The New York City school controversy shows why standardized testing is broken

When news broke this week that only seven black students were accepted into New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, an elite public school that supposedly only takes the most advanced students in the city, I wasn’t surprised. In my 14-year career as a middle school math teacher in Manhattan with majority black or Latinx students, I’ve had thousands of kids who were rejected from magnet public schools like Stuyvesant. It breaks my heart every time.

Every year, sometime in March, thousands of New York City adolescents receive a letter that tells them which high school selected them. That school day is always a tough one. Some students run up and down the halls, excitedly telling their friends about where they will be spending the next four years. Others, disappointed in their placement, sit solemnly or find a comforting shoulder to lean on.

I’ve had to console far too many brilliant students who didn’t get chosen for the high school they wanted to go to. They checked off all the proverbial boxes: great attendance, high grades, strong work ethic, and had positive relationships with adults and peers. They studied hard for the Specialized High School Admission Test — an assessment given to eighth or ninth graders for entry into eight of the elite magnet public schools in New York City — for months. Because a student’s score on that test is the only criterion for high school admissions, the stressful three hours spent taking this exam could determine a student’s future.

As a teacher, I try to assure my students that they will be fine regardless of which school they attend. But I often wonder if we educators are doing a disservice — and perpetuating the lie of meritocracy — by continuing to tell kids that if they work hard and excel then they can get what they want in life.

Make no mistake: New York City is burning. But unlike the literal and metaphorical burning of the Bronx in the 1970s, the latest fire is happening in our education system as schools continue to segregate at alarming rates. Only 190 of the 4,798 slots, or 3 percent, in the eight major specialized high schools went to black students. This is in a city where a quarter of NYC’s public-school students are black.

None of this is by accident. Some forty years after Stuyvesant High School opened, New York State passed the Calandra-Hecht Act in 1971 which stated that “admissions to [these specialized high schools] shall be solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination.” The bill was passed to preempt city investigations as to whether these institutions were racially discriminatory.

Essentially, these schools enshrined into law the right to ignore school performance, grades, interviews, standardized state exams, or any other qualification in favor of a test that rarely aligns with the standards they learn in school, tacitly keeping these schools out of reach for under-resourced students and schools. The specialized high schools continue to exemplify why New York City has the most segregated school system in the country.

The Specialized High School Admission Test, much like the IQ tests of yore and the SAT or ACT of the present, has been gamed since its inception. Everything from expensive test prep centers concentrated in specific neighborhoods to private tutors who spend hours with students across the city helps exacerbate admissions, and with it racial disparity.

Any number of initiatives may provide free resources for students to improve their scores. But the history of schooling suggests this will only push the already privileged to seek more advantages. Even if we buy the premise that the test is a valid assessment, which it isn’t, we already see how the multimillion dollar test prep industry makes the prospect of taking this test daunting for black and brown children in our city.

In Nicolas Lehman’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, he argues that “the study of human intelligence had always attracted people with a certain cluster of beliefs, even before there were IQ tests around for use as evidence.” In the early 1900s, our country had become fascinated with the study of eugenics. IQ tests became a tool for pundits to argue that people of darker skins were intellectually inferior.

These days, standardized tests don’t just create inequitable conditions for schools; they also bolster arguments of those who already preferred to consolidate education to the privileged few. In historian Horace Mann Bond’s 1924 paper “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” Bond brings this point home: “[T]o claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.”

In other words, standardized testing is a tool for structural racism, not a way to eliminate it.

Especially tragic is that so much of this debate ignores the brilliance that I get to witness on a daily basis from my students of color. I’ve seen the ways my students master scientific notation and systems of equations better than I could at their age. I hear them debate each other — often in vociferous ways — on whether a set of relations determines a function. I, and so many of their teachers, believe in their present and future.

My students deserve high-level academic experiences regardless of whether their school is specialized or not. That starts with abolishing this test, which simply does not reflect a student’s true academic potential. (Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he wants to end the SHSAT, which was met with opposition.) We need to support programs that reserve a set of seats for disadvantaged kids, such as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Discovery Program. We need a multi-faceted approach that tends to years’ worth of work, not just one exam that’s not even aligned to the standards students get taught in school.

As a middle school teacher, I long for the day when students can say, “Maybe I didn’t get into the school I wanted to attend, but I got into a school that loves me back.”

Jose Vilson is a New York City public school teacher. He is the author of This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education. He has spoken about education, math, and race for a number of organizations and publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, TED, El Diario / La Prensa and the Atlantic. He’s a National Board Certified teacher, a Math for America Master Teacher, and the executive director of EduColor, an organization dedicated to race and social justice issues in education.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.