https://www.rockawave.com/articles/school-scope-315/
School Scope: Those
SHSAT Tests, Part 1
By Norm Scott
When I was an 8th
grade student in the 1957-58 school year at George Gershwin JHS, a jewel of a school
recently opened on Linden Blvd in East NY section of Brooklyn, male students
were offered an opportunity to take an after school class in prepping for the
test for Brooklyn Tech, at the time the only specialized high school that went
from 9th-12th grade. The others, Stuyvesant and Bronx
Science began in the 10th grade and for those schools the test was
taken in the 9th grade. As a new school Gershwin wanted to make its
bones by being able to boast about how many students were accepted to the
specialty schools.
When the test came I joined hundred if not thousands of others in the massive auditorium at Tech. I was nervous but felt I was ready and I attacked the test with vigor but also worked my way through the questions carefully. Time was called when I still hadn’t completed about a third of the test. I didn’t even have time to randomly fill in the blanks which would have given me a chance based on chance to get about a fourth of them correct. I was stunned at my failure. Apparently I didn’t learn the most important factor in test taking – watch the time.
Naturally I was not accepted
and it was clear to me that the 8 students from my test prep class who made it
were much smarter than me. I was friendly with some but noticed their absence
in the 9th grade. I never saw them again.
When I entered my local high
school, Thomas Jefferson, the next year, a few classmates who had taken the
test in the 9th grade and been accepted to Stuyvesant were gone. We
never saw them again either. I don’t remember if test prep was offered that
year, but even if it was I was too demoralized to subject myself to that test
taking experience again. I should mention that none of the missing students on
both occasions were some of the incredibly smart girls in our class since girls
were not allowed into the elite schools.
Now I should point out that
at Jefferson I was among an elite group of about 200 students who were in
“honor school”, a sub-school of college bound, and over the next three years we
received what I considered a college-level education. But Jefferson also wanted
to compete for elite status and considered gaining a NY State scholarship a
measure of success. Thus we were pulled from gym cycles over the next year and
a half to prep us for that test.
The point is that schools
were offering test prep as far back as the 50s but it was free to all students
who were deemed as having potential.
I raise this story as an
intro to a series of columns on the controversy over the Specialized High
School Admissions Test (SHSAT). State law now mandates that this test be the
only determining factor for admission to some elite schools, counter to the
position taken by Mayor De Blasio and school chancellor Carranza who argue for
a wider admission policy that would make the schools more diverse. The Asian
community is up in arms since Asian students have had the greatest success and
would lose seats if changes were made. This has created splits with the Black
and Latinx who have been fundamentally shut out of these schools. In the 80s
and 90s the numbers of students coming out of these communities was much
higher. So the test was not a barrier then. What happened?
The NYT attempted to answer
the question in this June 3 article: How New York’s Elite Public Schools Lost
Their Black and Hispanic Students: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/nyregion/nyc-public-schools-black-hispanic-students.html
Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast,
Revisionist History did a story on the LSAT test for law school titled: The Tortoise
and the Hare that addresses the issue of why tests are timed and how that
affects results. Are we testing knowledge and skills or speed? Do we want
lawyers to be tortoises or hares? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revisionist-history/.
I went from a tortoise when I took the Tech test in 1958 to a hare when I received a NY State scholarship in 1962. But was I any smarter other than having figured out how to use limited time on tests to my advantage?
Norm, when he has the time, still
blogs at ednotesonline.com.
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