Educate our children, don’t just select them
As eighth-grade students across New York City submit their materials to try to get into the high school of their choice, and Schools Chancellor David Banks considers changes to our complex system for determining who gets to go to which school, it’s time once again to talk about the purpose of our public schools — and whether our current system is meeting that goal.
Public schools exist to ensure all students have the knowledge, skills and dispositions to contribute to society. Great schools meet that mission by investing in the growth of all students. Why then, are almost a third of New York City high schools exempt from having to invest in growing students, by screening out the neediest populations using grades, test scores and other criteria?
The best way to describe the problem with academic screening in New York City is through a basketball metaphor.
A team that is allowed to select the players that have already demonstrated the most potential will perform exceptionally well. What sense would it make to put those teams in competition with other teams who have no such advantage? Surely when the latter posts a winning season they’ve done more to achieve it.
Screened schools are simply playing by a different set of rules. And yet high achievement and effective marketing conceal the clear truth: that these schools are not necessarily delivering a higher quality of education to our students than schools that do not screen. Their energies are focused on choosing kids, not growing them; restricting access, not creating opportunity; investing in talent, not teaching.
Students at screened schools — whether the highest-profile campuses that admit based on how kids score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or any other campus that admits based on a range of other criteria — may boast impressive numbers, but little about their curricula, educational practices or developmental programs can be traced to these outcomes.
It’s time to end screens for good. Regardless of their use at the elementary, middle-school or high-school level, screening absolves the education system of the responsibility for improving all New York City public schools by placing the burden on students to be “selected.” The impact of this practice is clear for schools who choose to carry the burden of educating our neediest children while held to the same standard as those who cherry-pick their population. These are the schools that disproportionately serve students of color, students with IEPs and students with high economic need.
When these schools succeed, communities are transformed. When these schools succeed, it’s not because of who they’ve chosen, it’s because of their investment. When these schools succeed, New York City succeeds.
To return to our analogy, we need coaches who know how to develop the talent of all their players, not just the one headed to the NBA. This is the purpose of public schools. This is our collective responsibility.
It’s also a responsibility that Mayor Adams and the new chancellor seem to understand. Much of their agenda emphasizes uplifting all children, no matter their starting point. The Urban Assembly stands ready to support the administration in achieving this outcome and ensure that selective admissions systems that create an unequal playing field by keeping children out of many schools based on their prior academic performance or test scores are dismantled.
I’m proud of the work we have done at the Urban Assembly, the network of public schools I lead, to create a genuinely egalitarian learning environment. At our schools, all students are welcome, and we consistently outperform the city as a whole. We have achieved tremendous growth among our student body, helping young people who start years behind learning standards reach and exceed proficiency levels during their time in our schools.
We have seen firsthand how reorienting our understanding of success inspires innovation. By understanding how to develop the skills of students who are struggling, schools develop innovative new approaches to teaching and learning that help all students grow. Our students have graduated from our unscreened schools and went on to Julliard, Cornell, FDNY, the military and myriad other post-secondary outcomes that reflect the cultivation of their potential.
This is not accidental. Important academic breakthroughs have often taken place in schools that achieve growth among high-need students. For example, we would never know the best way to teach reading if it had not been for students with dyslexia. Teaching those students how to read required innovative ideas and new methods which, it turned out, were better than the methods we used to rely on.
If we put our energy toward the students and schools that need the most help, rather than allowing a rigorous screening system to draw out all the oxygen from the room, all our students and our communities will benefit. In other words: We need a system that teaches students, not one that just selects superstars.