Any school that relies largely on standardized test scores for admission is going to end up with racially skewed admissions. The tests themselves have a baked-in bias.
Please explain how you feel they have a racial bias.
The data on the tests themselves show economic and racial disparities in scores.
@hebegebe and @calmom that is actually the mystery. Where I live (large Northeastern city where the school district is a little over 40% African American), the most sought-after academic magnet school relies solely on behavioral records, 7th grade grades and state standardized test scores so it’s totally merit-based and there is no affirmative action component. If you meet the requirements, you get in. Even with test scores being a litmus (if you get over a certain percentile rank, you’re in), they still manage to enroll 30% African American students which is why the case of NYC is so curious (and Boston Latin, too). When I looked into it, it seems that the bias stems from the fact that admissions is based solely on one test which parents have to sign up for separately (they don’t use state tests that all students take). You have to apply to take the test. Additionally, many parents pay for test prep which isn’t as much of a thing here. When you leave identification of talented students to the devices of their families who can game the system, whether or not a student shows up for the test at all or shows up test prepped to the gills becomes an important factor. In families where it’s not a tradition to attend top schools or where roots at the neighborhood schools run deep, you just have a lot fewer students being identified. Here, a lot of talented students attend not so great schools because it’s where their whole family went to school back to the grandparents. IF their scores are high, though, the guidance counselor in middle school would see that and refer them for a magnet. I have read that if NYC replaced the admission test with results from state standardized tests, enrollment of African American and Latino students would go up a lot. Right now they make up 70% of the district’s student population but only 10% of special admission schools’ population. DiBlasio has talked about switching to state tests.
One of the common problems with state tests is that they have very low ceilings, making it impossible to distinguish good from excellent. For example, the Massachusetts MCAS is really useless at the top end.
This is why talent searches like SET and Davidson use tests with very high ceilings for the respective age group, in their cases SAT tests before age 13. That is how they can determine who meets their criteria, which is roughly top 0.1%.
It is clear that the SHSAT has a high ceiling, because it is able to sufficiently discriminate between Students who qualify for Stuy, vs. those who qualify for Bronx Science, etc.
That could mean a biased test, or different levels of talent among the groups taking the test, or a combination of both. To determine which case it is, we can just look at the topics on the SHSAT: Math and English
Mathematics, and learning mathematics, doesn’t remotely have anything to do with race. English on the other hand clearly favors people for whom English is their first language, and so in racial terms would favor White and Black students, and disfavor many Hispanic and Asian students. So @calmom, are you suggesting an admissions bump for Hispanic and Asian students?
Turning to SES, Stuy has 37% of its students qualify for free or reduced price lunches. So it skews somewhat wealthier than NYC as a whole, which is 49%. But nobody would confuse Stuy’s student body with that of a wealthy suburban school. If you wanted to adjust cutoffs by parental SES, I doubt the student body composition would change much.
The under performance on standardized testing and under representation at magnet schools of URMs is the norm rather than the exception throughout all parts of the USA.
I’m curious how/why the magnet school you keep on raving about is different than all the other magnet schools across the nation. Does it heavily weight school grades?
For SHSAT schools, state testing is not the answer. The increase in URM representation when using state testing was minor. I suspect that even this slight improvement is a fluke. It’s because most kids don’t try on the state tests. If the state tests mattered, then the kids who try on the SHSAT would also try on the state tests. There was another analysis that you might be referring. It heavily weighted school grades and lowered the weight of standardized testing, which is similar to having a quota for each school in the district.
The terrible performance of URMs on the NYC state test indicates that it is not lack of participation in the SHSAT test that keeps URMs out of SHSAT schools.
What makes it have a high ceiling?
@calmom posting from California, you may not understand the current demographics of the magnet schools in NYC. Yes, there are a LOT of Asian kids. But that is not solely due to SES differences. There are many many kids there who did their homework diligently and for hours, while inhaling dry cleaning fumes in the back of the store where the their parents were working. There are the children of Chinatown waiters, and green grocers. Lots of first gen Asians are poor, just as poor as hispanic families. The ones that come from families that stress that their job is to study, the ones who understand that they are paying back the sacrifices of their parents by succeeding, are the ones who make it to schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.
