Illegal discrimination could be caused by the exam only, other things only (but revealed by the exam), or both the exam and other things.
The exam’s other characteristics, purposes, and ability to fulfill its purposes (e.g. is it to predict who will do well in the specialized high schools, and does it actually do a good job of that?) could also be questioned, although if the situation is racialized (which it appears to be), it could be difficult to assess these aspects without getting pulled back into racialized politics.
There could also be factors which may or may not be illegal discrimination that affect who applies for those schools and tries the exam in the first place.
It is very clear that Asian students are working harder to prepare. If you provided any other objective test, they would work harder for that. Nobody has any right at all to equal outcomes without at a minimum putting in equal effort.
If you push Blacks and Hispanics up in proportion to their population ratio, without pushing Asians and Jews down, there will be no non-Hispanic, non-Jews in the schools …
While I think you are right in theory, I do not think that the discrepency between number of hispanic & black students overall in the district vs. the number who sit for the SHSAT is necessarily indication of discrimination, simply because it is known that a larger percentage of those students are attending underperforming middle schools. That is in itself a problem, of course – but it does provide an explanation as to why a smaller fraction of the population is even taking the exam.
You’ve got the math wrong – my post isn’t about the number of blacks & hispanics in the district , but the numbers who sit for the exam. So if exam scores were randomly distributed among all people taking the exam – the 44% of the students offered spots would be black & hispanic; 31% would be Asian, and 18% would be white. You have to look at the chart at https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2019/03/19/by-the-numbers-new-york-citys-specialized-high-school-offers/ and compare the second row under “Tester Summary” (“Distribution of Testers by Ethnicity”) with the penultimate row under “Offer Summary” (“Distribution of Offers by Ethnicity”).
Only a small fraction of 8th and 9th grade students in NYC take the exam – that generally would be a self-selected group of students who believe themselves capable of scoring well.
There may be an array of other reasons to explain why the percentage of black/hispanic students who opt to take the test is only 2/3rds of their overall representation within the district, while that pattern is essentially reversed when comparing percentage of Asians + whites test-takers vs. overall students in the district— but that isn’t relevant to evaluating whether the test itself has become an instrument of discrimination.
I don’t see any data on the number of Jews within the district or sitting for the test – so I’m not sure what relevance that has, unless you have a source of data that I am not aware of. I’m not sure I understand your assertion in any case. NYC school data reflects 15% white. If whites were admitted to the exam schools only in direct proportion to their population ratio within the city schools, then that would be the number. Some of those students would undoubtedly be Jewish, but I’m not sure where you derive your apparent assertion that they all would be.
The disparities mentioned here for the entrance test for Stuy are not all that different from the SAT: For example, a combined score of 1300 or above on the SAT was received by:
13% of all students; 17% of white students; 36% of Asian students; 3% of Black students; 5% of Hispanic students
Even if we accept that all these standardized tests are discriminatory, wouldn’t students accepted via a holistic process still have to take exams in their classes? And be able to write a basic, coherent essay? How about professional exams like Praxis for teachers (yes - I am already hearing that these are discriminatory, but unlikely that they’ll go away)?
In NJ, the math requirement was raised in high school a few years ago. We actually noticed a slight improvement in performance in our entering college students. I teach math at a non-selective , diverse university with about 50% Pell grant recipients, where 80% of the students have a total SAT BELOW 1100. It’s not the standard world of most CC commentators. Increasing academic expectations among the URM students in K-12 is more likely to bear fruit in the long run than claiming bias in every single assessment instrument.
I saw a recent article on a student who reached his goal of going to Stuyvesant which was inspiring for me to see. I have never been one who likes only one criteria (SHSAT) to be accepted into a school, but getting the scores necessary to reach Stuyvesant are not impossible, but just very very hard. It is hard for me to say the system is discriminating when you look at the work and sacrifice that students are putting in to reach admittance into schools such as Stuyvesant.
The top high school in my state (Has been ranked as high 3rd in the nation in the last 5 years and was ranked 31st last year nationally by USNWR) selects 350 students a year by lottery (about 1200 students a year apply in 8th grade). While that school has diversity (44% Asian, 22% African American, 19% White, 10% Hispanic, and the remainder being of mixed race), we still see Asian students making up a large portion of the student body in area where 5-10% of the population is Asian and the student body of African Americans and Hispanic students make up a smaller portion of the student body than the population of the area feeding the school. At this great high school, underrepresented students leave the school at much higher rates and apply at much lower rates than the population in the area would suggest. It would be nice if we stopped blaming a test for problems that are occurring years beforehand within underrepresented populations and work to help them reach the same academic levels years before high school begins.
