{"id":958257,"date":"2026-07-25T11:57:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T11:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/958257\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T11:57:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T11:57:19","slug":"time-to-end-the-test-that-grotesquely-segregates-nyc-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/958257\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to End the Test That Grotesquely Segregates NYC Schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n Photo: Bing Guan\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

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\u2019s public schools<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers know a hustle when we see one, and the recent news<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are being locked out. This is segregation,\u201d Queens borough president (and pissed-off parent) Donovan Richards told me. \u201cWe often will say, \u2018Let\u2019s not perpetuate the same policy that we see Donald Trump doing at a federal level as he attacks diversity, equity, and inclusion.\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0The 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 \u201cscholastic examination\u201d be used for admissions.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who used to be responsible for managing the SHSAT contract for the DOE – it\u2019s not a particularly strong or predictive test,\u201d Shael Polakow-Suransky<\/a>, a former deputy schools chancellor, said on social media back in 2018. \u201cA multiple-measures approach that looks at both qualitative and quantitative data is long overdue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jonathan James Taylor, who examined tens of thousands of SHSAT records for his Ph.D. dissertation<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Taylor writes. \u201cMiddle-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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat admissions system is broken,\u201d David Bloomfield, a professor of education leadership, law and policy, at CUNY, recently told Spectrum News<\/a>. \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t select for brightness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cconcerned\u201d advocates know, a cram-school industry sells intensive tutoring and test strategies to families for big bucks.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 for years! \u2014\u00a0to get ready for the SHSAT. The operators of these schools are explicit<\/a> about the product they are selling: entry to the specialized high schools.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThis 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,\u201d\u00a0he writes. \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ability, and there\u2019s 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\u2019t be a very good way to pick tomorrow\u2019s leaders.) After a few years of making SATs optional for admissions, many universities have returned to requiring it as one of many measures.<\/p>\n

The SHSAT is Exhibit A in the argument for mixing standardized tests with classroom performance, since most middle schools in the city don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fundamentally unfair to test kids on material that they\u2019ve never been exposed to and laughable to pretend you can assess a teenager\u2019s English skills without asking them to write a paragraph. It\u2019s 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?).<\/p>\n

And we should all agree that expecting kids to sacrifice all their free time and\u00a0thousands of dollars of family money to master a single test is not the best way to allocate important public-school resources.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Many 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.<\/p>\n

As Mamdani, the council, and the state legislature wrestle with the need to lock in math and reading skills in the lower grades \u2014 the main job of public education \u2014 they should also end the scandal of its top high schools being racially segregated on the basis of a questionable test. \u201cHere 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,\u201d says Bloomfield.<\/p>\n

As the socialists like to say: A better world is possible.<\/p>\n

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