@ChangeTheGame has explained the role he believers family plays in student success, and I agree. I am sorry that not everyone had parents who have bigger dreams for them - mine didn’t so I know what that’s like - but I think of some kid who has done everything that’s been asked of them for years, studing instead of playing or hanging out or having a job for pocket money or playing a sport they liked instead of one that the parents thought valuable…and I also feel bad for them, if they know that they were qualified, but denied a place because of their race, because too many kids of their race are just TOO qualified, for some larger, social-engineering scheme put forth by white people like Bill DeBlasio, to make themselves feel better about about themselves. I’d like to see Bill DeBlasio personally take the test scores for admission, hand each child their score, and then count heads and move each group of each color over into the “admitted” line. I’d like to make him look in the face of those long hours of study. I mean, unless someone is suggesting that Asians are genetically more intelligent, the disparity reflects the cumulative effect of many hours, even years, of study. Yes, even if you “prepped” for the test - prepping means sitting in your butt and doing math problems for hours. None of it is magic, no one is eating popcorn and sticking out their hand to receive the gift of a great test score. Some of these kids may very well have endured abuse to get to where they are. You can’t paint over all that with a brush and call it “fairness” or “equity”.
Differences by race/ethnicity appear to mostly reflect differences in parental educational attainment, which tends to strongly correlate to kids’ educational attainment.
The Asian American population has a large percentage of recent immigrants and their first generation American kids. 50% of Chinese and 70% of Indian immigrants have bachelor’s degrees, due to strong selective pressures imposed by the immigration system (favoring skilled workers and PhD students), so these immigrants and their descendants are a highly selected subset of their race/ethnicity. (For comparison, about 30% of non-immigrant American adults have bachelor’s degrees; bachelor’s degree attainment in China and India is considerably lower.)
On the other hand, the reverse is the case for immigration from Mexico, where only about 6% have bachelor’s degrees (considerably lower than in Mexico).
For African American people, educational attainment has been suppressed for generations, and we are not very far in terms of generations from de jure segregated schools that were meant to hoard most of the educational resources and quality for white students, and resegregation has been occurring as described earlier.
So we continue to discuss that there are cultural differences that explain varying levels of achievement on test scores, what schools/colleges kids get in to, and just overall success in life.
We still can’t seem to solve the “fairness” issue. As it relates to the NYC great magnet schools, Harvard, whatever, there just aren’t enough spots.
It seems like when, using a broad brush, we compare the extremes it comes down to:
Overachieving Asians who, yes, work their butts off and should be rewarded with opportunities VS. African Americans…whose communities are being stereotyped more negatively (which isn’t fair to do for the children of those communities, IMO, who did not get to pick where they live or who their parents are).
I realize there are lots of exceptions to this rule, but for argument’s sake, let’s just leave it at comparing these two groups.
Who deserves the spot more?
The black kid who did well enough (in that non-academically focused upbringing) in school and studied (albeit maybe not has hard as his Asian peers, but he studied and wasn’t just sitting around eating “popcorn”) to get himself on the board to even be considered for admission OR the Asian overachieving kid who grew up (albeit some inhaling dry cleaning fumes) in an environment where academics were the main focus?
I think we could argue this point either way…there just aren’t enough spots. But if we have some racial groups that aren’t ever included at all, that could end up being far worse for society, no? Not saying it has to be exactly based on percentages of population (I don’t think anyone is), but if we change policies that result in one group or two groups or any number of groups being completely excluded, that might not be a good thing in my opinion. But I really don’t know the answer.
One thing I am sure of though is going to a system that only relies on test scores will NOT solve this problem.
A test has a high ceiling when the problems become progressively difficult to the point where very few people get a perfect score. If the problems become difficult enough that nobody gets a perfect score, the ceiling is infinitely high.
