Life-long NYer advocating for excellence in STEM education! Reposts and Quotes are not necessarily endorsements. You can Direct-Message me.
New York, NY
Joined January 2019
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An inequitable geographic distribution of students who are even trying to get into specialized high schools. Awareness of, and desire to attend these science and math-focused schools must be brought to the Bronx and central-eastern Brooklyn. @BPEricAdams @rubendiazjr
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
What a disaster. So Regents stay....but don't count....but count towards accountability....but not really because they don't count so kids won't care.
yahoo.com/news/politics/arti…
Albany educrats are increasing NYS high school graduation rates without in any way improving education!
They keep hiding the truth from families by getting rid of standardized tests, inflating grades and lowering diploma requirements to pass the buck onto colleges.
The cost of remedial classes in college is effectively a tax on low-achieving students, because these courses don't earn credits towards a degree.
This is the genius of ideologues like Regent Shino Tanikawa.
tinyurl.com/bdh49rpt
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
Activists would have you believe that the 1% of funding that NYC PTAs raise has something to do with literacy outcomes. It’s simply not true, and while there might be some schools that are outliers, this appears to be yet another ham-fisted attempt to take away other people’s money.
There's a scandal fueling declining enrollment: Grade Fraud. Schools give passing grades to students who are objectively failing in math & English.
Here are 15 schools where the math course passing rate is over 70 percentage points more than the math proficiency rate based on standardized tests. The map shows the extent of Grade Fraud for middle schools citywide.
Lying to families prevents them from making timely interventions. This fraud must be stopped!
@JumaaneWilliams @DoEcorruption
ALT Adjusted proficiency is the percentage of combined Grade 8 mathematics assessment takers who either scored Level 3 or 4 on the statewide exam or took a mathematics Regents examination in lieu of that exam. Regents-only students are counted as proficient regardless of their Regents scores. Math course passing is the school's reported passing rate for mathematics courses across grades 6–8, rather than Grade 8 alone. Gap is the mathematics course passing percentage minus adjusted proficiency, measured in percentage points.
Today my office has released a major new report on student enrollment in NYC.
We found that k-12 enrollment in our public schools has fallen by 187k since 2013, with a projected decline of an additional 128k students by 2034.
As total enrollment declines, NYCPS is serving a student population with growing needs. The number of students with disabilities is increasing. In the most recent school year, approximately 73% of students were in poverty and 14% were homeless or living in temporary housing.
Our report finds the drop in enrollment is driven by declining births and families with children leaving NYC, with a particularly notable drop in public-school enrollment as students transition from elementary to middle school.
These trends have massive implications for our schools that we have only barely begin to grapple with. My hope is that this report will spur a long overdue conversation about what the era of falling student enrollment means for NYC, and what we can do to reverse or slow it. 🧵
By far the most critical school reform we need is the cheapest and easiest to implement!
Stop Lying to Families!
We can't fix problems we can't see.
When grades are inflated, corrupted by external influence, pressures for social promotion, conflicts of interest to hide incompetence, then families can't make needed interventions on a timely basis.
@MarkLevineNYC: stop this crime!
Grade accuracy is needed to hold the system accountable. Grades should objectively measure knowledge and skill mastery.
Grade fraud secured jobs for about 80,000 @NYCSchools teachers, but it robbed opportunities for over 1,200,000 children over the last 20 years.
The most critical school reform we need is also the cheapest and easiest to implement:
Stop Lying!
With Grade Fraud we can't see the problem until it's too late.
@nhannahjones wonders if she betrayed her daughter.
@nanalatinaAA knows @NYCSchools betrayed her son.
NYC public schools deceived me into thinking my son was a straight-A math student - but he can't do fractions, basic algebra trib.al/pWwmbHR
"At PS307 parent night, we were the only parents who showed up."
Integration activists like @nhannahjones are fixated only on race to explain gaps in educational outcomes. They're blind to the effect of culture and values, such as parental involvement. At parent-teacher conference nights at many high-achieving schools, the line of parents waiting for the school to open is quite long.
fordhaminstitute.org/nationa…
Same School, Different Attendance.
Integration activists are so fixated on race that they ignore culture and values. Just showing up is half the battle. This chart uses available 2024–25 NYC public middle-school data, excluding charter and mixed-grade schools. Schools are grouped into four categories based on their Economic Need Index (ENI). Within each category, attendance rates are calculated separately for Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White students, using school-level averages weighted by each racial group's enrollment.
