In a New York Daily News op-ed, Feerick Center executive director Dora Galacatos offers solutions to make New York City Schools’ high school-choice system empowering for families.
Few issues weigh more heavily on parents than access to good education for their children. Right now, 80,000 eighth-grade students and their parents are in the midst of wrestling with the nation’s most complex and confounding process for determining where their son or daughter attends high school.
New York City offers students and families a wide array of school options, holding the promise of greater access and equity in a socioeconomically and racially disparate system. Since 2003, a Nobel Prize-winning algorithm has improved the City’s efficiency in matching kids to their top school choices.
But the technical effectiveness of the process doesn’t account for how bewildering and intimidating it can be for families, especially those led by immigrants and busy working parents.
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While intended to increase choice and equity, the exceedingly long and complicated application process frustrates many parents. Families with much to do and not nearly enough time and resources are often at sea. This is especially true for those with language barriers, inflexible work schedules and other constraints.
And, since New York City adopted this model in 2003, it has not yet realized the promise of access and diversity envisioned by its creators. City schools are as racially and socioeconomically segregated as ever and still produce radically disparate academic results.
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The city has taken many admirable and notable steps to address the problem. For example, it funds two nonprofit organizations — Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and Henry Street Settlement — to develop middle school success centers focused on helping students and families navigate the process. These programs have enjoyed tremendous success in placing low-income students in higher-performing high schools.
But to make the process accessible to all, the DOE should begin by expanding middle school success centers to far more high-need neighborhoods.
On top of that, the DOE should conduct a soup-to-nuts examination of the policies that govern the algorithm, particularly geographic preferences and admissions methods. We can further diversify the city’s high schools and make the school-choice system empowering, not intimidating. To build the fairer school system that we all want, and that the city’s students deserve.