The People We May Never Meet Because of Our Privilege
At Stuyvesant High School, is a single test the best way to determine who’s smart and who isn’t?
Should we reconsider if Stuyvesant High School’s so-called “atmosphere of intelligence and opportunity” is actually a bubble meant to separate—or even “protect”—the “smart” kids from the “uneducated” masses of New York City? Canal Street News Summer Journalism Club member Claire Shin explains. Photo by Alexandria Misch
I am a student from Stuyvesant High School, a STEM magnet school that is said to be one of the best public high schools in New York City. To gain admission, you have to take a test called the Specialized High School Aptitude Test (SHSAT) and get above a certain score. Filled with only the city’s best, Stuyvesant is like a network of interconnected lights: it aims to offer an atmosphere of intelligence and opportunity for driven students who seek a challenge and want to change the world.
Last summer, I found an opportunity in Stuyvesant’s Student Opportunities Bulletin, a weekly newsletter informing us bored high schoolers of possible ways we could occupy ourselves for the summer. It was an internship for the NYC-based teen magazine called YCTeen. I applied and was accepted, and there, my peers and I would meet almost every weekday from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. to discuss and perfect writing techniques, eat mochi ice cream and write stories about our identities in small wooden cubicles while stealing chairs from one another because there were eleven chairs and twelve of us.
Each morning, I would come an hour early to play Minecraft because the internet at my own home might as well have come from a toaster. I remember sitting alone for long periods of time, hunched over my desk, absorbed in a multiplayer mini-game where beds explode and you need to slaughter everyone else in the game to win. Then one day, out of the corner of my gamer eye, I saw someone take a seat next to me. “Is that Minecraft?” The person asked.
Their name was Ky, short for Kya (now, they call themselves Khyron—a beautiful name for a beautiful person.) They were obsessed with anime—not unlike me— and with Ky, I could bury myself in long, laughter-filled conversations about Attack on Titan and One Punch Man. Sometimes instead of doing work, we’d play stupid online games where we played as stick-figure wizards and we’d have to team up and protect each other from evil stick-figure goblins and maniacal witches.
Ky is a fighter. They grew up in one of the least privileged places I knew: they called it a “hood” area in the Bronx, where police officers regularly patrolled high school sidewalks and brawls broke out between students every other day. Ky was bullied through middle school—their Blackness invalidated because their language was “too proper” and “too white”—and they grew up without a father while their mother was off at work for most of the day.
From the moment I heard them speak to this day, I look up to Ky. I remember having rich workshop discussions during my internship at YCTeen and eagerly awaiting for their turn with the talking stick—which was just an angel figurine that one of our adult editors happened to have on her desk. Every thought they added to discussions made me see things in a new light, and I found myself nodding my head each time they spoke, engrossed in their well-articulated words. It makes sense that they’re an excellent writer.
I still look up to Ky. They are one of the most intelligent people I know. But Ky didn’t even have an idea what the SHSAT was—even if they did know, they probably wouldn’t have been able to afford prep classes. They attend Borough of Manhattan Community College, which—with its physical proximity to Stuyvesant—is a school that many Stuyvesant students pretentiously make fun of, due to its status as a community college.
It’s a well-known fact among Stuyvesant students that SHSAT scores have nothing to do with success here: in a senior survey conducted by my school’s newspaper, the Stuyvesant Spectator, over 75 percent of respondents were either “neutral” or disagreed with the statement that their SHSAT score had a positive correlation with their academic performance at Stuyvesant. However, randomly selecting students would be detrimental to both the school environment and to students themselves, since the average student from the city would likely not be able to succeed at Stuyvesant, due to its extremely academic atmosphere and accelerated curriculum. Additionally, it is true that a test is one of the most constant—though not necessarily reliable—metrics we have in determining academic prowess. With the exception of a few who can’t take the test on a given day for religious reasons, who take a slightly altered test a day later, everyone takes the same test, and exams are colorblind, gender-blind, creed-blind, and sexuality-blind. The exam does not ask for information like race, and Scantrons are non-discriminatory; additionally, entrance into top NYC high schools are determined only by a quota of the top scorers on the SHSAT that high schools have space for.
But Ky is living proof that even an everything-blind test fails to take into account factors such as financial status and background. It is much, much more difficult to perform well on tests if you have an underprivileged upbringing—regardless of how intelligent you are.
Asking for essays on one’s extracurricular and life experiences to discover the human side of a person, as well as factoring in grades and other standardized tests like the State Tests or Regents would most definitely help—even though there are some issues with grades,—like the fact that it’s far easier to get good grades in some schools than in others, and not all schools use the same grading system. Grades are, at best, a steady measurement tool that allows us to see the continuous, long-term movie of a student’s academic success, and not in the one-time, often luck-based snapshot of a test.
The stark contrast between Ky’s life and my own made me wonder about all the Ky-like kids—the hidden geniuses—that I’ll never get to meet in high school just because we happened to be born into different stations of life.
Is Stuyvesant—with its so-called “atmosphere of intelligence and opportunity”—actually a bubble meant to separate—or even “protect”—the “smart” kids from the “uneducated” masses of New York City?
If so, how can we lift up the rest of the population and create better standards to discern who is “smart?”
