access to a wonderful range of advanced-placement classes and foreign languages, taught by some of the best public-schools instructors anywhere, and get on the fast track to landing offers to some of the finest universities. Many of their parents, understandably, are fighting ferociously to keep the status quo in place. They enlist powerful public allies in the form of specialized high-school alumni who frequently lapse into heartfelt, irrelevant nostalgia about studying for the SHSAT decades ago.
As Mamdani, the council, and the state legislature wrestle with the need to lock in math and reading skills in the lower grades — the main job of public education — they should also end the scandal of its top high schools being racially segregated on the basis of a questionable test. “Here is a particular odd artifact from the 1970s that continues to determine the high-school destiny, if not the life destiny, of thousands of kids,” says Bloomfield.
As the socialists like to say: A better world is possible.
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