The SHSAT has an infinitely high ceiling meaning that nobody has ever gotten a perfect score. Out of a maximum of 800 points, scores above 700 are very rare. These types of tests are very useful in discriminating among the top scorers, which the SHSAT needs to do in order to determine which top scorers qualify for which schools.
@ucbalumnus I would question the assertion that differences innpatental educational attainment being the reason for the success of Asian students. If 50% of recent Asian immigrants have a bachelors degree, and Asian immigrants represent 5% of the population, AND what youclaim is true, then we are only talking about 2.5% Asian representation in the elite school populations due to parental educational attainment. If that were the case, no one would say that that there was an over representation problem. If that is your argument, then what does it mean? people should be represented in all populations in the same proportion that they are present in the national demographics? Talent or achievement aside? I mean, the Asian kid in the back of the dry cleaners didn’t pick his parents either. I didn’t pick mine. My son would like to be a professional basketball player, but unfortunately he isn’t very good at basketball. Or very tall. But he didn’t get to pick tall parents. What I mean is, sure, different kids have different opportunities and maybe a lot of that has to do with who your parents are, how you were brought up, what opportunities you had for training or enrichment, the encouragement you received…but you can’t make everything “fair” because the inputs are so very varied. You can’t take inner city kids away from their parents and put them in boarding schools to give them a better chance (as Arne Duncan actually suggested) becausenit has been tried before by the Canadianngivernment on the native americans there, and the Australian government with the aboriginals, and it was decided that that was a VERY BAD THING. So you can’t take kids out of a less than ideal environment. You also can’t assume that whiteness or Asian-ness automatically confers a blessed childhood free from hunger and full of encouragement and positive reinforcement. Everyone has their trials. The ones who make it past a certain finish line with a certain amount of achievement should all be celebrated and allowed to continue on to the next level. I’m not Asian, but I am really resistant to the idea of trying to Asian-proof the admissions requirements. The 5 magnet schools in my county attract a lot of very qualified kids, all of whom get free transportation BTW; Asians are way over represented at 2 or 3 of them, and virtually not present at all at the other two, basically because those two schools focus on areas that Asian parents probably don’t deem worth pursuing. Fair to the kids? I don’t know. Maybe some Asian kids would really like to study Marine biology or Communications. Tough luck there. My daughter went to one and the education was so shockingly different and better than our “good” district. But part of the reason is the selectivity. The kids were SMART and NICE. The teachers were happy. There were no long-running contract disputes with teachers refusing to do this or that, wearing red shirts in protest…it was all so different from the grudging union-factory model in our “good” district. The school culture marginalized high acheiving kids. The popular kids were quite happy to stay put, while the “nerds” were all happy in their “nerd school” together. This is actual experience, and my daughters words. Deliberately mixing in some kids who aren’t prepared, who aren’t at the same level as the other kids, would be tricky at best. Hopefully they could catch up quickly, but it would have the potential of undermining the mission of the school to have a two-tier system. I don’t know the answer to equalizing opportunities; I do know it isn’t fair to stop a kid at the finish line and say “too many people from your team have already crossed. Now we let the other teams get some medals”.
I think people should stop thinking in terms of race. There are kids with parents who don’t care about their education of every race. Same for kids with parents who care about their education. Race is a very shallow metric. In practice, the majority of race-based affirmative action goes to the privileged kids.
As for who (kids with parents who care vs. kids without parents who care) “deserves” the spot more, the unfortunate reality is that the kids who start out with a lower knowledge base usually never catch up. Choosing for disadvantage is in direct conflict with choosing for the best minds of the country.
It’s not all that bad for kids with parents that don’t care about education. It’s not like these kids are left to sulk around. They’re spending their free time enjoying a social life and hobbies. They have low achievement precisely because they don’t study in their free time. It’s a tradeoff.
