According to David Bloomfield, a professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, no one really knows what the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT)used to decide who is accepted into eight of New York City’s elite public high schools actually measures. Why? Because the test has never been formally evaluated. The test, which by state law is the only way to become eligible for admission to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, has never undergone a public vetting process to determine if it accurately identifies students who will do well in an accelerated academic program. Sample questions are available online at Chalkbeat.
Testing standards developed by three leading professional educational research organizations, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education, specify that a test like this one is only a valid indicator of student performance if the test has been formally tested itself.
And guess who designed New York City’s controversial elite high school admissions test without demonstrating any proof of its validity? I bet you already know. Pearson, the company famous for producing an eighth-grade reading test passage about a race between a hare (rabbit) and a pineapple. The hare won the race and Pearson lost that testing contract! However, it still has a $13.4 million, six-year deal to produce the SHSAT test. A spokesman for Pearson refused to answer questions about the test and referred a New York Times reporter to the city’s Education Department.
A federal civil rights complaint, pending since 2012, charges that the SHSAT and the entire process for admission to elite New York City schools is invalid and racially discriminatory because one factor, a suspect test, does not truly determine a students capacity to perform in high school and college. Black and Latino students make up about ten percent of the student population at the specialized high schools, but they are almost seventy percent of the city’s student population.
In 2013 New York City hired an independent firm to evaluate the test but it has never released the results. Critics charge that all the SHSAT really measures is whether students took expensive test preparation classes.
An independent review, conducted by Jonathan Taylor, a research analyst at Hunter College, raised serious questions about the test’s validity. Taylor found that the highest scorers on the test did well at the specialized high schools, but overall, a student’s seventh-grade class average was a better indicator of performance at one of the specialized schools than their SHSAT scores.
Part of the problem is that New York City rations seats at its specialized schools, limiting admission to about 5,000 students a year, so passing scores vary from year to year. The city has never established what score actually qualifies a student to do advanced work or demonstrated that the test schools have a special curriculum that only selected students are capable of completing. Students who might qualify one year are denied admission the next. Students who might benefit from a “special curriculum” are denied the opportunity to learn.
New York City’s Mayor and School Chancellor are calling for a reevaluation of the admission process to specialized high schools. They propose a mixture of school grades with state test scores to select the top eighth-graders from each New York City’s middle school. They argue this would be a fairer admission process and lead to a more diverse student body at the specialized high schools where the student population is currently overwhelmingly Asian and white.
While it would require rewriting state law to change admission requirements to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, the city can change the way it admits students to the five other test schools, Brooklyn Latin, Staten Island Tech, American Studies at Lehman College, High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, and Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, without state approval.
In an admittedly a small sample measuring the validity of the Specialized High School Admissions Test, my younger brother and I (Bronx Science), and my son (Stuyvesant), all passed their test, I attended from 1964 to 1967, and none of us did particularly well at the schools.
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