Elisa is the Education Editor at SHSAT Score Calculator. She reviews all editorial content on the site and is the byline on technical explainers, school pages, scoring guides, and blog posts.
Current role
Elisa has been a teacher at a NYC Department of Education school since August 2021. Day-to-day, that means she’s working with middle-school students — the same age cohort that takes the SHSAT — in a NYC public school. Her current role gives her direct, current visibility into what NYC families navigate during SHSAT season: how the test fits into their kids’ lives, what they’re hearing from neighbors and school counselors, where the official information falls short, and where commercial prep products oversell.
That perspective is what made her the right person to be Education Editor here. The site exists to help NYC families make better decisions about the SHSAT, and the writing benefits from being grounded in the experience of someone who knows what the process actually looks like from inside a classroom — not just from reading prep books or working in test-prep marketing.
Career background
Elisa’s path into education has been steady and NYC-focused. Roughly twelve years of progressively more responsible roles, all within New York City public-education and education-adjacent organizations.
New York Edge (2016–2024)
Before her current DOE role, Elisa spent about eight years at New York Edge, a NYC-based nonprofit that provides after-school and summer programming to NYC public school students. Her role there evolved over time, including substantial responsibility as Budget Reporting Coordinator — managing the financial reporting that funded programs serving NYC students across multiple sites. New York Edge serves thousands of students each year through programs at NYC public schools, primarily in lower-income communities; Elisa’s work was in the infrastructure that made the programming possible.
St. Mary’s (Teacher Assistant)
Earlier in her career, Elisa worked as a Teacher Assistant at St. Mary’s, supporting classroom instruction. This was a hands-on teaching role focused on direct work with students and the day-to-day operations of a classroom — the kind of foundational experience that informs how she thinks about what works pedagogically with students at different developmental stages.
Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation (Group Leader)
Elisa also worked as a Group Leader at the Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation, which runs out-of-school-time programs at NYC public schools. Group Leader is a frontline role: directly supervising groups of students, designing activities, and managing day-to-day operations of programming.
Why this matters for the site
Most websites about the SHSAT are written by:
- Prep companies marketing their products
- Generalist content writers who haven’t worked in NYC education
- Anonymous "experts" with no verifiable credentials
None of these is necessarily wrong, but they all bring obvious biases or knowledge gaps. The reason Elisa’s involvement matters is that she brings the opposite profile: a verifiable, current NYC DOE teacher, with substantial NYC-education adjacent experience, who isn’t selling anything beyond a free calculator and free practice tests. The work she does here is editorial review — making sure factual claims are accurate, framing is honest, and advice doesn’t mislead families about what the SHSAT does and doesn’t reward.
To be clear about boundaries: Elisa is not commenting on the SHSAT or specialized high school admissions in her capacity as a NYC DOE employee. Her work as Education Editor is separate from her DOE role, expresses her own views, and does not represent the NYC Department of Education or any specific school. The site is also independent of the DOE and is not endorsed by it.
Content Elisa reviews
Elisa’s review covers the substantive editorial content on the site, including:
- School pages for the eight SHSAT-based specialized high schools
- The scoring cluster (raw, scaled, composite, percentile, equating, cutoffs)
- The admissions cluster (registration, eligibility, test dates, ranking strategy, Discovery)
- The prep cluster (ELA and Math sections, study planning)
- Editorial blog posts (cutoff trends, ranking strategy, format changes, Discovery in practice, free prep resources)
She doesn’t directly write the technical implementation pages (calculator methodology, CAT engine, IRT explanations) — those are written by Fahad with her editorial pass for clarity. The byline on each page reflects who did the writing or review; many pages credit her as reviewer rather than primary author.
Contact
Elisa doesn’t take direct correspondence through the site. For corrections to content she’s reviewed, the right address is [email protected] — she sees these. For her broader professional contact, her LinkedIn profile is the right place.