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
This is my yearbook picture. A diverse student body, reflecting a diverse city. Stop making excuses for these folks and fix the damn schools. Almost 60% of the Black kids in NYC can’t read at grade and you all are worried about the SHSAT?!?
The Hecht-Calandra Act is a NYS law that waves a magic wand to stop race discrimination.
Hecht-Calandra mandates a specific algorithm that must be used to determine admissions for NYC's specialized high schools, based solely on a multiple-choice standardized test (no essays) of mathematics and verbal reasoning that is scored by machines, not humans. This ties the hands of admissions officers, who have no choice and are forced to admit high scoring students.
For 55 years Hecht-Calandra has promulgated a specific admissions process that is an objective, transparent single standard of merit that prevents the possibility of discrimination by race, gender and other protected classes and minimizes the possibility of corruption.
Is there anything like Hecht-Calandra in the USA, if not the world?
We must keep the Hecht-Calandra Act!
The Supreme Court can't waive a magic wand and stop admissions officers intent on discriminating from doing so.
Having been through the application process with a new college student recently, the obvious way of doing it is to have leading essay questions about your background, and give implicit preference to those who talk about their experiences as a ____ person.
And you can also look at extracurriculars and favor those who were involved in minority student organizations.
IOW, even if admissions officials aren't able to see which box students checked, and don't have explicit "goals" for admission the way they used to, they can still discriminate if they choose to.
I guess @mattyglesias' point is that Harvard's personality score is plummeting.
25
Experts Are Confused by Harvard’s Race Data. Here’s Why.
The number of students not reporting their race has been growing.
thecrimson.com/article/2024/…
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
Blacks are 19% of @NYCSchools enrollment yet make up 80% of the failing kids who can't read or do math on a proficient level. Most of state prison inmates attended failing city schools and are themselves barely literate. Yet Banks & Co. won't blame black & Latino leaders at DOE.
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
You can’t buy your way into NYC’s Specialized High Schools. Can’t say the same for Dalton and Ivy League Schools. And the Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals too. Which are more prestigious?
NO! It has been stopping anti-black discrimination for almost a century!!!
Learn SHSAT's true history in this testimony: teapawt.net/STEMExcelNYC/status/20…
"It was explicitly to stop white flight. It was trying to advantage white students."
The SHSAT's origin story, in David R. Jones's own words.
Full ep: youtu.be/tHJZq9JEYIU?is=m1f3…
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
This is literally what every model showed would be the result of admissions without racial discrimination against Asian Americans.
Except Harvard is now discriminating against white students more because it thinks that is more acceptable.
It isn't.
Either everyone is equal, or everyone is vulnerable to racism.
Americans should not support racial discrimination against anyone, for any reason. There are no good reasons.
STEM Education Excellence retweeted
"during the last school year, a council of educators at both Palo Alto high schools rejected the [advanced math] course, arguing it would serve few students and set back equity and students’ well-being"
Right, math is harmful. Come on! What are we doing?
“If teaching math can harm students, then we have a lot bigger issues to talk about than whether to offer this course,” Nguyen told the Chronicle.
Indeed.
Brian Conrad, a Stanford mathematician, told the Chronicle that he felt math was treated as a “punching bag” for equity and mental health concerns.
“The school doesn’t cut sports teams simply because some kids are far more talented at sports,” he said.
“Why is it that the teaching of math generates much more controversy than other subjects?”
sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti…
Too many people want the easy, quick, racist fix of lowering expectations just for black and Latino students, instead of helping them learn more. When your child underperforms on a test, if your attitude is to always blame the test then you're harming your child.
Tonight, I was in Harlem to speak up for the Specialized High Schools and the SHSAT. The live podcast event brought together elected officials, educators, and activists pushing to repeal Hecht-Calandra. @AliciaHyndman will carry the bill in the upcoming legislative session.
Black students excelled on the test. There were 303 Black students at Stuyvesant in 1975. When I attended Bronx Science, 500 (15%) were Black. In 1980, Brooklyn Tech was majority Black.
What changed? Fix that. The test isn't the problem.
Watch the full podcast: youtube.com/live/0oS22tRctKw…