I think you are right @sbballer but Chicago seems to have done more than most to boost apps…adding ED I, ED II, and keeping EA??? You don’t have to send scores until accepted? Now test optional? The Ivies have made some adjustments too, but the SAT app essay dropping seems to be a very popular one…I just think ad coms don’t think it’s a good measure. Penn now allows score choice and just recommends subject tests, and no longer requires them. But Chicago still takes the cake on changes to the application process/requirements, IMO. There might be a reason, as you put it, “…Chicago gets the brunt of these accusations…”
Georgetown still has their own application which has two really hard essays and recommends THREE subject tests. And they only have REA, no ED. And I don’t think they have score choice, either. A school like that has the potential to really change their numbers…imagine if they went common app, added ED, and dropped the subject tests recommendation, and allowed score choice? I think they have defended their unique application requirements in the past by saying that they really only want students to apply that are interested in attending…that’s quite admirable and seems to not be the case in many other top schools.
@colllegemomjam agreed… but let’s not get all righteous with U of Chicago when all the ivies are admitting half their class EA to boost yield and boosting app numbers by dropping admission requirements left and right.
all schools need to be called out on these games including the ivies.
@sbballer but it sounds like you are implying all schools are doing this…and they are NOT. Georgetown, Notre Dame, Boston College and many others I’m sure…they have NOT given in to this. I wonder if they may have to at some point. And there are varying degrees of how the schools that are making changes are making changes…and while Chicago is an excellent school worthy of top students, it just seems like they are doing more than most. I guess when you are ranked 3rd in US News, it’s tempting to do what you can to hold on to that spot.
A possible side effect of changing from test-only to “top %” admissions at the NYC specialized schools…smart kids spreading out into different junior high schools to make the top % rather than clustering in the few great JHSs that they do now.
Did that happen in Texas when UT went to auto-admitting the top % from every high school? It would, should, be easier to do in NYC especially if one is trying to get to a lower performing junior high.
From the Atlantic article linked in Post #1848 above:
I bet those alumni were working in BigLaw, consulting or IB (corporate finance side only), where credentialing is very important to the hiring decision. Passing the same hard test as everyone else did means quite a lot more than impressing Mr. Holistic application reader, evidently.
One of the most pernicious real world effects of lowering standards for certain groups is that it discourages achievement and effort in the targeted “beneficiaries,” while simultaneously devaluing their subsequent accomplishment. Minority groups have a real point here that they feel devalued, one that cannot be fixed by simply wishing it away.
Overall, it’s a good article. The authors miss the full scope of what went on (e.g., they fail to understand how white flight was also accompanied by flight of the most successful blacks and even a few Latinos as NYC crumbled from 1965 until roughly the early 90s, which helps to explain part of why black enrollment at the schools collapsed after the mid-1980s). And they go on about silliness like poverty and test preparation, etc., as the main drivers. But they do importantly note how general ability tracking in the elementary schools simply disappeared in a political dream that all kids are equal in ability, which has had devastating effects on poor black and Latino children who only have the NYC Dept of Education to look out for them. (Remember, many of the most successful parents in these groups had already been progressively decamping for the near suburbs just to the north of the city, and to the east, their higher achieving kids enrolling in Westchester and Nassau County schools.)
Great point. Guess which group will actually do this? Poor Asians, who will sacrifice for their kids who perhaps fear they could not pass the SHSAT now. Over some years, the entire top 7% will be taken up by Asian kids, and we’ll be right back where we are now with respect to racial imbalance at Stuyvesant, except the quality will have gone down a little in the interim, as the unprepared current 7% cohorts pass through the system. Average JHS quality will go up with the influx of smarter kids, of course, but the gaps between minority kids and the newly arrived students will be enormous. The achievement gap at Stuyvesant itself, with a nontrivial percentage of kids who test at the genius level, will be risible, at least while those first 7% cohorts are there.
There is only one solution to the problem and it is a hard one. Schools need to track kids and offer a truly appropriate education to the level of a student’s ability and it needs to start early (with plenty of opportunity for “late bloomers” to move up if that is what they want). There ARE smart, high potential minority kids stuck in horrendous school situations, but there are not very many. Let’s find them, move them up, and then reorient the curriculum to be appropriate for the remaining segments in as many separate tracks as necessary, so as to ensure that each kid is moving at a speed appropriate to his ability and desire to succeed. Bandaid solutions at the high school level will not work, except as virtue signals by the elites, who will fete themselves with their altruism while their own kids are off at Choate and HM. Such a tracking approach will never happen, at least in the foreseeable future, and so the problem remains insoluble in the real world, imo.
Indeed the Atlantic article says this is what NYC JHSs did when there were a lot more black and Hispanic kids doing well enough on the test to get into S/BS/BT - when that stopped, so did the high % of those kids. There were gifted programs at every JHS.
I got a terrific education at my zoned/neighborhood NYC public schools, I stayed in that system through 8th grade.
The schools and the country will never have the resources to do this nor should they. It’s up the families to figure this out on their own.
“The problem, as he and many others see it, is one of equity: There are very few black and Latino students in the specialized schools. The three highest-status schools—Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech—have black and Latino student populations of 4, 9, and 13 percent, respectively, far below the 70 percent in public schools citywide. What would replace the SHSAT? A system that would admit the top 7 percent of students at every public middle school in the city, which by the mayor’s reckoning would make the collective student body at the specialized high schools roughly 45 percent black and Latino.”
The problem has absolutely nothing to do with equity and Satchel and others have documented this on this thread very thoroughly. de Blasio’s plan is clearly an attack on Asian students and surely would be challenged in the courts just like the Harvard Case which is pending in the Supreme Court right now.
