It’s time to end the Specialized High School Admissions Test

To the Editor:

Good for the city council members who want holistic high school admission. Boo to Eric Dinowitz who thinks it’s okay to keep the Specialized High School Admissions Test in place. Research on the SHSAT shows its results are biased against females and people of color — especially Latinx and Black NYC students — and poor and working-class folks. No other city in the country has one flawed standardized test as the sole admission criteria for specialized high schools.

Former Mayor DeBlasio said he’d get rid of it and didn’t. Both former Mayor Eric Adams and current Mayor Zohran Mamdani are for keeping it. Mamdani benefited from it as a Bronx Science alumnus. But he also wants us to desegregate the most segregated public school system in the country. A really fast way to do that would be to get rid of the SHSAT and put in the top students from each district citywide. No more standardized testing. Instead, everyone would have a fair shot geographically.

Right now, it depends on test prep and families that have the time and resources to make that test prep happen. Nationwide colleges have been dropping the equally unsuccessful SAT and ACT. Both exams are flawed and do not predict success in college. What does? The quality of high school curriculum and high school grades. If we let teachers teach creative, high-level curricula at all grade levels rather than try and install one-size-fits-all curricula, we’d be well on our way.

You also want to become familiar with the country’s largest group challenging standardized testing and the harm it causes nationwide: Fair Test.

We fail our students with ridiculous amounts of state testing that has not shown any success in increasing student success nor instruction no matter how many ways they change it. Let teachers teach. The only accurate assessment of student learning is the international PISA exam at the high school level. We simply don’t need to enrich testing companies any further nor take away from instructional time for our students at all levels.

As a professor of education at Lehman College, I encourage your reporters to reach out to my colleagues who are also experts in the field.

STUART CHEN-HAYES, Ph.D.
Professor, Counselor Education
Lehman College

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