Dissecting the New York City Specialized High School Controversy

During my fifth year as a biology teacher at Stuyvesant High School, I was paid a visit by one of my former students who came to the school after completing his first year in college, a usual ritual during the months of May, June, December, and January by alumni. This young man was majoring in environmental science, and since he took my environmental studies course, it made sense that I would be one of the teachers he would stop by to talk to. He was telling me about the exciting fieldwork he was doing and the classes he was taking. He also mentioned something that had stuck with me even now.

He mentioned how he was telling his former classmates which school he was attending, Colgate University, and he was taken aback by the look on their faces, the “why did you choose that school” look. “Why can’t they just get past the name?”, he continues. “I chose that school because of the program they offered.” To him, the reputation of that school, or lack thereof, was less important than what he was learning. To this day I am still amazed at the level of maturity that came out of my former student who was only 19 at that time. I certainly did not have that level of maturity at his age, but that statement he made over 15 years ago is even more relevant now, especially with this newly revitalized debate that has become an initiative of by both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza of how we should diversify the Specialized High Schools in New York City that is now being viewed by the rest of the state and nation. Conservatives have railed against this as “another form of affirmative action”, while liberals are divided on the issue.

I have been hearing both sides of this debate, and, as a former science teacher at Stuyvesant and mother of a middle school student in one of the City-wide Gifted and Talented schools considered one of the “feeder schools” for the Specialized High Schools, I believe that many of you are just making statements that are inaccurate, at best, and misleading, at worst. As a result, the debate continues to go nowhere, so before we can even analyze and dissect this issue, like a specimen ready to be examined, let us start with some basic questions. 1. What is the mission of these schools? 2. Is the Specialized High School Aptitude Test (SHSAT) really the best measure of which students will thrive in that environment? Both questions, of course, complement each other. A brief history of these schools is also helpful.

Stuyvesant High School was established in 1904 as a “manual training school for all boys”, where they would not just learn about trades, but the theoretical, scientific knowledge behind these industrial arts. This is noted by the school’s seal that includes a hammer and two books. Before that most schools focused on preparing students for the workforce and were not even full-time; Stuyvesant sought to prepare many of its students for higher degrees. Brooklyn Technical High School was established afterward in 1922, where boys were placed into either a college or a trade school track with an emphasis on preparing them for the field of engineering. Bronx High School of Science was established in 1938 to mirror much of Stuyvesant High School’s curriculum, also utilizing an entrance exam. In 1971, New York State passed the Calandra-Hecht bill into law, which established that an exam would be the sole determinant of admissions into the original three specialized high schools. Like the S.A.T.s, the exam served as an aptitude test for aspiring 8th graders that not necessarily tested how much a student learned or knew, but how well a student can solve a problem, given the information presented to him/her. The exam also has the same shortcomings of the S.A.Ts.

During the 1930s then president of Harvard, James Conant, wanted to create an exam that admitted students not just based on who their parents were and what school they attended, but what he believed was their “natural ability”, and he discovered an exam created by psychologist, Carl Brigham, that is now the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATs). We now know that there is no perfect instrument that can truly measure this. Exams are often based on an individual’s social environment and exposure to learning opportunities, i.e. cultural bias, and even though the exam was not meant to be studied for, we know that almost every high student who wants to do well does. He also did not predict that there would be entrepreneurs like Stanley Kaplan, who began the business of preparing students for this exam.

The same issues that continue to plague the S.A.T.s also apply to the SHSAT in New York. The city is saturated with test prep programs and private tutors. When I first taught at Stuyvesant High School in 1996, there was only Kaplan, Princeton Review, Kumon, and Mega Academy that targeted East Asian parents, some smaller programs run out of churches and community centers, and expensive private tutors for those who could afford it. I also started an after-school program during my time as a teacher there that I ran with a middle school teacher at a local school and some of my students who volunteered to tutor her students, but the sole purpose of our program was only to level the playing field for a group of local kids of different races whose parents could not afford those types of programs.

