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Dear Speaker Heastie: Support for your DREAM Act push is strong


heastie presser

Speaker Heastie (photo: Lori Van Buren)


Dear Speaker Carl Heastie:

A few weeks ago, you shared your initial priorities as the new Assembly Speaker. It was refreshing to see you focus on expanding access to opportunity for all of New York's youth, including the thousands of undocumented students who deserve a fair chance at going to college. We, the College Access Consortium of New York (CACNY), a network of over 100 professionals representing community-based organizations, colleges, and secondary schools, stand by you in fighting for the NY DREAM Act this session.

The American Dream is based upon the principle of equal opportunity for all. However, making that dream a reality for thousands of first generation college students cannot wait another year. According to USA Today, of the more than five million first generation low-income students, only 11 percent will earn a college degree.

In May of 2011 the NY DREAM Act was introduced to level the playing field for the children of undocumented immigrants. This idea builds upon bipartisan legislation passed over a decade ago by Governor Pataki that granted in-state tuition rates to undocumented youth. At its core, the NY DREAM Act is key for thousands of youth across the state to obtain post-secondary opportunities by allowing them access to state financial aid, just like any other student proudly walking across the stage at their high school graduation or dancing at their senior prom.

As college access and success professionals, members of the CACNY community know that unequal access to the Tuition Assistance Program and other forms of state aid can be the proverbial 'straw that breaks the camel's back,' preventing an otherwise willing and capable student from accessing and succeeding in college and subsequently contributing to the workforce of our state.

As a fellow New York City native, I have seen first-hand the negative educational and economic impact that delaying the NY DREAM Act for four years has had on our communities. In solidarity with our fellow CACNY members, we express our collective support and desire that your efforts this year will yield a different outcome.

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by Felipe Ayala Jr., Chair of the College Access Consortium of New York

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Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? E-mail editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Real Answers to Improve Diversity at the Specialized High Schools


bk tech hs

Brooklyn Tech HS (photo via school website)


Critics of the Specialized High School Admissions Test as the sole criteria for admission to Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and five other schools continue to lament the low admissions rates of African-American and Latino students. While they do so, two remarkable developments occurred last week when the latest admission results were announced.

First, NYU's Research Alliance for New York City Schools released a significant new research report. It shows many of the changes being urged on elected policy makers - such as using state assessment test scores, grades, and attendance - either would result in little change in the admissions rates for these groups or would actually result in fewer black and more white students being offered admission.

The study states that the only way to make dramatic demographic change through altering the admissions criteria was to eliminate the test and substitute guaranteed admission to the top ten percent of students at each middle school. But it makes clear that this would come at the significant cost of lowering the academic preparation of the student body to do the rigorous coursework that make the specialized test-in schools the turbo-charged engines of advancement to the best colleges for the children of New York City's working class, poor, and immigrant families. (Two-thirds of the city public school graduates attending Harvard, Princeton, or Yale graduate from only three high schools - Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science - where 50% of the combined student body qualifies for free or subsidized lunch, a measure of poverty.)

Given this dilemma, the NYU Research Alliance urged policy makers to consider better outreach to underrepresented communities to raise the number of high-performing students who sit for the test and offer better free test prep to ensure they are prepared to do well on the test. That is the same prescription advocated by alumni when we have urged lawmakers not to change state law mandating the sole use of the SHSAT for admissions. That state law covers Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Five additional specialized high schools created administratively by the old Board of Education also use the test to determine admissions.

The other relevant development last week is the wildly positive demographic results obtained at Brooklyn Tech – where I graduated in 1970 and now head the Alumni Foundation – resulting from innovative efforts made recently by the school and its alumni. Improvements in the numbers of African-American and Latino students being admitted to the school show that change is possible without moving away from the SHSAT.

What did Tech and its alumni do? Quite a bit: A consistent outreach effort was undertaken, targeted at many Brooklyn middle schools sending few or no students to Tech. The school increased the number of tours offered to prospective applicants. With the assistance of the Alumni Foundation, the school also developed a "Tech in the Middle" project which brought middle school classes into the building for special sessions and tours which enabled teachers to speak about the opportunities created by getting a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education. Alumni went to Community Education Council meetings to speak with principals and parents about the school. Seventh grade students visiting Brooklyn Tech were given copies of the Specialized High Schools Student Handbook, which means information about the test being distributed to students a year in advance of their sitting for the exam. Through the efforts of the Alumni Foundation, a print and television public relations campaign was rolled out highlighting positive news about STEM education and the school.

