I am always intrigued by those commenting on how any changes to admissions to the specialized schools will "wreck" or "destroy" these "special" "jewels" of the New York education system.
Richard Cohen has decided to comment on something he knows little about and to slander Bill DeBlasio with this idiocy: "Stuyvesant’s student body is majority Asian American. The mayor thinks this is a 'monumental injustice….'" No. What is an injustice is that 0.69 percent of Stuyvesant's students are African American and only slightly more Latino in a city with a 70 percent black and Latino student population. What is absurd is to think that fewer than 1 percent of black students are deserving of an opportunity to learn at the specialized schools.
The current admissions test has clearly become a barrier to black and Latino advancement while being a boost to Asian American advancement. There are a variety of reasons why. But it would not "destroy" the specialized schools if greater numbers of black and Latino students who performed well in school and did well on state standardized tests were given greater opportunity to attend the specialized schools.
The specialized schools exam has resulted in segregation. The decision in Brown v. Board of Education did not just speak of the unconstitutionality of forced segregation, but of the great ills that segregation generally has resulted in for the country and for *all* citizens. Time for change. And time to stop peddling idiocy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/new-yorks-mayor-wants-to-demolish-a-school-system-that-lifts-kids-out-of-poverty/2018/06/11/42168d6c-6dab-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.2ab979ac7601
Wendy Turkington Why do you feel more STEM is the answer? Literature, arts, human history, foreign languages, information literacy, all are just as important, if not arguably more so for developing brains as Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Math.
Lawrence Gulotta The specialized high schools have very strong departments of "Literature, arts, human history, foreign languages, information literacy." Another reason they are the NYC's jewels.
Evan Spritzer I'm confused. Does the fact that Eric is a "former student from NJ" disqualify him from weighing in on New York specialized schools? Or is the suggestion that he himself attended a local, non-specialized school and turned out well so what does it matter?
Eric Chenoweth I've corrected above after finding out Richard Cohen has in fact moved back to NYC. There are those both living in NYC and those not proclaiming the same uninformed argument: admitting more blacks and Latinos to specialized schools will "destroy" them. Those arguing for it think they are arguing for "standards"; in essence, as I've tried to point out, they are arguing in defense of segregation.
Several years ago, after considerable research and discussion, the Board determined that the underrepresentation of Black and Latino students at the specialized schools was not the fault of the test, but rather the result of poor schools in these communities. Since then, we have advocated for Gifted and Talented programs in the elementary schools and enriched coursework in the middle schools. We know that there are talented kids who could do well at schools like Tech, but are prevented from doing so because of the inadequate educational opportunity they are given in the schools located in their communities. We started a middle school to high school pipeline program, where we reach out to underrepresented Brooklyn middle schools to identify kids of promise in the sixth grade and give them a two-year STEM enrichment program and free test prep. We have had such good demographic results that the State of New York has provided funding for this effort.
We urge the city to get serious about improving the quality of the education offered in underrepresented communities. We also advocate for every effort that holds the possibility of improving the diversity of our specialized schools. For years we have publicly advocated for creation of Gifted and Talented programs in underrepresented districts and enriched coursework in the middle schools of every district. We also advocate for free test prep for all children who want it, for a practice SHSAT in the sixth grade, and for the expansion of the Discovery Program. We also supported the city’s decision to change the test to better align it with what is taught in our schools and thereby mitigate against test prep advantage.
Tech’s student body is largely made up of students from immigrant, low income and working-class families. We believe that diversity is a good thing and we want the City to implement a plan that would add to our diversity by creating pipelines of educational excellence in our underrepresented communities. At the same time, we also advocate for keeping the test because we believe it to be an objective, transparent process for selecting students based on merit. We understand that all tests are not perfect tools, but when you compare the alternatives, we believe that keeping the test is the only way we can prevent the effect of subjectively determined admissions decisions that are unfairly based on bias, politics or other reasons unrelated to merit. In fact, if one looks at the selective high schools in the city which use subjective criteria, many are much less diverse than the specialized schools.
We opposed the bill because it would eliminate the test. In addition, it was introduced in the dead of night and scheduled for a quick vote without any hearings or public debate. While the bill was voted out of the Assembly Education Committee, the Speaker of the Assembly has promised that he will not allow the bill to be put on the floor for a vote this year. So, for the moment, the threat to the test is over, although it likely will become an issue again next year. Over 6500 Tech alumni emailed the Assembly opposing the bill and this really helped stop the bill.
