Opinion Piece from The Hechinger Report: New York City’s new middle school admissions will test white parents
The recent news that New York City’s Department of Education will suspend the use of fifth graders’ prior test scores or grades as admissions criteria for some of the most sought-after middle schools — known as screened middle schools — marks a huge, even if temporary departure from the educational system’s overreliance on test scores as a central measure of students’ “ability.”
This policy change creates a real test for more affluent white parents who say they live in New York City because of the diversity and then send their children to segregated schools.
(Featured image is ““Blackboard” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine and is marked with CC0 1.0)
I read the linked article and nowhere does it say what criteria they are going to be using instead of tests. My suspicion is that any criteria more subjective than testing will only create more scope for racism.Report
The linked article was a great example of pretzel logic heavily salted with confirmation bias.
I wonder if we asked her to authentically voice an alternative explanation of the situation if she even could.Report
One has to wonder whether the test scores, which are too often correlated with race and class due to their cultural biases and the unequal prior academic opportunities that students have had,
Objection! Facts not in evidence!
“Cultural bias” being the cause of class and racial gaps in test scores is not even a hypothesis at this point, just a meme. It’s accepted as true not on the basis of the evidence, but purely on the basis of being the most ideologically palatable explanation.
Furthermore, the claim that the low test scores are due to unequal prior academic opportunities is hard to square with the earlier claim that the schools these students are attending are, in fact, perfectly good schools.Report
I predict that the elite will continue to love living in a diverse city while they pay for private school for their kids….if they don’t leave the city due to covid.Report
Two thoughts:
Yet another data point demonstrating how deeply embedded racism is in American culture, warping every institution and process.
And the startling point which was not even remarked upon: That in America in the 21st century, a child’s future is determined by their test scores at age eight.
By the age of eight, the child’s future life- Job opportunities, social status- is being foreclosed, with all the possible doors swinging shut and paths vanishing.
Schools aren’t seen as a shared common good providing benefits to all of society, but a scarce and dwindling one, and our only policy choices are who gets a seat on the lifeboat, and who gets tossed overboard.
And it is so ordinary and accepted, as to be barely worth a mention.Report
That in America in the 21st century, a child’s future is determined by their test scores at age eight*.
*Not actually true. Your life isn’t over if you don’t get into a selective middle school. And getting into one doesn’t make you set for life. Parents believe that getting into selective primary and secondary schools matters a lot, but the evidence for this is pretty weak. See, for example, this study from the Minneapolis Fed (PDF):
So in this study, the only positive effect they found from getting into a selective high school was having a more enjoyable high school experience, and it may actually have made lower-income students less likely to get into a selective university.Report
That’s not supposed to be a poem. I didn’t expect the comment processor to preserve the whitespace.Report
Chip over states his point but a lot of brass ring jobs seemed in the private and public spheres seemed reserved for an ever restricted number of schools in each country.Report
I think the core issue may be that people and policymakers put far more faith in what a ‘good school’ can do as an equalizer than is really merited. My suspicion has long been that the differences result more from congregation of households than anything actually happening within school walls. Yea, it’s exacerbated by the fact that public schools are paid for by property taxes but the real driver in diffetences in performance is what’s happening in the students’ homes.Report
You’re talking about universities, though, aren’t you? Universities matter more, but according to the study I linked, getting into a selective high school doesn’t seem to help you get into a good university, and may actually hurt you. So it’s very doubtful that getting into a selective middle school matters very much at all for long-term life prospects.
Well, there’s the galaxy-brain take, where getting into a selective middle school makes it harder to get into a selective high school, and thus ultimately helps you get into a selective university.Report
This seems to be a bit of a troll post. The group that tends to protest these changes the loudest in New York are Asian parents because they believe getting rid of s system based on testing and grade scores screws their children more than that of any other group. Non-Asian liberals like to look over this but a lot of Asian-Americans believe that they will be the sacrifice if affirmative action passes. They won’t benefit from it and don’t have the connections to get around it. From what I can tell they are either told to be on the right side of history being enough or that their concerns are dismissed either as false consciousness they got from white conservatives or just that they don’t count.Report