How the Other Half Learns

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The New York Sun

This weekend and next, thousands of eighth- and ninth-graders will compete for seats at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and half a dozen other schools that base their admissions on the competitive Selective High School Admissions Test. The pressure and anxiety surrounding the test is enormous, but so is the potential reward. Stuyvesant sends more students to Harvard than any other high school in America, public or private. Gain admission and you have grabbed the brass ring on the public education carousel.

I was curious if any of my brightest former students are taking the SHSAT, so last weekend I contacted some of them — kids who were solidly above grade level when they were my 5th graders at a public school in the South Bronx. Only two were even aware of the test. Of the two, only one, a current seventh-grader, is actively preparing for next year’s test.

In truth, by the standards of thousands of other high-achieving middle-schoolers, even this one girl’s efforts can hardly be described as “actively preparing.” Josephine takes a test prep class at her middle school on Wednesday afternoon and goes to school on Saturdays for extra science and math classes. She expressed a mild irritation at having to sit through the extra instruction. “I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s really hard.” “It’s one of those glaring symbols of the two New Yorks,” the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, Joe Williams, said to me last week. “The one where families obsess and pay for tutoring for years before the exams come, and those who have no idea there is a test.”

He’s right. Ask about the SHSAT in the South Bronx and you’re greeted with blank stares. Ask at my daughter’s Upper East Side private school and the conversation is very different. One parent described preparing her son for the test as complex and stressful, and called the $3,500 spent on private tutors a “luxury we can barely afford.” But it’s a modest amount compared to what other families spend. For well-off New Yorkers, a coveted seat at a free public high school like Bronx Science or Stuyvesant makes the money spent on tutoring an opportunity cost. It’s a fraction of what they might otherwise pay for their children to attend an elite prep or boarding school, where tuition routinely hits $30,000 a year. “The prospect of a mainstream high school is too scary,” this parent admitted, “and the likelihood of receiving a generous enough scholarship in a private school is never certain.” For the families of children like my former students, private tutoring fees of $100 an hour or more are obviously out of the question. Small wonder, then, that my students are unaware of the test. The race has ended before it’s begun.

A study released last month by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation should have gone off like a bomb in education circles. It has caused barely a ripple. Titled “The Achievement Trap,” the study noted that our high-achieving lower-income students are all but ignored. “Educators, policymakers, and the public assume they can fend for themselves,” the report noted, “when facts show otherwise.”

The study focused on the students I call the “not your problem” kids. As a teacher in my first year, I made the mistake of expressing concern to an assistant principal

about a handful of bright students in my class who were clearly bored and ahead of the other students. “Those kids are not your problem,” she said dismissively. The implication was clear: In a system that judges schools by the percentage of its kids reading at grade level, the advanced students were finished products.

We talk a good game when it comes to high expectations. But the reality is that we’re so busy — and challenged — trying to get our below-grade level students to the starting line, that our kids who are already there are not being given the tools they need to effectively compete for elite educational opportunities. As educators, we pat ourselves on the backs and lie to ourselves that we are doing well by these kids because they test at or above grade level on a state reading or math exam once a year. In truth, we neglect to give these students the solid academic foundations they need to hold their own against their more privileged — not more gifted — counterparts.

It is a sad irony of the laudable movement to raise school standards and expectations. We have shifted our focus to the most underserved and assumed the most capable will be fine. They won’t. The No Child Left Behind Act has come to mean no child gets ahead. A potentially worse unintended consequence is looming: the merit pay proposal announced last week by the Department of Education. It’s a worthy and well-intentioned reform aimed at raising the bar in our lowest-achieving schools. But if it’s predicated solely on test scores it could create a financial incentive to further ignore our brightest low-income kids.

Meanwhile, back at the education carousel, thousands of New York brightest and best-supported students are lining up to ride and try their hand at grabbing that brass ring. For most of our highest achieving low-income urban students, however, it will remain tantalizingly out of reach. Millions more don’t even know the fair is in town.

A former public school teacher, Robert Pondiscio is presently writing a book on public and private schools in New York City.


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