Fix the Process

 

            Getting a great education is always preached to you as a child growing up, especially in today’s day and age. Now imagine this. Imagine you work your butt off everyday in middle school thinking that you’re going to a good high school, only for all that work go to waste. All the good grades, perfect attendance, everything. The spot that you were expecting to get for yourself, actually fell to some kid that had terrible grades but just paid for test prep. How terrible and unfair would that feel. And for parents and teachers, good luck telling the kid to keep trying in school when they were clearly treated unfairly. The kid is going to tell themselves what’s the point. What you just imagined, unfortunately actually happens yearly. The admissions process for specialized high schools needs to be changed. There are too many people missing out on a very good experience due to many factors when they shouldn’t be. Things like a lack of money to pay for test prep to improve their chances. Being unlucky due to different questions on tests causes for lots of unfairness when it comes to admissions.  A lack of a wide range of criteria so kids are actually judged based off of their academic history as well, not just their performance on one exam. These are all things that cause a huge amount of injustice and unfairness in the admissions to take place.

            The New York City Department of Education is an interesting one because it seems to ignore the faults in their system. In NYC, there are all types of high schools, ranging from regular zone schools, which are your basic high schools, screened schools, which are more selective with their acceptances and specialized high schools, which require an exam to be admitted. The specialized high schools are the elite of the bunch and therefore, the seats there are highly coveted and limited. However, although the demand for seats is very high, the admissions process is terrible in comparison. You would think if the specialized high schools are pulling in more than 20,000 applicants a year, you would have a good way of evaluating intelligence and talent, but there isn’t. It’s based off of one test. The specialized high school admissions test, more commonly known as the SHSAT.

            Imagine taking a test unlike any other one you’ve seen before. Now add the fact that you’re so nervous because how you do on that test will change your future. How do you expect someone to pass under those circumstances. On the other hand, how about if you spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars preparing for the exam. Obviously, you then have the advantage. Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a speech about the SHSAT exam and the specialized high school admissions process, “Why should families who can easily afford test prep have an advantage over those that cannot?”(De Blasio) He said it plain and straight, that just isn’t fair. Why should something that has to do with high school admissions and academics develop into more of an economic class and racial problem. That’s why you see “private charter buses rumble through the Upper West Side to ferry students from the city’s wealthiest school district into one of the poorest.”(Veiga, Park) instead of students coming from all types of districts. The poor districts stay poor and the majorities stay in the better schools. How do you expect people to better themselves when you’ve made a test to benefit the middle to high class citizens. As it says on the Chinese Global Television Network, “The SHSAT gives an edge to those who have access to expensive test-prep tutors.”(Huber) Even the people that benefit from the admissions process as it is acknowledge that people that have the money to spend on test prep have the advantage. Asians, specifically Chinese students have a very high acceptance rate. That is just plain fact and yet it blows many people’s minds away just thinking about this. It’s clearly unfair for so many kids, so just change the system already.

            Luck is something that usually can’t be measured, however when it comes to the SHSAT exam, somehow even that is a component to whether or not you get admitted, and that is crazy. When looking at a case study from the National Education Policy Center from Colorado, there are some graphs showing that if a student took version A/B in 2006, they would have made the cut for Stuyvesant High School, one of the best specialized high schools, based off of a scaled score, whereas if they took versions C/D, they would’ve missed the cut off with the same score. There are “thousands of rejected students [that] have scores that are, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from those of students who were accepted.” (Feinman) Basically, what this is saying is there are numerous times where a kid that got accepted had an identical score as someone who got rejected. Apparently to the DOE and many protesters, this isn’t a faulty admissions process. Mayor Bill De Blasio even had something to say on this when he said, “Our best colleges don’t select students this way. Our top-level graduate schools don’t. There are important reasons why.” (De Blasio) He then went on to reason why its a poor system, which with all these examples and reasons, is hard to argue with.

