It says
the complaint offers a devastating analysis of the two-and-a-half-hour multiple-choice test, which, among other flaws, fails to reflect the curriculum taught at many middle schools. The test also heavily favors those who can afford extensive tutoring and has not been shown to be a good predictor of student performance in high school.
If such a complaint is well-founded, then sueing doesn't seem an unreasonable response. Have you looked at this "devastating analysis"?
The thing that jumps out at me from this, is the "fails to reflect the curriculum taught at many middle schools" statement. I can well believe that the curriculum at some schools (middle and elementary) is much worse than at others, and that different options might be available to students at different schools. But, I think it would be more productive to improve the curriculum and teaching at the poorer schools, or at least offer options to the students there. And it always strikes me as ridiculous that NYC doesn't just offer what is needed to the number of kids who need it, rather than creating winners and losers by imposing a rationing system.
Agree. To my mind, the part that might be devastating, if true, is "has not been shown to be a good predictor of student performance in high school". From a brief look at the complaint, it isn't clear whether the claim is that no evaluation has been done of the relationship between test scores and performance, or that they haven't given lower scorers a chance to show that they'd succeed at the school. The latter wouldn't be devastating in my view. The former would: I would expect the school to have collected statistics about the relationship between the scores *of those admitted* and their performance at school. If the test is an appropriate one, I would expect there to be a clear positive correlation at least towards the bottom of the scale of marks: those admitted with the lowest scores should tend to do a bit worse than those admitted with slightly higher scores, etc. (I put i this way because you might expect ceiling effects to obscure this at the top.) If this isn't the case, then indeed, it would seem reasonable to question the appropriateness of the entrance test.
But the interesting general issue is: this seems to basically be an achievement test, not an aptitude or IQ test. So, even if for the sake of argument we assume that aptitude is fixed at birth, better educated students are going to do better. "Better educated" is going to include going to better middle schools, having more supportive parents, and yes, having been tutored (whether "to the test" or "to enrich and improve the student's mind"). On average, that's going to lead to a skewed racial mix: in current circumstances, no way round that. People asking for a test that can't be tutored for are asking for (the impossible, and) admission by IQ test. But at some point, what makes for a coherent class that can all be taught at the same level isn't just aptitude, it's some combination of aptitude and achievement. So it wouldn't work just to replace this test by an IQ test (whose questions are miraculously kept secret so noone can prepare for them :-); that would weaken the school.
It's essentially the same problem that we have in the UK where the admission is to elite universities and the disadvantaged/advantaged groups are those who have been to state/private schools. There is pressure to "level the playing field" by discounting the better education that the private school students have (on average!) had up to that point, but this ignores the fact that it would have to cause either a dumbing-down of the universities' courses, or else mass failure of the students admitted who can't cope with them.