In partnership with the Alumni Foundation and National Grid New York, which is led by Ken Daly, a Tech graduate, and has employed dozens of diverse Tech graduates, the school announced a pilot STEM pipeline program aimed at high-achieving middle school students to encourage them to study STEM subjects and pursue energy carriers.

National Grid is dedicated to developing the next generation of science, energy, and environmental leaders to develop sustainable energy solutions and tackle climate change. National Grid pledged $300,000 for this effort and the Alumni Foundation underwrote the costs of providing free test prep to the group through the Science Schools Initiative. This program is different than any other because it aims to get kids excited about future careers after studying STEM while also preparing them for the test. In addition, we conducted a special high school admissions session with the parents of these students to teach them about the process - parental buy-in is very important to the success of the program.

The results of the first cohort taking the test have been spectacular: 87 percent were offered admission to a specialized high school. Of the 30 students completing the year-long program who took the SHSAT, 16 were admitted to Brooklyn Tech and 10 to Stuyvesant. (The remaining four will also be going to great high schools, one each to Beacon, Bard, Bedford Academy, and Brooklyn High School for the Arts.)

The demographic results were also encouraging, with 50 percent of the students admitted to Tech being African-American or Latino, and 62 percent being female. Our program also managed to boost Stuyvesant's demographic admissions statistics with two of the ten black students admitted this year having come through our program.

While offers of admission increased overall at Brooklyn Tech by 6 percent, offers of admission to African-American and Latino students surged by 12 percent and 22 percent, respectively, when compared to the year before. Over 300 African-American and Latino students were offered admission to Brooklyn Tech this year, reversing a downward trend of many years.

So what does this mean for policy makers? It means that significant efforts can be successfully undertaken to improve the admissions of African-American and Latino students without sacrificing the educational opportunity guaranteed by use of the test as the sole criteria for admissions. Thought should be given to having public monies intelligently spent to scale our STEM pipeline program and also bring it to Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and the other specialized science high schools.

We recognize that other efforts also need to be made to improve diversity, promote fairness, and maintain merit at these schools. Better and more enriched educational opportunities must be made available in the elementary and middle schools serving predominantly African-American and Latino communities. A refitted Discovery Program can significantly increase the numbers of these students at all the specialized schools by redefining eligibility for the program to include attending an underperforming middle school. Discovery offers students just missing the cutoff score for admissions a second chance to qualify through summer courses preparing them to meet the challenges posed by the rigorous curriculum of the specialized schools. The program once sent hundreds of eighth-graders to the specialized high schools, but has since fallen into disuse.

Other types of efforts could be made to improve the situation at little cost to the public. Thirty minutes could be added to the test to permit students not taking test prep the additional time needed to complete all the questions on the exam, for example. We want to see a practice test administered in the seventh grade to enable children to know a year in advance what they need to study to do well on the actual exam.

We have fought to keep "the test" as the sole criteria for admission because proposals to add additional criteria pose ineffective answers to the problem of declining diversity at these schools and risk destroying what is good and unique about them.

Those of us who benefited from the rigorous education provided by the specialized high schools agree that the lack of diversity is a problem the city should address, but not through abandoning the meritocratic test as the sole criterion for admission. The challenge the city faces is to identify high-performing students at younger ages – perhaps through their scores on standardized state tests – and nurture those children to prepare them for the rigors of the SHSAT and the schools' curriculum.

There are more than 700 programs at 400 high schools in the public school system, and there ought to be room for a handful of test-in only schools just as there needs to be schools using multiple criteria for admissions decisions. There are real answers that will help diversify the specialized schools. The Department of Education and our elected officials need to consider and implement them.

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Larry Cary is the president of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation and the chair of the Coalition of Specialized High Schools Alumni Organizations.

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Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? E-mail editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Perfect Parking Spot for Congestion Pricing


packed street

(photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)


New York City can achieve the goals of a long-vanquished congestion pricing plan through the management of its own parking property – all without making a single call to Albany.

