EDUCATION AGENDA - Doing The BEST for ALL Students In NHPS

[N'Zinga Shani]

Education Agenda: NHPS & NYC High Schools Have Similarities and Differences.  NHPS Administrators Can Learn Much by Looking at What Is Happening In New York.  We can always learn from the mistakes made by others.  Also, the "experts" are not always right.  The most important experts are the children and how they benefit from what the administration does.

By looking closely at the segment of the article posted below we learn some interesting facts about the New York City Public School system.  After reading the information and looking at the demographic data, whether we are parents, teachers, administrators or students, some interesting questions must come to mind.  Key among them are: what are our responsibility to students and to society? What kind of future are we building? Why in 2015 are we not able to provide equal access to quality education for what is already the majority of the population?

We highly recommend reading the complete article that is linked in this blog.

Proposals To Diversify NYC's Top High Schools Would Do Little To Help, Study Finds

New York City's public school system is vast, with more than a million students spread across thousands of schools. And like the city itself, it's remarkably diverse — about 15 percent Asian, just under 30 percent black, about 40 percent Latino, and about 15 percent white, with all sorts of finer shadings of ethnicity, nationality and language in that mix.

The city also boasts nine elite "specialized" public high schools — of which the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School, and Stuyvesant High School are the most difficult to get into. They're largely considered the school system's crown jewels, regularly sending students to top-tier universities. The demographics at those schools look a lot different.

Blacks and Latinos make up around 70 percent of all the kids in the city's public school system, but just a tiny share of the kids at those three schools. At Stuyvesant, generally considered the best school in the city, they made up less than 4 percent of the total student body — 113 out of 3,296 kids — this school year.

The conversation about how to boost the number of black and Latino kids at those three schools tends to focus on their narrow admissions process. There are no interviews, no applications, no required transcripts; whether a student gets in depends entirely on how she does on a 2 1/2-hour multiple choice exam called the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

(In CT we use a lottery; black parents who lived on Central Ave could not get their children into Edgewood for three years; however, as soon as they sold their house and moved to Woodbridge they were being invited to participate in the lottery for Edgewood School.  Most curious.)  In the past two years, the NHPS lottery seems to have gotten more locally friendly, but at least for this one family -- the damage had been done.  They are satisfied with the Amity School system, but would have preferred to have continued living on Central Ave in New Haven.  A few years ago OneWorld showcased the Magnet School system in New Haven Public School; you can see the entire 1-hr program linked here:  https://youtu.be/dc88PGh2APY

Critics say that all-or-nothing emphasis on the SHSAT exam hurts otherwise academically talented black and Latino kids who might otherwise get in. In 2012, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and other civil rights groups filed a formal complaint with the Department of Justice arguing that using the SHSAT as the lone metric of academic talent shuts out academically talented black and Latino students. And Bill di Blasio, the city's mayor, made the push for a more holistic set of admissions criteria part of his campaign platform when he first ran in 2013."

What is being done in NYC, New Haven and around the country to ensure that Black and Latino students become academically successful? Is it really about testing? Or is it about the attention being paid to the foundation that is not being laid? When will the fix begin?

What is the demographic make-up of Greater New Haven? Where are the better schools? What populations do they serve?  Who are the students who are succeeding in our New Haven Public Schools? New Haven has some of the best magnet schools to be found anywhere.  What populations do these schools serve? Who are the most successful students graduating from these schools? Why are not all students in these schools succeeding equally well?   What needs to be done to make that a reality?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/04/03/392366946/proposals-...

[N'Zinga Shani]

What is being done in NYC, New Haven and around the country to ensure that Black, Latino and poor students become academically successful? Is it really about testing? Or is it about the lack of attention to the academic foundation that is not being laid? When will the fix begin?