NYC OPT OUT STATEMENT ON PEARSON CONTRACT for DIGITAL SHSAT
As parents, educators, and community stakeholders in our public schools, we strongly oppose approval of the contract with Pearson to develop a digital version of the SHSAT for specialized high school admissions.
Pearson has a long rap sheet demonstrating its unfitness for even a dime of our budget.
Over the years, Pearson has had issues with erroneous scoring, online service disruptions, an extensive data breach, and more. Its poor track record led New York State to drop it as the vendor for the annual tests administered to the state’s 3rd-8th graders, joining several other states who similarly cut ties with the company. Leonie Haimson published a long list of Pearson’s errors, lapses, and literal crimes on her blog, NYC Public School Parents, including:
In 2012, the NYS exam produced by Pearson featured more than 30 errors, with faulty questions and problems with translation and scoring. One of the reading passages, The Pineapple and the Hare, was so ludicrous it was featured on John Oliver.
In 2013, Pearson’s state exams featured crass, commercial product placements as well as reading passages lifted from Pearson textbooks. According to Kathleen Porter Magee of the conservative Fordham Institute, Pearson was abusing its monopoly power in a way that "threatens the validity of the English Language Arts (ELA) scores for thousands of New York students and raises serious questions about the overlap between Pearson's curriculum and assessment divisions."
The Pearson Charitable Foundation paid a $7.7 million fine after the State Attorney General found they had broken state laws. The company also had to pay $75 million in damages plus costs to settle a lawsuit over price fixing.
Pearson was found to have made mistakes in scoring the NYC Gifted and Talented tests. Not once, but twice.
In 2015, it was discovered that Pearson was monitoring the social media of students who criticized their NJ state exams.
In 2018, Pearson’s lax security practices led to one of the largest student data breaches in history, involving probably millions of students, including many in NY. The FBI alerted Pearson to the breach in March 2019, but the company didn’t tell anyone, including the schools or the students until months later. Eventually, Pearson was fined $1M by the FEC for misleading investors about the breach.
Pearson has been subjected to dozens of investigations for discrimination against its employees on grounds of race, disability, gender, age, etc.
Given this record, what makes DOE think that Pearson is capable of developing, scoring and administering a reliable exam?
If the state imposes the SHSAT on NYC specialized schools, the state should pay for it.
If legislators upstate or on Long Island or wherever else in NY State are allowed to control admissions procedures in schools that are under the jurisdiction of New York City, which is precisely the scenario generated by the half-century-old Hecht-Calandra law, then they should back up that mandate with funds. Why should NYC taxpayers be on the hook for state interference into our schools’ admissions policy, especially to the tune of tens of millions of dollars?
There are 8 specialized high schools; only 3 are mandated to use a “competitive” exam for admissions.
Many who favor this contract are apoplectic that, without approval, admissions to the specialized high schools would be negatively impacted or even derailed entirely. They cite state law (Hecht-Calandra) to back their position. This is a misreading of state law. Most obvious, only 3 of the 8 specialized high schools are mentioned by name in Hecht-Calandra. The use of a competitive exam as the sole admissions arbiter for the other five schools could be altered or even stopped tomorrow if there were the will to do so. What’s more, Hecht-Calandra specifies a “competitive, objective, and scholastic achievement examination,” not the SHSAT per se. However, since the law currently mandates a test be used for three of the schools, and the contract is up for vote imminently, in this statement we will assume that some standardized test, most likely the SHSAT, will remain in place for the immediate future. Given that context, the question is whether the contract for its design and implementation should be awarded to Pearson, and at what cost and scope.
The SHSAT has produced decades of discriminatory outcomes.