It is also worth noting that along with this hugely problematic legislation, the City also announced its intention to expand Discovery, which is a program that has been around for 50 years. It allows disadvantaged students who take the test but just miss the cut off score to attend an intensive summer program that prepares them for the advanced academic work required at the specialized schools. Experience has shown that Discovery students do just as well as students who scored a few points higher on the test. The Alumni Foundation has long advocated for this expansion, as well as for expanding the definition of “disadvantaged” to also look at the poverty rate of the student bodies of the middle schools, which should improve the percentage of Black and Latino students gaining admission through the program. The city expects that these efforts will raise the percentage of Black and Latino students at the specialized schools from the present-day 9 percent to 15 percent of the student body. These changes – which again mirror the Foundation’s proposals and are already permitted in state law – should go forward.
We recognize that reasonable people may disagree with the positions taken by the Board this past week. The positions taken are the result of careful thought about the issues and problems, and are not the result of some misguided view that change is automatically bad. Tech and the other specialized schools are truly the most academically challenging schools in New York City. They serve as pipelines to higher education. Tech must be preserved for future generations of children from immigrant, low-wage and working-class families, and it must be available to children from every community in our city. This is what we believe.
Thank you,
Larry Cary
President, Brooklyn Tech Alumni The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF)
His premises are wrong, however. For one, there is a premise that the
SHSAT is an "objective" measure. It is not. It is a replacement measure for existing NY State standardized tests (as well as grades) that creates greater disparity at the specialized schools. There are many explanations for why it has created the type of disparity it has. But the idea (perpetuated by Cohen and Cary) that it is because Asian American students "work harder" is wrong. Or that high performing black and brown students at lower performing schools don't deserve opportunity because their hard work hasn't translated into a specific measure on the SHSAT. Or that those students can't perform at a high level at the specialized schools. (And by the way, these schools are educational institutions not factories for advancing good test takers.)
Cary will never be able to explain why the High School of American Studies, where my son attends, rose to no. 1 status in the state as a fully diverse school (25 percent black, 25 percent Latino, 25 percent Asian American, 25 percent white) and that thereafter it has had the same standards and achievements while becoming a segregated school (2 percent African American). The school was not "destroyed" when it was diverse. It rose to no. 1 status (surpassing Stuyvesant). It has been harmed by becoming less diverse. It harms all students, but most of all the students who are denied opportunity.
The problem for Larry Cary, which I have posed to him, is that his efforts are in service of a fundamentally ugly argument that supports segregation in our schools. It's time to address the problem for real. That is what DiBlasio and Carranza are trying to do.
I suspect many people who opine on NYC public schools have NO IDEA what it is REALLY like because THEY DO NOT SEND THEIR KIDS THERE. Raise your hand if you have, like me, and we'll talk.
The solution to the "problem" of Asians studying hard, having Tiger moms and all the rest, and getting into schools and colleges in ways that European white kids let alone black kids don't, is not to artificially bend the rules. The answer is to provide more remedial help, more tutoring, more help not only to students, but to parents i.e. with transportation, day care etc. so they can help their kids do better. I think with colleges, affirmative action is warranted and a good idea given the legacy of slavery, which is justly condemned as a crime against humanity. But there are a lot of states and a lot of colleges. In NYC, there are only a very limited number of these "top schools". Of course, more "best schools" could be added but that's expensive.
You recall the "No Child Left Behind" stuff where any family could get their child moved to a "better" school. But that child had to at least be passing and not have disciplinary problems or they weren't eligible. So that's how I know intimately what the "left behind" schools in New York are like — read my blog post about Norman Thomas HS if you haven't already.
My solution for the schools:
1) Break the unions' resistance — yes, unions are no longer sancrosanct to me, though they were growing up when my mother was in the teacher's unions in Rochester, and I always respected unions in general — but not after what I saw what they did to our kids in the schools in NYC.
2. Open the schools at 7:00 am and KEEP THEM OPEN until 9 pm. Yes, heat them, provide workers for them, have shifts of teachers and administrators for them, because they need to turn into community centers where parents and senior citizens can come, too. Stop the union restrictions to accomplish this.
