New York’s Jim Crow Schools
Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them . . . John Adams, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780.
Each year New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School admits on the basis of the Specialized High School Admissions Test nearly 1,000 ninth grade students, fewer than 10 of whom are Black, about 10 percent from the Black and Hispanic groups combined.
The SHSAT, essentially a math test, violates a cardinal principle of test design: It is not aligned with the New York City Mathematics curriculum (or even with the rest of the city’s curricula). Also, no one really passes it because admitting schools determine who can get in without so much as a set cut score, and its purpose since the passage of the Hecht-Calandra Act in 1971 is for discrimination and exclusion, a point previously made on these pages.
However, its annual results are effective in drawing attention to the inequities in the opportunity to learn across the city’s neighborhoods and among its racial and ethnic groups of students.
New York State’s Mathematics Assessment at grade 8, when the SHSAT is given, allocates student performance in four categories: Levels 1 to 4. It is reasonable to assume that students scoring at Level 4 would be well-qualified for attempting the further hurdle of the specialized high school test if that test were aligned with the CONTINUE READING: New York’s Jim Crow Schools – Dropout Nation
