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In most places in the country, enrolling in high school is a simple matter: You graduate middle school and move on to your local high school.
That’s not how it works in New York City.
In the nation’s largest school system, 12- and 13-year-olds go through a process that many say is as stressful — or more so — than applying to college. Students must rank preferences from a list of more than 400 schools citywide with widely varying specialties and admissions requirements, including essays, auditions, and interviews. Then, they wait months for an algorithm to spit out a match.
Many of those features are a result of big reforms that came two decades ago with the intention of making the system more fair and efficient. Twenty years later, some of those changes have paid off, but segregation and inequality remain baked into the system, a recent convening found.
The Nov. 18 conference, organized by Fordham Law School’s Feerick Center for Social Justice and the nonprofit New York Appleseed, which advocates for school integration, brought together policymakers, academics, admissions professionals, parents, and students to reflect on how the city’s current admissions system came to be and how it’s working.
Measuring how the reforms of two decades ago have worked is complicated and depends on how you define success, panelists said.
As a “technical solution, these reforms were very successful,” said Sean Corcoran, associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University who has studied city high school admissions for decades. Far fewer students ended up without a match and were assigned to a school they didn’t choose than before the reforms, Corcoran said, and the changes made it far more difficult for schools and families to game the system.
But as the number of high school options exploded and information became more accessible through the internet, the system has become more and more complex for families, posing equity concerns in a city where the time, resources, and savvy to navigate all that information aren’t evenly distributed.
And despite efforts over the years to make the system more fair, it remains sharply divided along lines of race, class, language and disability status.
Here are some of the big takeaways and lingering questions from the convening.
Reforms were a bid to bring order to an unwieldy system
Most immediately, the reforms introduced by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools Chancellor Joel Klein were an effort to rationalize a system officials said was rife with inequity and inefficiency.
Before the reforms, students had the option of attending a zoned school but could also apply to up to five options across the city. Students could get into multiple schools or none at all. Some 30,000 students a year didn’t get into any of their choices and were assigned a school by the city, according to reports from the time.
There were also more ways for schools and families to game the system, experts said. Principals could withhold a portion of their seats until late in the process, giving them more discretion over whom to admit.
By requiring all students to participate in the choice system and running their rankings through an algorithm that spit out a single match per applicant, officials tried to maximize the number of students getting into a school of their choice. The number of unmatched students dropped from 30,000 to 3,000.
Under the old system, families could win an advantage at some schools by ranking them first, incentivizing families to be strategic with their rankings. Under the current system, ranking a school lower down on their list no longer puts students at an admissions disadvantage.
Last year, 77% of eighth graders citywide got into one of their top three choices, according to Education Department data.
“That is an important criteria, but by itself is not a sufficient measure of success,” said Corcoran.
The promise and perils of more information
Many of the tweaks Education Department officials have made over the years were efforts to make information more accessible to more families, from creating a new online application and school search tool, to compiling school open house dates in a central calendar, to introducing a new tool this year that helps families gauge their chances of getting into a given school.
“We still have a very complex system we’re operating in,” said Lianna Wright, the executive director of Enrollment Research and Policy at the Education Department’s Office of Student Enrollment. But “we’ve made a lot of changes to the process to make it more transparent and to try to advance equity.”
And there’s some evidence that increasing access to better information about schools for disadvantaged families can make a difference. A research team led by Corcoran found that offering middle school students simple tools to help them compare the quality of high schools in their neighborhoods helped them attend schools with higher graduation rates.
But there are also dangers to continuing to flood families with more information and relying on that approach to increase equity, some panelists warned.
“It seems like there’s more and more information … and that is good for transparency, but it may actually increase racial and class disparities in admissions,” said Christopher Bonastia, a professor of sociology at Lehman College who has written about school segregation in New York City.
Selective admissions continue to be a defining and dividing feature
It’s impossible to understand the city’s high school admissions system without grappling with the prevalence of screened schools that select students based on prior academic performance, essays, audition, neighborhood of residence, and more.
Debates over the effects of screening stretch back decades before the 2004 admissions reforms. State legislators enshrined the test that determines entry to the city’s specialized high schools in 1971. A 1986 New York Times letter to the editor from future Mayor David Dinkins lamented the growth of selective “theme” schools that created “two school systems, one rich and one poor, one a success and the other a failure.”
But the landscape of screened high schools has changed dramatically over the past two decades as the city shuttered dozens of large high schools and opened hundreds of new ones. Manhattan gained roughly 1,000 screened seats since 2004 while the Bronx lost more than 2,000, according to an analysis from Jen Jennings, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. The city’s most selective schools continue to admit freshman classes far out of step with the demographics of the school system, despite tweaks over the years to screened admissions and the growth of programs that give underrepresented students priority.
City officials and supporters of the screened schools argue they’re immensely popular, ensure high achievers are challenged academically, and keep families who might otherwise leave in the system.
But the existence of those schools also concentrates more low-achieving and disadvantaged students in unscreened schools, and students at those schools are “acutely aware of the status of their school,” said Bonastia, the Lehman College professor.
“It made for a really sad experience to watch all my friends go to these ‘good’ high schools, and where I went it wasn’t really looked at as a great high school,” said Katelyn Melville, a senior at the Brooklyn Institute for Liberal Arts, an unscreened school in Flatbush. “It made me feel really less than.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org