3. Enable senior citizens to have lunch in the school/community center (breakfast, too) instead of routing them to (more expensive" senior centers, and have the kids serve them. Maybe they'd behave better during lunchtime if grandma was there?
4. Allow parents to come to school WITH their kids. Side by side. Will they be able to beat up others and smoke pot as much? No. And more adults in the room would help. PS parents could also be taking classes. I myself, for example, flunked math and could use remedial math. Others could learn computer skills.
5. Keep the school open with various activities, homework help, films, activities so that parents who work don't have to worry about the evil hours of 3-6 pm when their kids can do everything up to and including taking drugs and dying of overdoses, as some of my childrens' classmates did.
This is deadly serious stuff. The schools are abysmal. I'm unable to take part in this struggle now. If I had to live my life over, I wouldn't work on international human rights, I'd work only on NYC schools. They must be taken apart completely and rebuilt.
Bill DiBlasio and Richard Carranza are proposing some real solutions to a real problem: increasing and entrenched segregation at the specialized schools. They are similar to what the UFT proposed four years ago after a serious study. Read the ugly arguments of conservative media and Richard Cohen to justify resisting any change, including slanders. They should remind you of something.
I can say her posts reflect a fervor that is common in conservative media, the anti-union operation Campbell Brown ran, and the hedge fund managers who rail against public education and teacher unions while promoting charter schools to undermine public education. Her proposals for radical change are common means to deflect from and delay any immediate action to address the increasing segregation of specialized (as well as other) schools. Still, a number of the proposals for increased services are good ones. BTW: a number are proposed by UFT and AFT.
As to Carranza's tweet, it shared a viral video of a very ugly meeting at a public school whose principal proposed to reserve more seats for low-income students. Carranza's argument is simple: we need to address segregation in the public school system. Finally. It is something The New York Post finds anathema.
2) It doesn't matter if my personal experience isn't "reflected in statistics". It's enough to cause white flight, and that's what matters. It's not that the schools are segregated — children are bused an hour from their homes to midtown Manhattan! It's that real and perceived responses to crime drive not only white parents to leave the system altogether, but some black and Hispanic parents seeking charter schools as an alternative. I always marvel at how these people of colour are blasted for their embracing of the charter school system by leftists and liberals. Huh? What drove these parents to this?! I personally want the public schools to work, and the charter schools are an aberration that comes from failure to address public schools which should be our priority. That has to be looked at. The NYACLU saying it is all racism in the reporting just doesn't cut it, nor does DeBlasio's tweaking the numbers to make crime seem less. The NYPD statistics tell the story. You wouldn't applaud the Soviets fudging their crime statistics to make themselves look good. Why is this ok for DeBlasio?
3) Whatever your feelings about the NY Post, and their agenda, they are reporting some of the truth of the situation you want to shield your ears from.
4) Your claims that proposals I make are "also made by the UFT and AFT" just don't past muster. If they were, they'd follow through on them and the schools would be a different place! They have nothing remotely like this.
5) Crime fell in NYC for a number of complex reasons, not only because of police crackdowns, or running out of criminals to jail or the receding of the crack epidemic. Among the reasons is the increase in jobs, that for every percent increase in jobs, crime goes down. So the answers to the problem of crime in schools– mainly black perpetrators with mainly black victims — does not have to lead to a illiberal solution or "school to prison pipeline" cliches. Surely there are humane and decent solutions, just like there should be for school shootings. But it starts by admitting the truth of the situation and admitting the failure of liberal solutions since the 1970s.
6) It's great your son is in the NYC schools. Is he in high school yet? {Note: Eric said in one of his comments to a comment that his son did attend an NYC HS which "wasn't segregated and succeeded" (with 25% from each category) and then later "became segregated". He says that we should note that it succeeded when it wasn't segregated; but the real point is to note that it stayed successful after "segregation" and what that tells us is that his notion of quotas and "segretation" or "not segreation" is IRRELEVANT. Why did whites and Asians flee his son's HS? Because their racists? Or was there crime? That's the question I would keep asking.} Has he ever been beaten up by a gang member? God forbid. But this was the reality not only for our family but neighbours' families, and you can't wish it away as a statistical anomaly or shush it up by saying it "sounds" like conservative, racist comments.
