A New York City education panel voted late Wednesday night to approve a new contract for a contentious testing system for admission into the city’s elite public high schools.
The board, the Panel for Educational Policy, made its decision in a 14-to-2 vote, with four abstentions, at its final meeting of the year — a vote that had been delayed as debate waged over the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT, the sole admissions criteria for the city’s eight specialized high schools, which include Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science.
The new contract, a five-year, $17 million agreement with Pearson, the dominant education publisher in the United States, would make the test computer-based for the first time, according to the city’s Department of Education.
The move marks a major shift for a test that has been the source of fraught fixation for decades. While the specialized schools educate only about 5 percent of New York City high schoolers, their admissions are scrutinized yearly, as they are regarded both as shining examples of the best of the city’s education system and as symbols of entrenched school segregation.
According to the D.O.E., approximately 30,000 eighth graders and 5,000 ninth graders take the test each year. Major racial gaps have persisted in the admissions process, with 12 percent of spots last year offered to Black and Latino students — the highest number since 2013 and up from 10 percent the year before. Mayor Eric Adams once referred to the schools as “a Jim Crow school system.”
The flagship school, Stuyvesant, admitted only 10 Black students to its first-year class of 744 students last year.
But Asian American families have fiercely opposed any change to the entrance system for the eight schools. Over 2,000 of the more than 4,000 offers for admission last year were made to Asian students, many of whom came from low-income households.
The meeting on Wednesday night at Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn lasted more than five hours, and debate was impassioned, with most speakers focusing on whether the test should remain the grounds for admission, rather than on whether it should be computerized. If the panel had voted down the contract, an entrance exam might not have been offered for the class of 2026.
Kamala Carmen, a parent, sardonically suggested playing a drinking game and taking sips at each mention of the specialized schools being “crown jewels,” or threats of the sky falling. She also bristled at the suggestion that students at specialized schools are the only ones who work hard. “The amount of hysteria that has been whipped up by this contract is beyond,” she said.
Chien Kwok, a parent of a student at a specialized high school and an alumnus of Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the eight, pushed back on the idea that the admissions test was racist or inequitable, arguing that the most rigorous schools often serve students from low-income families.
“Focus your resources on helping students become high achievers,” said Mr. Kwok, who is also a co-founder of PLACE, an advocacy group that is a fierce defender of test-based admission to the schools. “There’s a crisis of low academic achievement across our city.”
The policy panel, the governing body for the city’s public schools, has 24 members, 13 of whom are appointed by the mayor.
The meeting agenda for Wednesday night acknowledged that the D.O.E. was aware of 19 investigations into Pearson for workplace discrimination but said that 16 of those cases had been closed or dismissed.
But the department did not address a string of issues involving Pearson’s testing over the years. Testing errors led the New York State Education Department to end its contract with Pearson in 2015.
“Thoughtful family engagement is of paramount importance, and as our students continue to live in a more digitized world, the transition to computer-based SHSAT testing aligns with the way most standardized testing is done, including the SAT,” Chyann Tull, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Education, said in a statement.
The panel vote was originally scheduled to take place in October but was delayed twice as the board sought additional feedback from community members.
Before the meeting, Nyah Berg, the executive director of New York Appleseed, an advocacy group pushing for integrated schools, said that a single test should not determine someone’s access to a New York City public school, especially not a test with a $17 million price tag.
“We have to scrape and claw every year in the budget to find money for these important tools and resources for some of our most marginalized students, but we can somehow find $17 million for a test to replace the contract of the paper test,” Ms. Berg said.
But Senator Chuck Schumer of New York released a strongly worded statement before the meeting, saying that voting down the contract would be “an attack on fairness, opportunity and proven pathways to success.”
“Derailing the SHSAT would lead to chaos and unfairly deny opportunity to countless students,” he said.
The post New York City Approves New Contract for Specialized High School Test appeared first on New York Times.
