The Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) board voted late Wednesday night to renew the controversial Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) testing contract for New York City public schools. The test had been criticized as pro-segregationist since few Black and Latino students pass.
“This is a difficult vote and I understand that there’s been a lot of discussion, a lot of dialogue on this,” said PEP Chair Gregory Faulkner. “My feeling is that I am convinced that if we were to defeat this contract we would really cripple the incoming freshman class and that’s not a position I would feel comfortable [in].”
NCS Pearson, Inc. (Pearson) is a testing company that has been designing and administering the city’s SHSAT paper exam for decades. It has come under stark criticism for high-profile test errors and a severe data breach in 2018, prompting New York State to drop the company as its vendor for its English and Math exams. Despite these issues, which several attendees at the PEP meeting testified about, PEP voted to renew a 5-year, $17 million contract with them to administer a new digitized version of the SHSAT test next year.
The city’s Department of Education (DOE), under the state’s Hecht-Calandra Act (1971), is required to have the SHSAT exam to determine which eighth and ninth grade students get into a handful of elite specialized high schools.
Out of 400 high schools, only nine are specialized.
Asian American advocates, Asian immigrant New Yorkers, and elected officials showed up in droves on Wednesday to testify in favor of keeping the SHSAT test. They testified that it was a “race blind” merit-based test. Many criticized the DOE for “politicizing” the test and pitting Asian and Black and Brown communities against one another as opposed to investing more money into adequate test preparedness in historically disadvantaged school districts.
“The NYC Panel on Education Policy should not eliminate the testing system for specialized high schools,” said U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer in a social media post prior to the PEP vote. “Derailing the SHSAT would lead to chaos and unfairly deny opportunity to countless students who work so hard with hopes of admission to one of the superb specialized HS’s.”
Still, the SHSAT has been denounced as inequitable because the majority of Black and Latino students don’t usually get in. This highlights a concerning racial and ethnic disparity within the city’s public school system. For example in 2023, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan selected seven Black students, 20 Latino students, 489 Asian students, and 158 white students.
Students with disabilities also received fewer offers of admission to specialized high schools and they enrolled nearly 12 times less than their peers without disabilities, according to a New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) review of the SHSAT process this year.
During former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s time in office, the city proposed removing the SHSAT test in an effort to promote more diversity in specialized schools but received immense amount of pushback from Asian communities. Mayor Eric Adams went a different direction and suggested creating more specialized high schools in more school districts citywide.
“The SHSAT unfairly disadvantages poor Black and Brown kids, and Pearson has willingly ignored this and has made a number of other major missteps,” said Congressmember Jamaal Bowman ahead of the PEP vote on Dec. 18. Bowman is a former principal and school founder from the Bronx.
“We cannot allow this test to continue to segregate our public schools,” said Bowman. “Every child in NYC, and across the nation, deserves an exemplary education that unlocks their unique brilliance and cultivates a generation equipped to take on 21st century challenges. This means we have to value diverse intelligence and foster school cultures grounded in joyful, rigorous learning across a wide range of subjects and skills. Kids deserve experiential learning opportunities, and the time and space for curiosity, discovery, and creativity. These pursuits cannot be bubbled in on a multiple choice scan sheet.”
A few members of the public who testified on Dec. 18, and some PEP board members in their comments, shared Bowman’s sentiment that the SHSAT test is designed to segregate Black and Brown students from the city’s top schools. Some of the PEP board’s Black and Brown members abstained from the vote or said no to the SHSAT contract.
“You cannot convince me that a test is fair when it produces those results,” said Bronx Community Education Council (CEC) Presidents’ Representative Thomas Sheppard, a dad to six children and a U.S. Navy veteran. “The test is working exactly how it was designed to work.”
Faulkner added that he wants to lobby the City Council to get more resources and test prep in Black and Brown communities with staggeringly few offers and admissions.