NEW RULES TO GET IN SCHOOLS
City admissions shakeup aims to boost diversity and fairness amid COVID chaos
New York City middle schools won’t screen applicants based on grades, attendance or test scores this year, and high schools will be permanently barred from prioritizing students who live in their surrounding neighborhoods, education officials announced Friday.
The new rules mark a major revamping of the city’s school admissions process, and one that education advocates have long pushed for to address the racial and economic segregation of the city’s schools and the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The changes, the biggest of Mayor de Blasio’s seven-year tenure, will have a ripple effect across the city’s public school system by immediately changing rules at roughly 40% of middle schools and some of the most coveted high schools.
“These changes will improve justice and fairness, but they’ll also make the process simpler and fairer, particularly given what we’re dealing with this year,” de Blasio said Friday.
Officials said the changes were forced by the abrupt switch to remote learning, which upended grades last year and this year, canceled state exams and shifted attendance metrics — all major criteria for selective middle schools.
Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said middle schools would’ve had to look at scores from state tests students took in third grade if they stuck with the admissions screens.
“Using data from the year prior when rising sixth graders were 7 or 8 years old and in their first experience of taking the state test, it’s untenable and it’s unfair to students,” Carranza said.
De Blasio said the middle school change is temporary for now, but didn’t rule out the possibility of a permanent shift.
“This is the step that makes sense now, and then as we evaluate how this goes … we’re going to be able to take additional actions,” he said.
High schools will still be able to “screen” students for admission, but will no longer be able to give preference to kids who live in the surrounding district.
That’s a major shift for Manhattan’s District 2, the city’s largest and one of its wealthiest.
The district — home to some of the city’s most coveted and selective public high schools including Eleanor Roosevelt High School — has long given preference to students who live in the area, including much of lower Manhattan and
“These changes will improve justice and fairness, but they’ll also make the process simpler and fairer, particularly given what we’re dealing with this year.” MAYOR DE BLASIO
the Upper East Side.
The change to the high school geographic preference will be permanent, and comes after some District 2 principals called for the rule to be scrapped to increase their schools’ racial and socioeconomic diversity.
It will take two years to complete the transition. This year, District 2 will stop giving priority to students who live in the area. In 2021, all schools will eliminate geographic preferences.
“These screens have kept too many students out of the high school of their choice,” Carranza said Friday.
The city’s eight specialized academic high schools, which include Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, will still admit students based on the results of the Specialized High School Admissions Test which will be given in-person at city middle schools beginning Jan. 27.
The complex set of admissions rules for both middle and high schools has long been a stressful rite of passage for kids and parents — one that critics say contributes to the racial and socioeconomic segregation of city schools by concentrating white and wealthy families in a relatively small number of schools.
The student advocacy group Teens Take Charge filed a lawsuit last month alleging high school screenings violated federal civil rights law by discriminating against Black and Latino students.
Officials signaled months ago they were considering changes to the admissions process to ensure the school selection rules didn’t unfairly punish students affected by the pandemic.
“There are inequities in our city and school system that have been exacerbated this year by the COVID-19 crisis,” Carranza said. “We took the time to hear feedback and work through this complex and important issue to make sure that we got this right.”
High schools using grades and test scores in admissions decisions will, for the first time, consider applicants’ grades and test scores from sixth grade — a change that concerns some education advocates.
“We are frustrated that the DOE has missed an opportunity for truly transformative change by failing to remove all academic screening for high schools, even as a temporary measure,” wrote the group Parents for Responsive, Equitable, Safe Schools.
Many city parents and kids have been waiting for the admissions changes, and watched the typical Dec. 4 application deadline come and go with no update.
The application for middle schools will now open Jan. 11 and close the week of Feb. 8. High school applications will open Jan. 18 and close the week of Feb. 22.
Registration for the specialized high school exam will open Dec. 21 and close Jan. 15.
Middle schools that get more applicants than open slots this year will use a random lottery system to decide who gets in.
Since most middle schools will still restrict admission to students who live in the surrounding district, the changes will likely make the biggest impact in districts with a diverse mix of students within their boundaries.
A 2019 report from the Center for New York City Affairs found that, for middle schools “in high-poverty, mostly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, the prospects for racial and economic integration are slim, given the current district boundaries.”
Areas like Brooklyn’s District 15 that have already retooled their admissions systems to increase diversity will be able to keep in place rules that prioritize homeless, low-income and English Language Learner students.
Five more districts will get city funding to devise their own intradistrict diversity plans, officials said.
City officials will also for the first time require any high school that screens applicants based on academic or other factors to post a precise breakdown online explaining how much they weigh each of those factors in their ranking systems.
Arts high schools that require auditions for admission will now ask students to submit their tryouts online.