New evidence of an extreme gender bias in selective high school admissions demands an independent evaluation of the exam

Correction: A reader pointed out that Al Baker of the NY Times wrote an article about the gender imbalance at the NYC specialized high schools in 2013, so the Daily News is not the first media outlet to cover this important issue.

Today, Ben Chapman of the NY Daily News wrote about the disproportionate number of girls rejected from the highly-selective Specialized high schools compared to the boys. As I was quoted in the article, "You would think that the city would be taking every step they could, to ensure that girls are accepted to these high schools at, at least the same rate as boys...Girls should have the same opportunities as boys and the data suggests that this entrance exam has a gender bias that needs to be addressed.”

I have been writing about the gender imbalance at the specialized high schools since 2010.  There has been much written about the low numbers of black and Latino students admitted through the SHSAT exam, with only 10 Black students and 27 Latino students accepted into Stuyvesant high school this year.  Indeed, in 2012, a complaint was filed with the Civil Rights office of the US Department of Education about the exam's discriminatory impact.

Meanwhile, the Mayor has continued to blame the state for the problem, which passed a law years ago requiring that the exam results be the deciding factor in three high schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech; yet in the case of the other five high schools that use the exam, their method of admissions is completely under his control.  It is also important to note that  NYC is the only district in the country with selective high schools in which a single high stakes exam is the sole criterion for admissions.

Yet today's Daily News article is the first time to my knowledge that the mainstream media has reported on the sharp gender differential between the admission rates of boys vs. girls.  Here is a chart showing a large gender gap of ten percent, with only 15.4% of girls who took the exams admitted to the specialized schools compared to 20.4% of boys:

These disparate results strongly suggests the  exam exhibits gender bias, especially as among NYC public school students, girls tend to get better grades AND better test scores than boys.  Here, for example, are their comparative scores on the 2017 state 8th grade exams:


  
You can see from the above that according to the state exams, girls obtain higher scale scores, achieve higher proficiency rates and more of them score at the highest level (level 4) in both ELA and math. 

I also checked for the gender differential on the 7th grade state 2017 math tests, since many 8th graders take the Regents exams in math instead.  Girls get higher scores on these exams as well:




In past years as well, according to this paper by Sean Corcoran and Christine Baker-Smith, if state test scores, grades and attendance from 2005-2013 were used as criteria instead of the SHSAT, girls would be 9 to 13 more points more likely to be admitted to the specialized high schools: "In fact, the gender gap would shift dramatically in favor of girls with the use of grades and State tests."

That's a far greater disparity than they found for Black or Latino students (who tend to score lower on the State exams).  Yet among similar applicants with the same performance on the State exams, girls, Blacks, Latinos  and low-income students were all significantly less likely to score high enough to be admitted to these schools, and Whites and Asians significantly more likely to be accepted.

Corcoran and Baker-Smith also said, however, that over that period, girls were less likely to apply to the specialized high schools, which is no longer seems to be the case, with more girls  now taking the SHSAT than boys. 

In 2016, after much criticism of the exam and its racially disparate results, Pearson was awarded a six-year, $13.4 million contract to improve the previous SHSAT, which was also written by the company.  This is despite the fact that Pearson is not noted for its high-quality exams, to say the least.

They did eliminate the scrambled paragraph section of the exam, and the logical reasoning section, but appear to have made few other changes, other than making the exam even longer -- to 180 minutes from 150 minutes.  They also included only non-fiction passages in the ELA section (perhaps a nod to the Common Core/David Coleman personal preference for informational texts.)  

One of the most frequent criticisms in the past has been the highly unusual way in which the SHSAT was scored, to give extra weight to students who scored exceptionally high on the math or the ELA sections, rather than those who received an overall high average score.  Apparently this remained the scoring method as late as 2016. Has the methodology changed?  Is this one of the reasons for the extreme gender disparity in the results?

In any case, whether you believe that using one high-stakes exam as the sole criterion for admissions is itself unfair and highly unreliable (as I do), it is long overdue that the SHSAT be independently evaluated for gender AND racial bias.  There have been calls for this independent evaluation as far back as 2008.  Given the latest stark disparity in admissions for girls vs boys, that should be mandatory.  Or perhaps a Title 9 complaint?  Please leave your comments below.

Below are the offer of admissions by gender and  by school; you can see that the more selective the school the more unbalanced the numbers; with Stuyvesant 58% male and 41% female.

The diminishing number of black students at NYC selective high schools

There is an interesting NY Times article about the diminishing numbers of black students at Stuyvesant and other Specialized Science High Schools (SSHS) in NYC.   It includes the following statement: 

NY Times chart

Over the years, there have been a host of efforts to increase the number of black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and the other large specialized high schools in the city, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, like making interviews and grade-point averages part of the admissions process. 

 It is linked to an article that mentions an earlier DOE program to prep promising middle school minority students for the exam (which now has been recast as a program for economically disadvantaged students and has been heavily cut back in any case.)  But it has no info that I can see about any efforts on the part of city to change the actual admissions process which is based solely on one high-stakes exam.   

When there was a push by some advocates and elected officials to make the admission process more holistic many years ago, the NY state legislature stepped in and passed a law making this impossible.  This law, the Hecht-Calandra Act was passed by the New York State Legislature in 1972: 

http://law.onecle.com/new-york/education/EDN02590-H_2590-H.html 

(b)  all specialized  senior  high  schools. The special high schools shall include the present schools known as:  The Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School,  Brooklyn Technical High School, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts in the borough of Manhattan, and such further schools which the city board may designate from time to time. The special schools shall be permitted to maintain a discovery program in accordance with the law  in effect on  the  date  preceding  the  effective  date  of this section; admissions to the special schools shall be conducted in accordance  with the law  in  effect  on  the  date preceding the effective date of this section;

 As you can see, though state law makes an exam the sole criterion for the three original specialized science HS – Stuy, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech, as well as La Guardia, which uses another pre-existing process – Joel Klein as Chancellor expanded this rigid admissions policy by mandating that the test be the only factor in admissions to Staten Island Tech, which previously had a more holistic admissions process. 