The SHSAT requires extracurricular test preparation because it tests for skills outside of the public school curriculum. Some students, with family support, prep for the test a year or more in advance. As Akil Bello testified in a city council hearing, “Test prep will never be able to level the gaps in opportunity and outcomes engendered by the SHSAT since the duration, effectiveness, and cost of test preparation greatly vary not only by type of preparation but also by community.” As a result, today our specialized high schools, with the SHSAT as gatekeeper, are essentially segregated academies whose student bodies do not reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the city. In addition, peer-reviewed research shows the SHSAT to be biased against girls. The city should not be investing further in this particular test without, at the very minimum, conducting validity and reliability studies. According to Bello, despite numerous changes to the SHSAT over time (in number and types of items, duration, scoring algorithms, etc), “The DOE has released only one validity study in the past 30 years to substantiate the utility and predictive validity of the exam.”
Only a tiny fraction of NYC high school students attend a specialized high school.
Based on NYS enrollment data, 81,995 high school students entered 9th grade in NYC in the 2023-2024 school year. Of these, only 3,845 (or just under 5% of all entering students) entered the specialized high schools. Breaking down this number further, only 2,994 (or 3.65% of all entering 9th graders) entered the schools (Stuy, BK Tech, Bx Sci) for which Hecht-Calandra specifies a competitive exam. This translates to spending up to $23.5 million to determine who will sit in fewer than 3,000 high school seats per year. Assuming the proposed 5-year $17M contract (the $23.5M figure would be for a 2-year extension), adoption of this contract would mean that the PEP is electing to spend $1,135.60 of scarce funds per 9th grade specialized high school seat at those 3 schools, for admissions purposes alone. There are so many better and more equitable ways to allocate the department’s money. For example, the entire budgetary allocation for career and college counseling was approximately $15.5M this year, citywide. If we divide that number by the total number of 12th graders in NYC public schools (66,715), we wind up with $232/senior to spend on college and career counseling. (That number is generous as the actual figure would be less since those services typically extend to 11th graders as well for at least part of the year.) Put another way, the department spends nearly 5 times as much to figure out who sits in a specialized high school seat at one of the three Hecht-Calandra schools than it does to ensure that every senior has adequate guidance towards post-secondary success. These spending priorities are fiscally irresponsible and illogical; when allocating its budget, the department of education must look towards how to benefit the majority of students.
Computer-adaptive tests are expensive to develop but not necessarily better.
The contract under consideration appears to leave the door open for the creation of a computer-adaptive format after Year 1 of adoption, making it important to consider the potential implications of CATs.
Since each student taking a CAT is responding to a different set of questions based on how they answered earlier in the test, it is harder to review items after the test has been administered–for example, when the test taker believes that their test may have been scored incorrectly or questions the validity of a question or answer. In fact, the author of a peer-reviewed study retrieved from the National Library of Medicine concludes, “[M]ost CAT systems deprive subject matter experts of the chance to review a full test either before or after it is administered.”
CATs increase test takers’ anxiety, favor test takers who don’t need “warm up” time, and generally don’t allow test takers to go back to an item they skipped or belatedly realized should have been answered differently.
When the contract stipulates that, to serve students with accommodations, Pearson must continue to produce the standard paper-and-pencil test that has sufficed for decades, the decision to develop any digital exam, CAT or not, is clearly a matter of choice, as a digital exam is not required to comply with Hecht-Calandra. Indeed, when there are already concerns about the discriminatory outcomes for the SHSAT, adding in a digital test runs the risk of adding yet another layer of inequity. Researchers from the American Institutes for Research found that “online tests increased the gap between high- and low-performing students, primarily children from low-income families, special education students, and English language learners.” (Note on English Language Learners in the Specialized High Schools–there are currently only 4. Total! Brutal and shameful.)
Takeaways
“I fundamentally do not believe that one single test should determine access to any particular program.”--David Banks, not to mention the National Research Council, the American Educational Research Association, and pretty much anyone with a grasp of psychometric principles. Our former chancellor was right on that account, at least. For the 5 schools not mandated to admit solely based on a single “competitive” test, we don’t need the SHSAT. Now is the time to meet the moment and make this change to create more inclusive schools.
For the other 3 schools, the state should pay the costs associated with procuring a “competitive” admissions exam or of developing one that meets its requirements.
Bottom line: no one should be approving a contract with a company, Pearson, with a demonstrated track record of being unable to satisfactorily fulfill similar contracting obligations.
PDF version of this statement available here.