"What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other. Abraham Baumel, a former principal at the school, laid out the dynamic nicely: “The fact is, if the teacher is not delivering at a place like Stuyvesant, the kids will find the answers from one another, from books, and from other classes. They will find a way to learn the material, and the teacher thinks he is responsible for that marvelous achievement.”
The real answer to this is the fact that all the students have far above average intelligence and come from families that value education.
Exactly, @OHMomof2, about the former programs that used to help gifted minority kids. The eventual ending of most of those programs was foreordained with the NAACP case against San Francisco, which illegalized ability testing of black children (the 1971 case was Larry P. v Riley iirc, and it was not settled finally until the late 1980s). It wasn’t a straight line of course from that case to the practical elimination of all tracking, but the course was set. It’s tragic.
Here is a local zoned JHS in NYC with which I am very familiar. It was actually even worse 30 years ago (that neighborhood is quite a lot better than it was in the 1980s). From your posts, I am having a tough time imagining where you were back then.
Look up the test scores for the school if you want to get a laugh. And, remember, de Blasio wants to let in the top 7% of that school into Bronx Science, which is only about a quarter mile away (Stuyvesant is a tough place to get to from there on the subway). And you think that two years of post-AP math is going to remain at Science once these kids - who literally cannot multiply fractions (yes, even the top 7%) - enter and sit next to kids who come in sometimes already having completed AP calculus on their own in elementary school?
The schools and the country will never have the resources to do this nor should they. It’s up the families to figure this out on their own.
While I DO think families need to be a part of this (and that what goes on at home is extremely important) and that we probably will never have enough resources, to say that families need to figure this out on their own is a little extreme. I think there is a government role in all of this…even if it is to monitor, justify and explain the existing testing policies, they still have a role in assessing their application process and keeping it “fair”, even if that “fair” evaluation isn’t agreed upon by all constituents. We will never make everyone happy, of course.
I have very grave concerns about intelligence testing for very young children. Setting aside the very few profoundly gifted kids who clearly won’t be able to function in an ordinary setting, I wonder how accurately intelligence tests measure actual potential. IQ tests were never originally intended to rank and stratify kids for those purposes, but to identify potential problems. When tends to happen in districts where kids are stratified and tracked early is that the “gifted” kids (gifted in that they test well, not gifted in the true sense) are given access to all kinds of enrichment that all children could benefit from. It is nearly impossible for “late bloomers” to ever move up in such a system.
I am speaking as the parent of three daughters, neither of my older two were early readers or academically precocious but both became very high achievers by high school. I am grateful that I live in a district that does not track the kids in elementary school. There is something humiliating about being separated off from the “smart” kids at age 6. I doubt most people use that as motivation to achieve rather than as a reason to give up.
Finally, I wonder how much difference in achievement is actually do to intelligence and how much to family support and other resources. My impression is that there is a wide range of innate ability which allows a hard working kid to achieve nearly anything. In other words, most people are not geniuses but are smart enough to achieve in school and in most fields of employment with the right work ethic and support.
Again, I go back to my own kids who blossomed in a family that valued education and had the resources to provide help when necessary.
I am not diminishing the importance of the history and statistics that @SatchelSF has raised. It is a sad history and tragic. I just don’t think that IQ testing very young children and separating them out is the way to go.
That Harlem elementary had a swimming pool in the basement. In the 70s. I passed my deep water test there. I won an award for the highest grade in African American history which was a class that came to us in an rv periodically. My Jhs had a print shop, we made notebooks and all kinds of art and practical stuff. No team sports that I recall. But great teachers and not too much disciplinary distraction. Can still sing la boriquena and lift every voice, actually.
I was one of maybe 2-3 white kids at the elementary but there were more at the jhs, maybe a quarter. It was not an issue for me after the first year.
Very interesting about your JHS, @OHMomof2. Could you post or at least give a range of current proficiency scores for the kids? It would be very interesting to see whether the last 40 years have led to increased achievement or decreased. My anecdotal sense is that, for a number of interrelated reasons, inner city schools have generally gotten worse.
It also might be interesting to test the effects of neighborhood income/wealth in the abstract on achievement. Brownstones in Harlem as you know could be had for $30,000 in the 1970s, while today $5MM is not uncommon (could even be higher - I’m no longer even in the same state so I don’t know). I do suspect that the kids of those people in the renovated brownstones (if they have kids, lol) are not attending the same school that you did, but I really don’t know and would be curious.
It’s a comforting thought, but absolutely untrue. Sometimes we forget that hard work will always allow a person to be successful at something, but that does not mean that hard work will allow her to be successful at anything. This no big deal. Understanding our limitations is part of the growing up process we all go through.
There are certain tasks for which only 5% of the population can reasonably perform no matter what effort is put in, and these tasks are quite a lot more visible than one might imagine. Of course, there are the “genius” tasks as well (say, particle physics professor, which not 0.1% of the population could ever become), but even relatively common occupations like doctor, (good) lawyer, programmer, etc. require higher levels of ability than one might imagine. Linda Gottfredson is the person to read if you are interested - she has done the most work on ability and personnel selection.
Collegemom I live in coastal California. The state government can’t even build a simple road or off ramp. The train to nowhere is now a 70 billion dollar cluster screw up. While there are many good people in government jobs you will never get effective outputs from a work force that can’t be fired. With the ever growing pension deficit s it’s totally unrealistic to expect the government to ev en do,it’s most basic functions. Sadly that’s the way it is.
@SatchelSF Assuming you are right about innate intelligence differences, when and how would you start testing for those? From what I have observed, for example, the kids who show very early achievement in reading don’t necessarily go on to become high achievers later on. How would you separate out the kids with potential without wrongly leaving many behind?