Wai Wah Chin A Conspiracy Against Specialized High Schools? Opponents angle to defund the entrance exam.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-conspiracy-against-specialized-high-schools
New York City’s racial polarizers are back, targeting academic excellence in public schools. This time, they’re mobilizing to oppose the standardized test that the city’s specialized high schools use to achieve race-blind, meritocratic admissions.
To understand the polarizers’ scheme, take a step back. The Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT), which determines admissions to eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools, had been provided by Pearson Assessments to the New York City Department of Education under a multiyear contract. That contract expired on October 31, and the decision to renew the deal falls to the city’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP).
PEP itself has a history of racial politicking. The panel infamously helped kill the department’s gifted and talented program in 2021, with members claiming that the G&T admissions test was racist. They declined to approve the vendor contract for G&T testing—with Pearson. “A yes vote on this contract would be a continuation of white supremacy,” said one PEP member. Other members suddenly discovered frugality and objected to the test’s cost.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, in his final year in office and no friend of G&T, used the panel’s denial of the Pearson contract to terminate the program entirely. Mayor Eric Adams restored it, but without the admissions testing that PEP had rejected, rendering the program far less effective in delivering rigorous K-8 education that, among other things, prepares top students for the SHSAT.
This time, the racial polarizers’ pretext for objecting to the proposed Pearson contract renewal is the proposal to replace paper-and-pencil testing with computerized (“digitized”) testing, which, they claim, “could worsen inequities.” The notion that, in our digital age, the city’s sharpest eighth-graders would be intimidated by computers is ridiculous. Indeed, the SAT, Advanced Placement tests, and New York State’s proficiency tests—the last administered even to grade schoolers—have all been successfully computerized without fuss. The GRE and MCAT have been computerized for decades.
Since the previous Pearson contract has already expired, the PEP can kill the SHSAT simply by declining to vote on the new contract. It has already postponed the vote for at least two months and hasn’t scheduled one for an upcoming meeting. It’s a clear replay of their efforts a few years ago.
The city’s Department of Education, meantime, realizes that a new contract is the only way to provide the SHSAT. At a November 2024 panel hearing, the department’s deputy chancellor, Dan Weisberg, stated:
This [contract] would be the sole means of providing an exam, so if we don’t have this contract in place, the current contract will expire. There will be no contract for paper-and-pencil to continue . . . . This would be the actual contract for provision of any test for SHSAT.
Does the DOE have a plan to ensure that the vote passes, or a contingency plan if the vote fails? The answer to both questions appears to be “no.”
While Mayor Adams is a public supporter of the SHSAT, something is amiss in the department’s response. Is it incompetence at the highest levels of the DOE, or something else?
The passivity is especially troubling given New York City’s legal obligation to administer the SHSAT to prospective specialized high school students. Failing to do so would put the city in violation of New York Education Law §2590 (the “Hecht-Calandra” bill), which requires that each entering class to the specialized high schools be admitted on the basis of performance on the SHSAT, whether “digitized” or not.
More important, perhaps, than the city’s statutory duty to administer the test is the fact that the SHSAT works. Challenge any racialist to show you another high school admissions process that produced 15 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, along with winners of such prestigious recognition for scientific achievement as the Fields Medal, Abel Prize, Turing Award, Cole Prize, Wiener Prize, and more, plus an abundance of members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. They can’t.
Whatever is happening on the panel and at the Department of Education, the city should renew Pearson’s contract and fund the SHSAT. This is not only its legal obligation but also its duty as a guardian of educational excellence.
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