7) Neither NYC unions or the NYCLU are honest brokers are on this subject and certainly not DeBlasio. Why all the fascination with him? I honestly think only federal inspections, federal control, etc. of a real emergency nature might fix some of these schools, or some kind of really radical educator/parental/citizen control outside the unions which have caused perpetual failure. But certainly federal control would be a terrible idea under Trump. Yet as these situations persist, and as the media evades or even lies about them, along with "progressive" groups, we will only get more Trumps.
How are we "policy wonks" proposing to "debase" the specialized schools? By restoring some measure of integration (that existed before and that did not "debase" the schools)? By proposing that high-performing black and Latino students be given greater opportunity to attend the specialized schools and face the challenges they offer? By suggesting that the specialized schools function as educational institutions that live up to the promise of Brown v. Board of Education? How does this "debase" the specialized schools? Is it integration that debases?
Really, I ask people to stop and reflect on what they say and how they say it. And to study the issue rather than speak about it without knowledge and out of emotion. I started this conversation by pointing to the wrong arguments of Richard Cohen, who decided to write out of emotion and to spout a bunch of idiocies that perpetuate ugly stereotypes and malign people who are trying to address a serious issue. It is he who debased the discussion about the specialized schools. I leave to you and others to decide what you wish to keep on my FB page or not as a reflection of your values.
Ange Louis ’19, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, recently described in the Daily News how, starting in 6th grade, the National Grid STEM Pipeline program operated by the Alumni Foundation, prepared her to successfully gain a seat at Brooklyn Tech. The National Grid STEM Pipeline Program is funded by the Foundation and generous support from National Grid. This two-year program introduces middle school students to the world of science, technology, engineering and math by having experience in project-based learning. The students attend a program at Tech on Saturdays during the school year, and for five weeks during the summer. The pipeline begins with 6th graders, nurtures them and shepherds them through high school. The program provides test prep in anticipation that students will sit for the Specialized High School Admissions Test and attend Brooklyn Tech. The pipeline then has the potential to extend beyond high school through college with National Grid providing opportunities for students to have an engineering/technology career at National Grid.
"Excellence is the key," you also write. This is your definitive position. You don't want to "debase" excellence. What this response indicates is that you believe that over time there are fewer and fewer black and Latino people capable of excellence. And having more black and brown people will thus debase BTHS. And this is proven by the SHSAT.
None of this is true. And if you read Larry Cary's and the BTHS's initial report, you would know it as well. Or the UFT's report. But you don't and you feel free to harangue, just as the BTHS PTA does. I've worked on this issue over the last four years. Including going out and meeting many talented black and brown students capable and willing to take on the challenges of the specialized schools but who are shut out. It breaks my heart knowing how entrenched the forces are against them.
I am not arguing out of any "ideology." And I look for no evil intent. I know that neither you nor Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick have evil intent. That is why I engaged you both in conversation. What I try to impress on both of you, though, is that you are responding not out of knowledge or even experienced reality, but on wrong assumptions, prejudices, and false stereotypes that are not born out in any study, honest analysis or true exploration. My cousin Julia Schwadron Ross's response relating her experience in the South should also indicate to you that entrenched assumptions about "excellence" are quite harmful. Yet, as yours and Cathy's responses indicate, "reality" becomes translated into a societal norm that defends segregation. These assumptions are in fact serving entrenched forces that stoke enormous division in our society. I encourage you not to be a part of them.
And worst of all, brings us Trump, and will bring us Trump *again* unless it starts to focus on real issues and real coverage of real problems and their just remedies, instead of urging cover-ups and manipulation.
Bill DeBlasio wants to change the criteria of the current stringent tests for the top schools in NYC to one of a variety of other criteria, some subjective and depending on teacher evaluations. This is deadly in the failing NYC school district because it essentially lowers standards. Affirmative action is warranted in colleges, when there are a huge variety of colleges, many seats in them and many resources across all kinds of colleges. In NYC, there are only a few of these select schools. One answer is to make more of them, but that costs a lot more money than another solution. Invoking the notion of segregation of the 1960s can't fix what is caused in very specific situations by a very specific problem: crime by black teenagers, mainly against other black teenagers. This creators havoc in classrooms and makes it hard to learn. It has to be addressed and not wished away by reporting incidents differently. The reality of the incidents and their impact on others don't go away when they are masked.
