Politics Brooklyn Boro

Public advocate candidates blast mayor’s SHSAT plan

February 15, 2019 By Paula Katinas Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Benjamin Yee, Jared Rich and David Eisenbach all decried the lack of diversity in the city’s top high school but all three said Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan is wrong. Eagle photo by Paula Katinas
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Three of the candidates running in the special election for New York City public advocate criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio’s controversial proposal to scrap the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), charging that the mayor was going about the task of increasing racial diversity in elite schools the wrong way.

David Eisenbach, Jared Rich and Benjamin Yee all said they favored other approaches. The three men appeared at a Feb. 13 candidates’ forum sponsored by the United Progressive Democratic Club and held at the club at 29 Bay 25th St. in Bath Beach.

“I don’t understand why the mayor is messing with great schools while we have so many failing schools,” said Eisenbach, a history professor at Columbia University. “This is not a solution.”

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Instead of changing the admissions process to the city’s elite high schools, the mayor should be concentrating his efforts on reducing class size and getting parents more involved in their children’s schools, according to Eisenbach.

Rich, a lawyer specializing in housing cases, called the SHSAT situation “a complex issue” and called for additional funding to pay for test prep courses for underprivileged students. The test shouldn’t be eliminated, he said, noting that students who work hard and study for the exam should be respected. “We’ve got to reward the kids who work hard. But we have to acknowledge that some kids do not have the same advantage,” he said.

Yee, who teaches coding and is the Democratic district leader of the 66th Assembly District in Greenwich Village, charged that de Blasio should consider changing the education system for the grades prior to high school. “You cannot fix outcomes in the high schools,” said Yee, who is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science.

It would be better for the mayor to “fix the funding formulas for elementary schools and middle schools,” Yee said. That would give students in all schools a chance, he said.

In an effort to secure more racial diversity in the city’s top high schools, de Blasio has proposed eliminating the SHSAT as the sole standard to gain admission and replace it with a system in which elite high schools would be required to reserve a certain number of seats for the top performers from each middle school.

The proposal would give African-Americans, Latinos and other minority students a better chance of gaining admission, supporters of the mayor’s plan said. Currently, nine percent of the students in elite high schools are black and Latino. But those students make up 68 percent of all New York City high school students and are under-represented in the top schools, according to the mayor’s office.

But opponents have argued that many of the students getting into schools like Brooklyn Technical High School and Stuyvesant High School are Asian-Americans and that they gain admission by working hard and studying to prepare for the SHSAT.

Changing the system would be unfair to them, opponents of the mayor charged.

“The public advocate office must be the voice to protect people to fight on issues like quality education for our children, including the fight to keep SHSAT, expanding gifted programs for all high performing children and quality remedial programs for underperforming children to ensure all children will achieve their highest growth of quality education,” of life for all New York City people,” Democratic Assemblymember William Colton said in a statement. The United Progressive Democratic Club is Colton’s home club.

Eisenbach, Rich and Yee are three of the candidates in a crowded field of more than a dozen hopefuls running in the non-partisan special election on Feb. 26 to fill the public advocate’s seat left vacant when Letitia James won election as New York State attorney general in November.

The field of candidates also includes City Councilmembers Rafael Espinal, Jumaane Williams and Eric Ulrich, Assemblymembers Michael Blake and Daniel O’Donnell and former Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.


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2 Comments

  1. Benny

    I mostly support deBlasio but wow I would love to see him and Carranza tarred and feathered and driven out of town for their foolish and short-sighted attack on the specialized high schools. If you have **so much faith** in your new admissions protocol, then open up five new High Schools and fill them with your racially balanced vision of the future and see how they turn out. But Bronx Science and Stuy are crown jewels that serve so many immigrant and working class NYC families. In 30 years, all deBlasio will be remembered for is what they did here and now to these terrific schools.

    February 15, 2019 at 12:21 pm
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    • Queenie

      I do not support De Blascio who is creating racial tension dividing NYC. Among all those challenging schools, De Blascio and Carranza would not do much to help them but messing up specialized high schools who represent less than 5% of NYC students by leaving out 95% or more students in cold. How is it fixing educational system? It is messing up NYC schools. There are several hundreds of high schools in NYC and 9 specialized high schools of which 8 are for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Among several hundreds of high schools, there are several dozens of them are challenging schools with more than 15 are failing schools. De Blascio and Carranza don’t spend time, funding, and effort to fix them and help those struggling students but would rather messing up 8 specialized high schools. Does it make any sense? Let me tell you why! Both De Blascio and Carranza cannot close up the achievement gaps of all those schools and cannot improve those challenging schools. So, they both concocted a plan by pushing down 8 specialized high schools to appear closing up achievement gaps. Isn’t it cheating?

      February 15, 2019 at 2:53 pm
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