@calmom
Can you articulate for me exactly how the SHSAT is biased? The data doesn’t convince me, since there are all kinds of other explanations that can account for this. Does SHSAT include Chinese language or Indian geography or Korean history in it?
You could probably draw the Discovery Program kids from the poorest performing schools instead of the lowest income students. Is there a makeup day for the SHSAT if a kid is ill on the day of the test? Because the idea of one day, one test deciding a kid’s future makes me really squeamish.
I can see the dilemma here. Of course Asian families feel that other groups could also just prepare better for the test. There’s nothing to stop other groups from setting up the same kind of testing prep apparatus. My issue is that I don’t think it’s a healthy childhood to spend so much after school time on test prep. I don’t see easy solutions, until people stop putting just a few schools on a pedestal there will always be people trying to game the system to get into them.
Studying for a test isn’t gaming the system. There are plenty of things that I wouldn’t want my kids to spend their childhood doing, like playing football or baseball or doing ballet, but I wouldn’t accuse those things of being unfair (and they’re far more racialized than test prep). Besides, we’ve seen in this thread that the magnitude of test prep might be overstated. It’s probably not true that a majority of students at Stuyvesant “sacrificed” their childhoods for test prep or prepped so much that it could be considered unhealthy. I think it’s become a sort of racist caricature at this point.
And the changes to the Discovery program are exactly as you describe, because to explicitly discriminate against Asians would be definitely illegal. But there’s precedence in the US for using proxies for race to discriminate against Asians. See for example the Supreme Court case Yick Wo v. Hopkins where the city of San Francisco made a law against wooden laundry facilities to target the Chinese demographic.
I’m not saying it’s unfair. I’m saying it’s unhealthy. Gaming the system is doing perfectly legal stuff that up your odds. For example apparently in the case of the SHSAT that would be concentrating only on half the test.
That probably wouldn’t help as much as could be hoped. Middle schools cover larger geographic areas than elementary schools, but they all have honors programs which frequently have a higher proportion of Asian students. My D teaches seventh grade in a middle school in Brooklyn that is very heavily Hispanic and very, very poor. The honors program (one of her bridesmaids teaches honors math) is mostly Asian and very, very poor.
Too much of anything can be unhealthy. But I am not sure whether most attendees of such schools are actually studying too much (That would need to be defined). If my goal was to get into Stuyvesant and my only way to get there was to study a lot, then that is what needs to be done. I have spent my life watching people who say they want something, but will not put in the effort required to obtain it. For those students from low income backgrounds, putting in more work (studying/prepping for the SHSAT) is one way to overcome the cards that life has dealt them. For those low income Asian American students or students of any race who have worked hard and have reached that goal, what folks on this thread call gaming the system is anything but. It is another step on a path to a possible better life. Will people with more resources have an advantage? Yes. But they don’t have to have the advantage of working harder.
The fact that those middle schools with black and Latino students are underperforming may not necessarily be due to illegal discrimination, but it is not certain that illegal discrimination plays no part in why they are underperforming.
AFAIK, the only tracking NYC public schools do nowadays is Gifted & Talented district programs, G&T borough-wide schools, or G&T Citywide schools. My two kids are in a district G&T program at their Elementary school (they had to take the G&T test at age 4 to get in).
Calmom’s point is important. Looking at the chart linked in #223, about 44% of the test takers were black or latino. Yet less than 7% of the offers went to that group. Clearly, these are highly motivated students. They are likley students with good grades, but may also be students who do not have parents or a community that knows how the system works. They do not have access to or money for tutoring. Many of these kids go to schools that are clearly not teaching them what they need to know to do well on the SHSAT. Kids should NOT be required to spend countless hours outside of school preparing for a test that is administered by the district.
The dilemna is figuring out if kids that don’t do well on the test, have the background and ability to do well in the specialized high schools. Would these kids have done well enough on the SHSAT for admission if they had access to and support for high levels of tutoring? Are the kids that are accepted BECAUSE they had years of tutoring smarter or more capable than the kids that just missed the cutoff who had no tutoring? Do highly tutored kids do well in these HSs or do they just continue to get tutored?
I think it is easy to say the kids that go to tutoring are more deserving becaue they worked so hard, but kids that do slightly less well with no tutoring may actually be smarter and, if that is criterion, more deserving. Those kids may have overcome many more obstacles to simply do well in their middle schools. Yes, there are other good options, but this avenue should not be closed off.
It would be interesting to see if the kids that do less well are only doing slightly less well or if in fact there is a large gap. I can see making some allowances if there is a small difference but not if the difference is quite distinct.