Eric is so busy villying even fellow liberals to ensure that he is disassociated with them by politically correct notions that he fails to see what real people do in the real world. Here's Anthony Boryga, a Hispanic author writing for the liberal New Yorker — surely Eric would accuse neither of racism.
https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-complex-disadvantages…
While Eric wishes to imply that only 172 black students and 298 Latinos out of 5,000 offers of admission is somehow about racism and these students of colour mastering "whiteness,"
Boryga, who himself didn't get into a select school, explains that DeBlasio wants to increase funding to the Discovery Program which gives low-income students shy of the marks they need to get into the Specialized High Schools (SHS) more opportunity in a summer program (a problem in that it means kids have to reluctantly attend summer school or not get summer jobs or internships, I would add, which the city provides). But DeBlasia also wants to replace the SHSAT, the exam to get into schools like Bronx Science, with criteria like "school performance" and "statewide exams" but that not only introduces certain subjectivity and lowering of standards, he also wants to have a quota system from each of the middle schools. That is what people object to most of all. It undermines the achieves of those 172 blacks and 298 Latinos, for one, not to mention everyone else's, even if it means 62% Asians in the student body. No one ever wants to admit that strict parenting, usually from two-parent homes, and lots of homework and studying, has been a key to success for Asian families; to state these obvious facts these days is to be accused of racism, and Boryga doesn't get into it.
But he says something else that Eric and others advocating DeBlasio's misplaced Soviet-style uravnilovka need to hear:
The city’s specialized public high schools weren’t always so segregated. In the nineteen-eighties, the three oldest and most prestigious specialized schools had sizable black and Latino populations. (In 1989, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant were sixty-seven, twenty-two, and sixteen per cent black and Latino, respectively; today, those numbers have fallen to fourteen per cent, nine per cent, and three per cent.)
Wow, how to account for that huge drop after the term of Mayor David Dinkins, the first black mayor of NYC?
Says Boryga:
Things began to change in the early nineties, when New York City eliminated many of its honors programs as “tracking”(separating students based on their abilities) fell out of favor. Then, under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, two billion dollars were cut from the city’s education system. Awilda Ruiz, who helped found the middle-school honors program that I attended, within an underperforming school in the South Bronx, and taught math in the program for nearly thirty years, said that during this period funding for test-prep in the program dried up.
So the answer is to restore the "pipeline" to the test — test-prep funding, but not just rote test prep, creating a climate where students are helped with their problems, educational or practical, to get the studying done they need to do and to get to the test as prepared as they can be. That means more social workers and addressing the cultural phenomenon of bullying by failing students or those who succeed and the implication that they can't stick out by succeeding.
Two billion dollars is a lot, and test-prep is really important. I didn't have $3000 for my daughter to go to a SAT cram school; had I had that money, she might have gone to an Ivy League School; there are parents who hire private tutors to get their kids through SSHAT as well, and that's beyond the ability of many, not just the very poor.
Boryga interviews a teacher and gets the facts:
Adewumi, the Brooklyn Tech teacher, is more ambivalent about the utility of the SHSAT. In 2012, he founded a test prep and academic-enrichment company to serve low-income families in Brooklyn, especially with help preparing for the SHSAT. But he said that the students he works with sometimes have gaps in their fundamental math and reading skills, which no amount of test prep can compensate for. He worries that, under de Blasio’s new plan, some students might arrive in the specialized schools unprepared to excel there. “You want them to go to high-performing high schools,” he said. “But no pipeline exists for them to do so.” (Last year, only a quarter of black and Latino New York City public-school students in grades three to eight were deemed proficient in math, compared to two-thirds of Asian students and more than half of white students.)
Rather than getting rid of the SHSAT, Adewumi said, de Blasio’s administration should focus on reinstituting gifted-and-talented pipelines—in his neighborhood school district in Bed Stuy, there are currently no such programs for middle schoolers—and focussing on getting more students of color to become proficient on state assessments. “There are hundreds of thousands of high-school-aged kids in New York City,” he said. “We are fighting over these crumbs, but what about the other thousands of kids? What schools are they going to and what are we giving those kids to help them be successful?”
Is Erik going to denounce Adewumi as "racist"? Is he going to say his experience is "anecdotal&quo
t;?
DeBlasio is part of the Stalinist left — embracing the Sandinistas — that Erik should repudiate on those grounds alone, but his use of Soviet-style methods like "levelling" should also be repudicated. Acusing critics of "racism" is also part of the Soviet — and in recent years, the Cuban — playbook.
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