OK, flashbacks to middle school! The NY Times finally gets around to noticing that DeBlasio's plan to make the top eight NYC high schools less selective will also put the top middle schools in a spot. (I thought I had posted on this; I know I tweeted.)
Eventually they may bring themselves to report on why or whether the city could simply open more selective schools to serve this surfeit of talented kids. Bloomberg added four (five?) in 2002/2006 ( HSAS, HSMSE, and QHSSYC in 2002, Brooklyn Latin in 2006) . DeBlasio can't add any? OK, he could but there is a problem - if he opens new schools with, hmm, a more racially acceptable admissions standards they may not achieve the same academic and public stature as the current group of selective schools. De Blasio really needs to combine opening new schools with crushing the standards at the current ones. Or hope that the now less selective schools can ride on their legacy, for a while anyway.
And for Bonus Reporting, since the big concern is racial diversity they could examine the racial mix of the 'near miss' kids who just miss the cutoff for the selective schools on the current test. I will re-find the link regarding the NYC Discovery program (here, a pale substitute), but the gist is, the near-misses look just like the winners - too Asian and white.
For the third year in a row, a smaller share of black and Hispanic students are benefiting from a program designed to boost diversity at the city’s elite and hyper-segregated high schools.
The city’s recent expansion of the program has disproportionately benefited Asian students, who are already overrepresented at the eight specialized high schools, according to new data.
...
In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, white and Asian students comprised 78 percent of the students who were offered admission through Discovery, a slight increase from the previous year. By contrast, black and Hispanic students made up between 18-20 percent of the program’s offers, a percentage that has been shrinking since 2015.
Advocates who are pushing the city to diversify the schools say the latest data proves more aggressive efforts are needed.
“It’s clear at this point that it’s not an effective approach,” said Lazar Treschan, youth policy director at the Community Service Society and who has studied specialized high school admissions.
MORE: Lots of background in this recent Atlantic article. Note the creative tension between these two ideas:
First, why Stuyvesant works:
This peer effect is critically important for understanding how Stuyvesant alums turned out, and has a simple lesson for all schools: If there is a critical mass of achievement-oriented kids (and it doesn’t have to even be the majority at a school), it’s going to have a positive impact on the rest of the student body. There’s a student-driven culture of achievement at Stuyvesant—one that is independent of parents, teachers, and administrators—that raises everyone’s game.
Second, De Blasio's new plan to send the top 7% from every middle school:
Whatever the merits of de Blasio’s proposal, it would have a limited effect on the system-wide problem of school inequity he’s interested in fixing, as specialized high schools only account for about 6 percent of seats in the city’s public high schools. (It may, however, have a larger impact on diversifying the city’s middle schools, in that it could incentivize parents to choose “worse” schools for their kids, where those kids might have a better shot at finishing at the top of their class and thus gain entry to a specialized high school.)
My concern has been that the magnet middle schools cannot survive once parents realize their child will be on the bench in the majors instead of starring in Double-A.
So the question is, as these talented, Stuyvesant-capable kids spread out across the city, will they reach critical density in other middle schools? Or will the cream be diluted down to tastelessness?
YET ANOTHER WORRY - THE BALANCE OF COMPETITION AND COLLABORATION: Under the current rules, each kid taking the high school test is competing against every other kid in the city. If Sally helps Johnny with his math skills that has only a miniscule chance of boosting Johnny past Sally for the last of the several thousand seats in the program. Twenty kids in an advanced math class can really believe that if they all work hard and help each other they will all advance on the test.
But in a school with two hundred eight-graders, under deBlasio's plan only fourteen kids will move up, no matter how much they learn and how proficient they become at math. Does this change the risk/reward of Sally helping Johnny? Well, yes - six kids in that advanced class won't be moving up. Sorry. Avoiding the bottom six may become a bit of an academic focus in a way that does not encourage team building. That does not have to be the case, and there is already a similar dynamic in trying our for sports teams and school plays but still - eventually some experts may chime on on just what the impact might be. Re-imagining 'Hunger Games' as an academic process may not be the best idea yet from de Blasio.
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