            The SHSAT, as bad of a measurement it can be to analyze students, you can say that for any test. Throughout a students life in a specialized high school for example, or even just as a student going through the academic system, there are many bad exams given. Tests will be tests, the key is knowing the base information and sharpening up on the little things with studying, but again that goes back to paid test prep. So overall, yes, it is very hard to make a good test to actually measure someone properly, however that is why you use more criteria. You could use the students grades, attendance, extracurriculars, for example, just to get a better understanding of the person. That is why so many people are calling for reform in the admissions process, not necessarily a change in the exam.  

            The thing is, the SHSAT is so much worse than other exams are. Also, because making the perfect test is basically impossible, that’s why you are supposed to use a wider range of criteria when choosing students. As it says in the National Educational Policy Center case study, “It is contrary to professional testing standards to use any single metric as the sole criterion for  admission.”(Feinman)

            There is a fear that if there was change in the admissions process, it will make the admissions easier, and “change will lower standards as many of New York’s middle schools have students lacking fundamental math and reading skills.”(Huber) This isn’t necessarily true. Just because you change the admissions process doesn’t mean it will be easier for unqualified people to get in. When you change the admissions process, you change it so more of the right people get in, not the other way around. It would be different if you were going to start accepting more kids, so therefore the standards fall. If it’s the same amount of people, but people that actually deserve to be there, that won’t harm standards at all.

            New York City is known for being the city of immigrants. Now imagine the best high schools of NYC severely lacking diversity, the irony of that is striking. There are so many statistics that show the lack of diversity in specialized high schools. The best statistic is probably the most basic and simple one, saying, “African-Americans and Hispanics represent two-thirds of the city’s student body yet get about ten percent of the spots.” (Huber) This, in and of itself, is a crazy statistic to marvel about. Mayor Bill De Blasio and the CGTN also stated statistics on the lack of diversity. Now there are people that don’t see the problem with this. Some say that diversity doesn’t benefit schools, or environments in general but that isn’t true at all. De Blasio believes diversity “will raise the bar at the specialized high schools in every way. The pool of talent is going to expand widely and rapidly. That’s going to up the level of competition.” With more diversity, you get so many more cultures, mindsets, different ways of thinking, all of which benefit the schools, not harm. With different races and cultures, also come ways of thinking as Mayor De Blasio said. If you have more of a variety of people, you have a better chance in getting all types of perspectives, which never hurts. Of course you won’t admit the kids that aren’t deserving of a seat, so the standards won’t fall. A change in the admissions process will benefit african american and Latino students and allow their populations to increase in specialized high schools.  

            Overall, from test prep being so important, being unlucky, or just a huge lack of diversity should be enough to show anyone that the admissions system is very out of whack. There is no reason whatsoever not to increase the amount of criteria used to judge a student so that it is more fair to the kids, so why not do so. Alter the process, and solve so many of the problems you have with it. Why ruin one kids dream, and crush all his efforts because they weren’t lucky enough to have enough money to spend on preparation for the test and because they weren’t lucky enough to get the easier version of the exam. That’s something that is completely out of the kids hands and they shouldn’t be punished for that, that’s unjust. That’s why it needs to be changed, for the better of the kids, because they deserve something that’s fair to all of them.

 

Work Cited:

Feinman, J. (2008). High Stakes, but Low Validity? A Case Study of Standardized Tests and Admissions into New York City Specialized High Schools. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved 11/8/18 from http://epicpolicy.org/publication/high-stakes-but-low-validity

Veiga, Christina, and Sam Park. “Where Specialized High School Students Come from (and Where They Don’t).” Chalkbeat, 29 June 2018,chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/06/14/where -specialized-high-school-students-come-from-and-where-they-dont/.

Huber, Karina. “Asians in New York Protest Proposed Changes to School Admissions to Increase Diversity.” CGTN America, 10 Aug. 2018, america.cgtn.com/2018/08/09/asians -in-new-york-protest-proposed-changes-to-school-admissions-to-increase-diversity.

Blasio, Bill De. “Mayor Bill De Blasio: Our Specialized Schools Have a Diversity Problem. Let’s Fix It.” Chalkbeat, 2 June 2018, www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2018/06/02/mayor-bill-de- blasio-new-york-city-will-push-for-admissions-changes-at-elite-and-segregated-specialized-high-schools/.