Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday a major change in the way New York City’s hundreds of select middle and high schools admit their students, saying that admission policies discriminate against black and Latino students and increase segregation among long-term students and address long-term concerns. The largest school district in the country by step.
New York is more reliant on high-stakes admission requirements than other districts in the country, and the mayor has faced pressure over the years to take more drastic measures to desegregate the city’s racially and socio-economically divided public schools. Black and Latino students make significant representations in select middle and high schools, although they represent about 70 percent of the district’s 1.1 million students.
But it was the epidemic that eventually led Mr. de Blasio, now in his seventh year in office fees, to implement some of the most successful school coordination measures in New York City’s recent history. However, the changes will not affect admissions to some of the city’s most selective high schools, such as Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science.
When schools closed in the spring, the city changed or suspended the grading systems and standard tests used to admit students to schools of its choice. Which has made it impossible for most of the schools of choice to support students through academic performance as they have in previous years.
Nevertheless, bogus changes in the crisis are now to curb the epidemic.
“By the time I leave the mayoralty, I think we’ve put the city on a different path, definitely a school with a school,” Mr de Blasio said at a news conference on Friday. “This is clearly the beginning.”
The change, which will take effect for this year’s round of admissions, will have an impact on enrolling about 400 students from the city’s 1,800 schools.
Mr. de Blasio and his successors will no doubt face demands to unify many more City High Schools, especially the Screening School, one of the most ethnically well-represented in the system. But the integration of special and screening high schools has long been considered the third rail in the district, and the changes made to it would be highly controversial.
Middle schools will see very important policy changes. Will remove all admissions screening for schools for at least a year, the mayor said. Use metrics such as grades, attendance and test scores – about 200 middle schools – 40 percent of total – to determine which 200 students should be admitted. Now those schools will use random lotteries to admit students.
In doing so, Mr. de Blasio is essentially piloting an experiment that, if considered successful, could permanently end the city’s middle school of educational choice, which is whiter than the district as a whole.
The deadline for a final decision on whether to get rid of the middle school screening for good – shortly before Mr. de Blasio leaves office fees on New Year’s Day in 2022 – immediately sparked controversy among candidates seeking to replace him. .
Candidates are likely to be pressured whether they will resume what has been a particularly controversial practice: measuring the academic achievement of fourth-grade students or whether they will attend a select middle school.
City officials said that due to the epidemic, there is not enough data to assess how the growing number of middle school students are performing this year.
After schools closed in March, state-certified English and math exams were canceled, and the mayor canceled attendance records as a measure of achievement. Junior grade students turned to one of the letter-grade systems to indicate whether they passed the class or needed to repeat it.
In 2018, a local district, Brooklyn’s District 15, turned into a lottery admission system. Seen closely as one of the most significant disengagement measures of the years, these efforts will now be expanded to the city.
The admission process for selected schools usually takes place in the fall, but was delayed this year due to the epidemic. Families can start applying to middle schools under the new system in early January until the week of February 8.
In the second big shift announced by Mr. de Blasio, New York will also remove the policy that could allow some high schools to spot students living in nearby first dubs – even if all seats are considered available to all students, wherever they are Living.
In the year 2004, Mayor Michael R. The city’s system of choice was implemented by Bloomberg as part of an effort to democratize high school admissions. But Mr. Bloomberg exempted some schools, and entire districts, from the policy, and Mr. de Blasio did not complete that useless work.
Manhattan District 2, one of the whitest and richest of the city’s 32 local school districts, is a clear example of this. Students living in that district, which includes the Upper East Side and West Village, are given preference for some of the district’s high school seats, which are among the city’s highest-performing schools.
No other district in the city has as many high schools – six – set aside for local, high-performing students.
Many of them fill almost all their seats with students from the District 2 neighborhood before considering high school, deserving students from elsewhere. As a result, some schools, such as Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the Upper East Side, are among the whitest high schools in New York City.
Mr. de Blasio, who campaigned twice on the message of fighting inequality in all aspects of city life, and the priority of that entry – and always the right to get rid of everyone else. But he has not yet used that power, and is doing so only after some of the city’s prestigious District 2 high school principals publicly vowed to diversify their schools by freeing up admission choices for local students.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s principal, Dimitri Saliani, wrote in an email, “As a public school public servant, it is my mission to educate many students from many different backgrounds, reflecting the abundance of the city we live in.” . “The lack of diversity among students, faculty and staff is a blur for our entire community.”
The Chancellor of the School of New York City, Richard A. Caranza and his superiors have for years urged Mr. de Blasio to remove the district’s choice, officials with direct knowledge of the conversation said.
The city will remove District 2’s priority for next school year, and remove the geographical preferences of all other high schools using it for next year’s admissions. About 200 of these other high schools are not of higher educational choice, but are admitted as part of geography.
Mr. de Blasio also announced Friday that the city will provide grants to five districts to develop diversification schemes in all of the city’s districts, an example of what District 15 parents did to eliminate their middle school screening system.
Over the next four years, the city will support all 32 districts to create integrated plans.
The big changes for the soon-to-be admissions that many integration activists had hoped for during Mr. de Blasio’s tenure are still few.
“I hope this is the beginning and not the end,” said Rafael Lena, Queen’s parent. “I’m worried that just by removing the screens and deliberately not taking steps that will disintegrate, and let schools come up with their own thing, we’ll only open up to the wealthy parents who fill those schools.”
The mayor’s previous only major attempt to unify schools – forcing the state legislature to get rid of the city’s select special high school entrance exams – failed. In 2018, Mr. de Blasio said he would fight to remove the top eight high school exams, which are heavily Asian-American and white and have a small percentage of black and Latino students.
Those eight schools are the only public schools in New York City that are not controlled by Mr. de Blasio. Instead, the legislature has a right to how they admit students.
The mayor’s attention to the special school entrance exam at the time was sharply criticized for discriminating against low-income Asian-American children who attend a large number of those schools.
Mr. de Blasio also struggled to answer questions about why he did not pay attention to other high schools, including Beacon High School in Midtown Manhattan, which is primarily attended by middle-class White students. It has also largely ignored the recommendation made by the task force that the city ended its smart-and-talented program, which is also quite different.
Also on Friday, the city announced it would conduct a special high school exam in January this year, which was delayed by an epidemic. The city is required to test the state.
And for the first time, high schools will have to post their admission criteria and rubrics publicly for student assessment.
Students can start high school application in the week of January 18 and applications must be submitted during the last week of February.
Some parents in the high-performing local district on Friday expressed frustration over the change. John Liu, a Democratic state senator who has emerged as a staunch defender of most preferred admissions, said more families should be consulted about admissions reform in the city.
“Bulk changes should not be made by the administration without making a full public speech about the issues,” he said.