New York is famously a city of contradictions and contrasts. Perhaps the most fundamental duality is its status among the world's most important cities and the fact that it yields much of its own governance to a hamlet up the Hudson River. Battling Albany is the oldest pastime in New York City politics. However, as Mayor Bill de Blasio continues to lobby for home rule and maneuver legislative alternatives, there already exists a latent opportunity to turn around one of the major defeats of the previous mayoral administration: congestion pricing.

A rare crushing defeat of the Bloomberg Administration, congestion pricing is a policy that attempts to lessen congestion in central urban areas by charging a fee to enter a demarcated zone. Following the lead of other major world cities, Mayor Michael Bloomberg sought to enact a congestion pricing plan in 2008, but Albany brought the mayor's plans to a halt when Speaker Sheldon Silver could not secure enough Democratic votes to bring the plan to the floor of the Assembly - where Democrats have long-held a wide majority - before the legislative session expired.

Other professionals and advocates have renewed efforts at securing more measured transportation policy from Albany. But in the meantime, New York City can pursue many of the same goals of congestion pricing through the administration of its own property: parking spaces.

At its core, congestion pricing operates with one simple mechanism: attaching a higher cost to the activity of driving into the city center. Parking is an inherent cost associated with driving – and not just a monetary one. While the City may not have comprehensive power to demarcate congestion zones or raise tolls on Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) bridges and tunnels, parking is still inevitable at the end of every trip, and can serve as an effective proxy for raising prices on the activity of driving.

There are three main ways that New York City can lower congestion, stop subsidizing personal car ownership, and raise revenue through the management of its own parking spaces. While I go into further detail on all these reasons, and the data behind them, in a white paper published by the Roosevelt Institute, here is how the City should do so in brief:

Raise parking meter rates, and ideally enact "smart" demand-responsive pricing systems
In New York City, parking simply remains far too cheap, way below market price for how valuable a resource it is. While the rate for one hour of parking in a private garage in Manhattan can easily hit $30, the most expensive street parking in the city is $3.50 an hour. This discrepancy encourages drivers to cruise around in search of dirt-cheap street parking, and constitutes a surprisingly large portion of overall congestion. Correcting the underpricing of metered street parking has proven effective at removing this particular source of congestion in other cities, in addition to raising revenues.

The most thorough manifestation of this concept is the dynamic pricing system put into effect in San Francisco, where a "smart" grid of electronic meters allows prices to be changed based on demand in nearly real-time. New York City already administers a less precise, lower tech version of this with its "Park SMART NYC" program, which raises prices during business hours based on demand in certain neighborhoods. The Department of Transportation should expand such pricing schemes until installing the kind of infrastructure in San Francisco is viable.

Residential parking permits
While metered parking is a great illustration of how parking is subject to supply and demand pressures, it ultimately constitutes a very small percentage of all parking spaces in New York City – by some estimates, a maximum of 2 percent. The vast majority of the parking stock is completely free parking spaces on residential side streets. Such an egregious underpricing of residential spaces represents a de facto subsidy for personal car ownership within the city. In addition to removing this subsidy, a residential parking permit would raise revenue from an untapped source of rentable city property, and offers residents increased certainty that a parking space will be available when they return home – a crucial factor that helps gain support from residents.

Dedicating public spaces for car-sharing vehicles
A final solution involves careful public-private partnerships to dedicate on-street parking spaces for the exclusive use of vehicles in a car-sharing service, such as ZipCar or Cars2Go. Car-sharing services provide many benefits that have already proven popular in New York. For those who cannot afford the high costs of purchasing, insuring, and fueling a car, paying a small subscription rate and hourly fee for when they actually use a car is a viable alternative. Car-sharing can also ease the decision to move to a carless lifestyle - which should be encouraged - by providing an alternative for bigger trips such as errands to big box stores or moving.

Traffic congestion remains a critical problem in New York City. In addition to the dangers of pedestrian casualties, environmental emissions, and low quality public space resulting from car-centric design, traffic congestion is estimated to have cost New York City $1.9 billion in logistical, inventory, and personnel costs, and up to $4.6 billion in unrealized business revenue.

A comprehensive congestion pricing plan should remain a goal for anyone interested in a better New York City. But while Albany continues to seethe and combat its own corruption, there is nothing holding back a self-described progressive mayoral administration and City Council from managing the city's own public space in a smarter way.

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Brit Byrd is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a Columbia University student.

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Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? E-mail editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



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