Things get test-y
Plan aims to diversify elite high schools
Tempers flared at a public hearing Friday in Lower Manhattan over a State Assembly bill that would scrap a citywide test for admission to elite public high schools.
Assemblyman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) went toe-totoe with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams over a plan to increase diversity within the city’s eight elite public high schools.
Currently, less than 10% of students at the eight schools are black or Latino, while 67% of New York City public school students are black or Latino.
“The public advocate is not supporting a bill that’s gonna get us from 9% to 45%. Shame on you,” Barron said to Williams, to boos from the crowd, which included a large group of predominately Asian proponents of keeping the citywide admissions test, the Specialized High School Admissions Test.
Barron wants to do away with the test and replace it with middle-school gradepoint average as the sole criterion for admission.
Under his plan, reflected in a bill before the Assembly and supported by Mayol de Blasio and his schools chancellor Richard Carranza, the top 7% of students by GPA in every middle school would be offered a spot in the eight elite high schools.
Williams, who said that he would not have been admitted to his alma mater Brooklyn Tech but for his high SHSAT score, favors reserving a certain number of seats for those who pass the test while adding what the bill wants: GPA-based admissions for a certain number of seats at the elite schools.
“I am presenting something that I think can provide access to everyone, without pitting the Asian community against the black and Latino community,” said Williams.
“I’ve mentioned a number of multiple-criteria schools right now that looks at grades and other things that we could look at, and is not diverse, is abysmally segregated. So the question is, what about the schools right now that do exactly what this bill says, and is not diverse?” he said, citing predominantly white Eleanor Roosevelt and Townshend Harris High Schools.
Carranza (inset) testified during the hearing that the test rewards those who focus on test preparation above all else.
“We are merely putting in place a screen for students, and a screen that students, unless their parents invest resources that they can use elsewhere — they’re investing those resources in test-prep, and doing it for considerable amounts of time — then you’re not being prepared to take that one test,” he said.
Opponents of the bill contend that the test results’ racial disparity largely reflects the quality of elementary and middle schools that students attend. Students at “strong” middle schools, they say, would be punished by an approach that admits an equal percentage of students from each of the city’s hundreds of middle schools to the elite high schools.
“The 7% quota absolutely punishes those schools for doing the right things in educating their kids,” said Yiatin Chu, 51, a Bronx Science alumna and mother of a Stuyvesant High School alumna. “Why aren’t we looking to replicate what those schools are doing? Why are we punishing those schools?”
Many of the bill’s opponents propose a revival of Gifted and Talented middle schools, which the city’s education department has mostly been done away with. One of those is Chien Kwok, 51, a graduate of Brooklyn Tech with a son in sixth grade at NYC Lab Middle School For Collaborative Studies in Chelsea, which requires testing for admission.
“Everybody who goes to that school has high grades,” said Kwok. “So you’re gonna tell me, like, 93% of those kids, who are academically very strong, some of the of the strongest kids in the city, are not going to be able to have access?”