NYC OPT OUT RESPONSE:
Mayor’s admissions policy announcement 12/18/2020 

MIDDLE SCHOOL ADMISSIONS POLICY
NYC Opt Out applauds Mayor deBlasio and Schools’ Chancellor Carranza for today’s announcement eliminating state test scores from the upcoming NYC Department of Education middle school admissions process. This is a significant step and one that parents and educators in NYC Opt Out have long advocated for. (See our June 2020 statement on middle and high school admissions policy and Advocating for Fair Admissions Policy post-COVID:
NYC Opt Out Speaks Out.) Additionally, we reiterate our call for NYCDOE to assign students to middle schools via weighted lottery, similar to the model successfully implemented in Brooklyn’s District 15. We recognize that this year’s middle school admissions policy will likely result in increased academic diversity in schools, including schools where this has not traditionally been the norm. This is a win for our children, and schools should not respond to increased or unfamiliar diversity in their classrooms by instituting or doubling down on the educationally unsound practice of “tracking.” To that end, we call on NYCDOE to provide the supports (specialists, services, smaller class size, professional development, etc) that schools will need to help all students thrive in heterogeneous classrooms.

HIGH SCHOOL ADMISSIONS POLICY
We wish we could be as congratulatory on the high school front. The department’s decision to continue to allow the inclusion of test scores in high school admissions rubrics is extremely disappointing. State tests scores should never figure in admissions; they are highly inequitable and problematic.* This is especially true this year because the pandemic-induced cancellation of the tests this past spring means that students going into ninth grade will be judged and sorted based on their sixth grade selves. This is absurd. As the first year of middle school, sixth grade is a transitional year for most children and does not reliably indicate later performance. The NYCDOE’s own materials, shared in various public meetings this spring, showed that 1 in 6 seventh graders performed at least one level worse on 6th grade tests. If the NYCDOE insists on using these 6th grade test scores, we call for an expansion of the Ed Opt model so that at the very least scores will be used to distribute students into academically diverse institutions.  As this model will be new for many schools, we further call on NYCDOE to provide those schools with the extra supports they will need to succeed in its implementation.

G&T and SHSAT TESTING 
There is no ethical way to administer these tests this year. In-person administration, for obvious reasons, poses health risks. Uneven distribution of devices and varying access to WiFi renders online administration inequitable. Furthermore, use of monitoring software to detect potential cheating during online administration raises substantial privacy concerns.  Both G&T and SHSAT testing must be suspended.

*State test score results, year after year, show correlation to family income, race, language learner status, and disability.