Education is a huge investment of emotional, physical and mental energy and time. The payoffs only come after your mid 20s. The parents who care about education put enormous stress on their kids and themselves. This harms the parent and child relationship and the self esteem of the child.
Parental involvement in education is especially stressful for parents and kids in low to middle class immigrant families who suffer from language and cultural barriers. Without money, english proficiency or education, these parents can’t do much other than tell their kids to study hard every single day. This is the situation that many SHSAT kids are in.
I think parental involvement and parents caring is a huge factor as well, but certainly there are other factors to consider. There are plenty of kids whose parents care the the kids don’t care (I know A LOT of those). There are kids that care whose parents don’t. There are some that both don’t care and live in great communities, and some that both care and live in communities that are unsafe and have poor schools/teachers. Not to mention probably about a thousand other factors that can impact a child’s success.
Related to incentives of studying vs. enjoying free time, I don’t think African Americans are actually really minorities in the USA. Their families have been in the country for generations and are completely fluent in English. The vast majority of them live in communities that are completely dominated by African Americans and African American culture. Most African Americans don’t truly understand what it is like to be minorities because they live in places where they aren’t actually minorities. This is in contrast with the many high achieving kids with immigrant parents who live in WASP dominated suburbs or immigrant communities with high ethnic diversity. These differences affect the activities that students do in their free time.
In terms of culture and language, the SHSAT schools are actually very, very diverse. Most students have immigrant parents that come from many different regions of the world. It’s only when reducing the students to arbitrarily-made racial classifications do the SHSAT schools seem non-diverse.
I wouldn’t call a school that is 70% Hispanic or 70% AA and 30% other segregated. And the Hispanic ethnicity is a much broader category than the Mexican nationality. And a Mexican nationality or Hispanic ethnicity is not a race and can overlap with being white. To the extent your argument holds true, that there are a lot of 95%+ AA schools in this day and age, I would attribute that to AA self-segregation and racist AA not wanting their kids to go to school or live with those of other ethnic/racial groups.
@roethlisburger Are there racist African Americans? Yes there are. But do you actually think that all African Americans in segregated schools (Let’s just say 95%+ of the student body is black)are due to all of those households of black people are racist? My Grandparents moved into a black neighborhood because they had no other choice (Mid 70’s) and never left. My Mom moved into a diverse neighborhood after I left the nest and the neighborhood became almost all black within 10 years. Same thing happened to my father but took about 20 years. Those 70% Hispanic and African American schools are almost all 95% minority which still denotes segregation. I am not saying that the white people who left were racists (there are many reasons to move on) but as soon as African Americans reach a certain threshold in a community, those neighborhoods can turn majority African American very quickly.
I’m just wondering how they obtain that. Do they just ask advanced math questions so that students with more accelerated math have an advantage? What about the English section? Is it written analysis of text?
@collegemomjam said:
These are good questions, but I think we should back up a bit.
There is a lot of angst generated by the fact that although black and hispanic students make up about 70% of the NYC school system, they only get 12% of the offers to join the city’s exam schools.But there are two parts to this:
- Do all the high performing black and hispanic students apply to the exam schools?
- Is there enough being done to try and increase percentage of black and hispanic students above 12% , not by lowering the bar, but by having more of them of them clear the existing bar.
First, it is not obvious to me that all the high performing black and hispanic kids will even apply to the exam schools, for three reasons. First, because they are sought after in the elite NYC privates because they are high performing and URM, and might be able to attend for free (why would anyone pass that up?). Second, because as mentioned earlier it is not an ideal environment for everyone as it is undoubtedly a highly competitive environment. Finally, because after the percentage of your race drops below a certain threshold, it might no longer be desirable to be there.
When it comes to trying to get more students to clear the existing bar, the city has historically made free tutoring available in underrepresented neighborhoods, and in any case there a dozen free real online SHSAT tests for people to practice with. These programs, and others like them to increase the URM share should be encouraged. But ultimately it is the responsibility of these URM students to clear the bar. Don’t take some of the great public schools nationwide and make them worse by lowering the bar.