Black alumni of specialized high schools: SHSAT needs scrutiny, not just defenders

A group of black alumni of the city’s specialized high schools say the alumni coalition calling to retain the current admissions system doesn’t fully speak for them.

In a letter sent to Chalkbeat, members of the Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Diversity Initiative say they want the Specialized High School Admissions Test to face new scrutiny, not just be defended. Mayor Bill de Blasio and civil rights groups have pointed to the test, which determines admission to eight of the city’s top high schools, as contributing to the scarcity of black and Hispanic students at those schools.

Just 11 percent of the offers to those eight schools went to black and Hispanic students in 2014, thought they made up about 70 percent of the city’s eighth graders.

De Blasio has backed a state bill that would require the specialized high schools to use more than the single test score to make admissions decisions. The City Council education committee is poised to vote on a symbolic measure of support of that bill this month, sparking the Coalition of Specialized High School Alumni Associations to release a five-page letter to Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito telling her to vote “no” on the resolution.

In their letter, the black alumni group doesn’t say the single-test method should be abandoned, and joins the Coalition in asking for stepped-up recruitment efforts directed at minority students. But the group reiterates concerns about the test’s content, including that it doesn’t reflect middle-school curriculums.

“In light of these issues, we wonder why the Coalition of Specialized High School Alumni Associations is defending the current SHSAT, instead of urging the City’s Department of Education to insure that it is fair?” the letter asks. “Like the Coalition, we believe that using a test can guarantee an admissions system free of favoritism and bias, but we are not certain that the current SHSAT offers that.”

Here’s the Diversity Initiative’s letter:

The members of Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Diversity Initiative and other alumni and friends who support our goal of increasing the number of Black and Latino students enrolled at the city’s specialized high schools are pleased that we and the Coalition of Specialized High School Alumni Associations are in agreement that increased resources need to be devoted to outreach and improving educational quality citywide, and that the Discovery Program needs to be reinstated at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science High Schools. We would go further and demand better schools, and improved efforts to identify and provide an enriched and accelerated education to talented students in every neighborhood, and not simply increased access to test prep. We would also urge the Department of Education to specifically target the Discovery and DREAM-SHSI programs to students from communities currently underrepresented at city’s specialized high schools. Like the Coalition, we believe that using a test can guarantee an admissions system free of favoritism and bias, but we are not certain that the current SHSAT offers that. As far as we know, the current SHSAT has never been validated. It is deeply concerning that biases inherent in its scoring methods — most notably, an acknowledged preference for the “uneven genius” — may themselves provide an advantage to certain groups of students. Additionally, the inclusion of certain question types, scrambled paragraphs and logic questions, which are unfamiliar to most school children provide an advantage to students who have the benefit of private prep. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is inconsistent with notions of basic fairness that the SHSAT assesses knowledge of concepts beyond the scope of the standard middle school curriculum. This disconnect between what most students have been taught, and what they are being tested on helps explain why some public middle schools send hundreds of students to specialized high schools each year while most public middle schools send none. We believe the SHSAT should be challenging, and measure students’ critical thinking skills, and their ability to apply concepts, but it should be aligned with what children have been taught. All public middle schools should have the same capacity to prepare students for success on the SHSAT and admission to the city’s top public high schools, not just a handful. In light of these issues, we wonder why the Coalition of Specialized High School Alumni Associations is defending the current SHSAT, instead of urging the City’s Department of Education to insure that it is fair? Regardless of whether admission to the city’s oldest specialized high schools continues to be based on a single test or permits consideration of other relevant factors, we need to be sure that whatever test utilized is fair. Please join us and other concerned alumni in asking the Coalition of Specialized High School Alumni Associations to establish that the SHSAT is fair. We ask that you refrain from signing their petition of support for the SHSAT until we are assured that any test used as part of the admissions process is fair to all test takers.