He also mandated that the test be the only criterion for admission at four more high schools established under his watch, including the HS for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, the HS of American Studies at Lehman College, Queens HS for the Sciences at York College and Brooklyn Latin.  

I don’t see that Walcott has made any move to change this, which would be totally under his control to do, nor to advocate for any change in the state law to allow this at the big three.

Moreover, the DOE has apparently refused to analyze the test to see if it is racially discriminatory, as several people have pointed out, including Joshua Feinman, who wrote about this on our blog here: 

 Excerpt: No predictive validity studies have ever been done– not only to see if the test suffers from prediction bias across genders and ethnic groups, but to see if the test is linked to any desired outcomes. In fact, the NYCDOE has never established what specific, measurable objectives the SHSAT is supposed to achieve. Without well-specified objectives and carefully constructed validity studies, there’s no way to know if these admissions criteria are serving their purpose, or if an alternative system would be more reliable.

Feinman also revealed several glaring problems with this exam, and reported that his FOIA requests to DOE for more data about the exam got no response.

 Something to think about during a week when DOE claimed that they had no choice but to respond to the FOILs for the inaccurate & unreliable Teacher Data Reports.

Closing the Achievement Gap? Black & Hispanic Students Disappear from City's Top High School

As reported today in the NY Times and the Post, a grand total of 7 black students scored high enough on the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT) to be offered admission to Stuyvesant High School. The total for Hispanic students was an equally dismal 17. The under-representation of black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant has been pointed out for a number of years (see 2006 and 2008 NY Times articles).

During my tenure as a parent and PA officer, there was much consternation about it, but of course nothing that either the PA or the school itself could do (most notably, a mentoring program for students already at Stuyvesant) could improve the dismal admission statistics. These are basically a reflection of the quality of preparation in the lower grades. No doubt the test is culturally biased, but that alone cannot explain the low numbers. And it certainly cannot explain the continuing drop in admissions, as there is no reason to believe the test has become any more culturally biased over the years.

According to the “DOE spokesman" interviewed by the Post reporter, “the demographics of those taking the test and receiving offers has stayed relatively constant in recent years.” The statistics on the DOE's own website tell a different story.

The state statistical reports for Stuyvesant (here and here) indicate that the school had 83 “Black /African-American” students in 2003-4; 75 in 2004-5; 66 in 2005-6, 66 in 2006-7, and 61 in 2007–08; the corresponding numbers for “Hispanic or Latino” are 96, 86, 99, 99 and 93. These classifications are probably somewhat fluid, but there has undoubtedly been a huge fall-off. Incidentally, the shrinking number of black students is even more dramatic when viewed against the backdrop of ever-larger freshman classes (between 2004 and 2009, the freshman class grew from about 700 to almost 1000 students).

Of course, the city's response to the continuing slide in the number of black and Hispanic students who “ace the test” (shorthand for making the cut-off for admission to Stuyvesant) has been more test prep rather than more instruction. Instead of teaching more math, science and English in K-8 (including correct verbal expression and critical reading of books and essays rather than isolated passages), DOE set up a Specialized High School Institute, which gives promising candidates “extra lessons and test-taking tips.” Predictably, the approach hasn’t yielded results. Although it seems that most people who can afford the often substantial fees have given in to SHSAT test-prep frenzy--"cram schools" in Flushing are given much of the credit for the explosion in Asian enrollment at Stuyvesant, while Kaplan and its clones are considered virtually obligatory for everyone else--there's little reason to believe test prep will make a real difference for a child who isn't already adequately prepared in the subjects the test covers.

The stories behind the statistics are instructive and heart-breaking. The 2006 New York Times article cited above reported on two kids in the city's free SHSAT test prep program, which was held at Stuyvesant. (I have edited identifying information):

[A girl], 12, said the very act of striding through Stuyvesant’s gleaming hallways made her feel smart. “You can be like, ‘I could be here, I could be in these desks in a year or two,’ ” she said during her lunch break one day. For [a boy], 12, who got an “overall excellence” medal at his sixth-grade graduation, the experience has been humbling. His teacher at [PS XXX] had called him a “walking dictionary,” but in the first seven pages of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a book he read for the institute, he found 71 new vocabulary words.

How can a few weeks of "extra lessons" and "test tips" possibly prepare these kids for the SHSAT, much less the Stuyvesant curriculum? Consider, by contrast, the experience of several kids I know, who moved to New York after going to school overseas, took the SHSAT without much preparation or even familiarity with that sort of test, "aced it" and did well at Stuyvesant. Most did not even speak English in the home, but all were well-prepared to learn what Stuyvesant can offer.

When the Post reporter called me for comment last night, I practically fell off the couch on which I was dozing. The under-representation of black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant is an old story, but a drop in the black student population from 2%-3% to less than 1% is astonishing. No matter how much BloomKlein may crow about increasing scores on dumbed- down and easily gamed tests, the proof of the pudding eventually is in how many kids get admitted to good high schools. A competitive-exam school such as Stuyvesant is not for everyone, nor would I suggest it is the only avenue to academic success. But I don't see how the administration can claim to be making progress on the racial achievement gap when the number of black kids who qualify for the city’s top high school has fallen to insignificance under their watch.