Admission to select NY high schools still biased

Promise of choice does little to repair existing inequity in education system

NEW YORK — It was a warm Sunday morning, the breeze sweeping aside the last wisps of summer, and 31 students from Pelham Gardens Middle School in the Bronx had signed up to spend the day indoors at a showcase for city public high schools.

The annual fair kicks off the city’s high school application season in September, and Jayda Walker, 13, arrived with a plan.

An eager girl with an easy smile, Jayda wanted to be a divorce lawyer, and at the fair, held at Brooklyn Technical High School, she planned to focus on schools with a legal theme, in Manhattan.

Eighth-graders can apply anywhere in the city. They select as many as 12 schools and get matched to one by an algorithm.

There is no doubt this process has generated meaningful improvements. The high school graduation rate is up more than 20 points since 2005. The graduation gap between white and black or Hispanic students, while still significant and troubling, has narrowed.

But school choice has not delivered on a central promise: to give every student a real chance to attend a good school.

Within the system, there is a hierarchy of schools, each with different admissions requirements — a one-day highstakes test, auditions, open houses. And getting into the best schools, where almost all students graduate and are ready to attend college, often requires high scores on the state’s annual math and English tests and a high gradepoint average.

Those admitted to these most successful schools remain disproportionately middle class and white or Asian, according to an in-depth analysis of acceptance data and graduation rates conducted for by Measure of America, an arm of the Social Science Research Council. At the same time, low-income black or Hispanic children are routinely accepted by schools with graduation rates 20 or more percentage points lower.

While top middle schools in a handful of districts groom children for competitive high schools that send graduates to the Ivy League, most middle schools funnel children to high schools that do not prepare them for college.

Pelham Gardens is new; its third graduating class will start high school in the fall. But its guidance counselor, Ayana Bryant, knows the application process as well as anybody. She has worked in middle school guidance for 16 years.

On the morning of the fair, she took Jayda and the other students to Brooklyn Tech in the hope they would connect with the right schools. But that hope was tempered by her experience.

“They say it’s choice, but is it really?” she said of the city’s system. “Some schools really aren’t for everybody.”

Each year, about 160 children from Pelham Gardens join the flood of 80,000 eighth-graders applying for the city’s public high schools. The field on which they compete is enormous: They have to choose from 439 schools that are further broken up into 775 programs. One program may admit students based on where they live, while another program at the same school may admit only those with strong grades.

An analysis by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School found half of all students who got top scores on state tests came from 45 middle schools out of more than 500.

For Jayda, the process ended with an offer from Mott Haven Village Preparatory High School in the South Bronx, which was her sixth choice, she said.

“At first, I was really upset,” Jayda said. She thought about reapplying in the second round of admissions, but the only schools available would be those that did not fill up in the first round. “I thought about it and decided I didn’t want leftover schools.”