Name: Hudson Lewis

Social Justice Group: Funding Inequality in NYC Public Education (A)

Date of Fieldwork: January 30, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Kay Notts

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

On January 30, we interviewed Kay Notts, an administrator at Brooklyn Technical High School, a very nice specialized school. We wanted to interview her because we felt she would help us learn more about the SHSAT test and specialized schools. In this interview, we learned more about tests and school segregation, which was all pretty new and useful information for our project.

She thought that the SHSAT was the best possible test for students to get into high school. She thought this because they don’t see your name, address, or income of the students on the test so it is like a reset. There are a lot of other problems as well for example, she brought up school segregation she taught us about how testing and gifted and talented schools impact school segregation. They removed the gifted, and talented schools away from Brooklyn.
This makes it harder for certain students to get into better schools. She said that the SHSAT testing was not a huge factor for school segregation at Brooklyn Tech High School.

This interview was very interesting because we focused a lot of things we wouldnt have thought about learning before, like SHSAT testing and school segregation. Kay Notts was also very passionate about this topic so we were able to learn a lot more from this interview than if we had tried learning about this information elsewhere.