Many of them came from a nearby public housing development. Despite Stuyvesant being within walking distance from their home, the school seemed “unattainable”, until our program was able to help quite a few students get into all three, then six, schools at that time. My program was much different than the for-profit programs, which have changed the landscape of the specialized high schools admissions process. One only needs to do a quick google search to find the many options of for-profit test programs out there that insist that your child will have an advantage over others, if they attend. These vary from courses that charge $1,400 to $2,500 to private tutors who charge $50 to $100 per hour. Both Errol Louis and Lindsey Christ of NY1 have called this a “Test Prep Arms Race”.

These programs are not just limited to the SHSAT; they start as early as preschool, prepping three and four-year-olds for the Otis-Lenning School Ability Test (OLSAT) and the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT), which are used for the Gifted and Talented programs/schools for elementary school students. If you look at the top five middle schools that have the highest rates of admissions for students into the Specialized High Schools, 65% or more, three of them are part of the city-wide Gifted and Talented schools that use this exam. The playing field is already made uneven before children even start Kindergarten.

For many Asian immigrants, this type of test prep is nothing new. In many of the Asian school systems, particularly in East Asia, it is quite common for parents to spend a fortune on these types of programs to get their middle school children into a prestigious high school, and those programs continue into high school. The most reputable universities in Asia are public, but many parents might spend their life savings to prepare their children for them. They see this as a necessary sacrifice they must make for what they believe is best for their children. The irony, however, is that many of them are re-creating a system that they had left behind because it was a very cut-throat process, and some of these schools might not actually be the right school for their child.

Exactly how effective are these programs? One cannot tell, but for a student who would have scored a 550 without the program, it may push them to the coveted 559 or 560 to get into Stuyvesant. That certainly gives that student an edge over a student who scored a 557 without attending any program and missed the Stuyvesant cutoff by two points. The cutoff scores for each school are determined by the highest scores of students who ranked that school as their first choice with Stuyvesant being the most competitive to get into. The better a student does because of these prep programs; the higher it raises the cutoff score for each school, causing an artificial inflation of that score.

I never had the opportunity to take the exam, myself, since I lived in the suburbs, but many of my contemporaries told me that their level of prepping was getting a good night’s sleep the night before, eating a light, but adequate, breakfast, and bringing in two sharpened number two pencils. This was in the late 1980s, where the Black and Latinx population at Stuyvesant was 16%, still lower than the city’s population but over five times the 3% that Black and Latinx students now make up. If this test is supposed to test innate ability, should you even be prepping for it, and, if you need to do all of that prepping for your child, does your child even belong in that school?

The one key point that all these debates miss is that Talented and Gifted is a special needs program, or as one Stuyvesant alumnus tweeted: A disability that everyone seems to want. I abhor the name “Elite High Schools”, just as I abhor the names “Elite Kindergarten”, when my son first got into one of these programs because that is not what Talented and Gifted programs are. Anyone who has been around talented and gifted children knows that they think and act differently than most children, and many of them are somewhat socially awkward in some form or way, although not all. When I taught at Stuyvesant High School, there was a fairly substantial percentage of students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). The most common diagnoses were autism, dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and ADHD, all conditions that allowed them to score well on the SHSAT. Some are not diagnosed with any of these conditions, but might be if they were actually evaluated. Even the original founders of Stuyvesant sought to recruit a particular group of boys who were “abnormal in character” and, therefore, required “peculiar training”, since many of them were “truant” in their current schools.

These schools were created to allow like-minded teenagers to connect with each other and share ideas. As a former Stuyvesant teacher, I had the opportunity to work with, and even inspire, some extremely innovative minds, including my student who went to Colgate University and cared more about learning the material than going to a name-brand school. One of them was organizing high school students at a Settlement House in the Bronx, where her piece on the unfair suspension of Black and Latino male students was published in the Huffington Post; she is now in law school, continuing her fight for social justice. Another former student I bumped into years ago was Chief Resident of the neurology department at New York-Presbyterian Hospital at that time, and I was not surprised at all to find that out. A third student started out as a cultural anthropology and neuroscience student as an undergrad but is now developing software and acquiring her degree in electrical engineering. During her time at Stuy, her passion was sustainable development, which it continues to be.

