My daughter Gabriela was yelling again.
“All that stupid test shows is how good someone is at taking a test,” she said.
This was after I asked her to spend more time on the Kaplan test prep book on our dinner table — the one that’s supposed to help eighth-graders like her prepare for next month’s New York City Specialized High Schools Admission Test.
For decades, any student wanting to enter elite schools such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech needed to rack up a big score on that exam.
But somewhere along the line, the test became a tool for more affluent New Yorkers to buy their children’s way to the front of the line, and for school officials to justify excluding a scandalous number of African-American and Hispanic kids from the city’s best high schools.