What's riding on them for NYC students
NYC fifth graders are not allowed to apply to some of the city’s selective middle schools and programs unless they score at or above a certain level on state tests. At these schools, where the number of available seats is a small fraction of the number of would-be applicants, state test scores are used to shrink the applicant pools to manageable levels.
According to Clara Hemphill’s New York City’s Best Public Middle Schools (2nd ed.), the following schools and programs are among those setting hard-and-fast minimum ELA and math scores for applicants:
Simon Baruch Middle School, MS 104 (Manhattan)The Lab School for Collaborative Studies (Manhattan)Robert F. Wagner Middle School, MS 167 (Manhattan)East Side Middle School (Manhattan)- The Anderson Program at PS 9 (Manhattan)
- Delta Honors Program at Booker T. Washington School (Manhattan)
- William Alexander School, MS 51 (Brooklyn)
- Sunset Park Prep Academy (Brooklyn)
[Important update, and a small piece of good news, on this point: Officials at Region 9 inform us that their middle schools no longer use state test scores to set an applicant cut-off point. Any student may apply to these schools. But Region 9 middle schools do continue to use state scores as a factor in admissions -- see below.]
[We're told that two of the programs listed above, the Delta Program and the Anderson Program, have used a combined math-ELA score of 1385 as an applicant cut-off point, which has been in place for several years. Imagine the response if an elite college announced that it would not accept applications from students scoring below, say, 1385 on their SAT's. No respectable college would invest such weight in a single test (would they?) -- even one designed specifically for the purpose of evaluating college-bound students. Remember, the state's tests are NOT designed for middle-school admissions evaluations. For one thing, they're taken only halfway through the 4th grade....]
Many other selective schools, though they don't cut off applications based on state test scores, do require that students provide the scores when they apply, and they use them in their admissions determinations (how much weight they're given varies widely).
This is a clearly inappropriate use of the ELA test – even in a “good” year. In a “bad” year like 2006, when the design of the writing test is badly botched, what it amounts to is this: the thousands of students who apply to the city’s selective middle schools will be judged based on how they responded to the state’s nonsensical writing questions. If a student failed to get the “right” answer on this year’s “Brownie the Cow” question – or if the grader decided her essay rated a “3” rather than a “4” – she may be excluded from the middle school of her choice.