However, I question, if we are really selecting the best and brightest students if the test prep industry is contributing to a student body where too many of them have been “inorganically prepped”. These programs are much different than the Dream program, Math and Science Institute before that; they promise parents that their child will “have an edge” over other students. As Talented and Gifted expert, Dr. Joy Lawson Davis, points out, “The problem with the current system is that it does not select the children who have the greatest potential; it selects the children who have the most proactive and informed parents, and not all talented and gifted children have proactive and informed parents. Similarly, not all pro-active parents have talented and gifted children.” This brings another flaw to the argument made by those who want to preserve the test.

During my time as a teacher at Stuyvesant teacher, I had quite a few students who had average, and even below average, grades at their middle school and surprised their teachers and classmates, when they announced which high school they were attending. It was not a common occurrence, but it was not uncommon either. When many supporters of the SHSAT say that the test rewards hard work, what does that really mean? Are they referring to a child who works hard to get straight A’s in all subjects but cannot do well on the SHSAT or middle school students who spent all of their summers preparing for this exam, usually at a for-profit program? Then, there is the student who had mediocre grades and did no preparation but scored well on the exam anyway. Which one of these students deserves to attend more?

This does not mean I am completely against the SHSAT exam, but we do have to admit that the current system needs to be reformed. Townsend Harris, also a very good school but with a diverse population, uses a more extensive admissions process because it is a much smaller school. This is the difference between a large state university that relies mainly on grades and SAT/ACT scores, while smaller liberal arts colleges include recommendation letters and extra-curricular activities as an important component of their admissions process, too. The school also has a slightly different mission. Similarly, other cities that also have gifted and talented programs also do not rely solely on an exam because they are much smaller systems with much smaller programs. Those who want to eliminate the exam continue to say that even the elite Ivy League schools do not rely on one exam. Here is another point both sides get wrong. The Specialized High Schools are not high school versions of Ivy League schools, contrary to what many believe.

Admitting 20% of students from high poverty middle schools who scored just below the cutoff score of their first-choice school is a start. This was the purpose of the original Discovery program, which was also mandated by the Calandra-Hecht law of 1971 but eliminated during the Bloomberg administration, but it will be on a much larger scale. Just as with the Discovery program, this may also benefit low-income Asian students who attend one of these high poverty schools whose parents can not afford to send them to a for-profit test prep program.

State Senators Toby Ann Stavisky and Jamaal T. Bailey, both alumni of Bronx Science, have introduced a bill that will screen 6th-grade students who may potentially do well on the SHSAT, which is supported by the president of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Association. Senator Bailey cited how Bronx Science had opened many doors for him. Senator Stavisky has joined a list of elected officials who have been steadfast in maintaining the SHSAT as the sole criterion. She issued her statement here, where she discusses her bill and other measures to diversify the schools. The Stuyvesant High School Black Students Alumni Association has even proposed to go as far back as screening children at the Pre-K level. Students may not be prepped a half-hour a day for the OLSAT and NNAT, as some expensive preschools do, but at the very least they will have a better idea of what these exams are and what they are looking for. As an active member of my son’s PTA and volunteer for a community-social service coalition, I spent a great deal of my time reaching out to the Head Start programs in East Harlem as an effort to increase the number of East Harlem children attending our school, where the school is located.

These solutions will still not make it a perfectly fair system and the playing field completely level, and it will not address much of the institutionalized and systemic racism that disproportionately affects African-American children more than any other community of color, even before they begin school, but it will make the process much more inclusive for more students. Having said that, it will also be difficult to get any of these proposals passed, given Albany’s notorious reputation as one of the most ineffective state legislatures and a State Senate that is Republican-controlled when Senators Stavisky and Bailey are both Democrats. However, I praise our mayor and chancellor for bringing this issue to the forefront because we cannot continue to only pay lip service to a problem that has existed for far too long and can be addressed with a few short-term, tangible solutions.

Flora Ichiou Huang taught science and health education at Stuyvesant High School from 1996 to 2005. During her tenure at Stuyvesant, she developed a free after-school program for students in a nearby middle school in the Two Bridges area of the Lower East Side that prepare their students for the Specialized High School Admission. She relied on her high school students who volunteered as tutors. As a parent of a thrice exceptional child who attends one of the Specialized High Schools, as well as a preschooler who might be Twice-Exceptional, she has become a strong advocate for equity in gifted programs, working to dispel myths the public has about giftedness and the mission gifted education programs.

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