New York City released the results of its mandatory high school admission process last week. It's receiving a lot of negative attention at online parent forums (like this one) for the fact that 7,500 students (nine percent) received no placement at all. These students will have to submit preferences to a supplementary round for placement at new or under-subscribed schools. Understandably, parents and the unmatched students are upset, but, while the 7,500 number seems large, for some missing perspective here are the numbers of unmatched students over the last several years:
2009: 7,455
2008: 7,722
2007: 8,340
2006: 8,097
2005: 10,217
2004: 16,609
2003: 34,837
These numbers are incredibly important: they are the number of students who did not get one of their top twelve choices in a system that prides itself on choice. These are the failures of the choice system. But, as the numbers above show, New York has gotten a lot better. In a city where roughly 90,000 eighth graders apply to high school each year, they are now able to give more than 90 percent of students one of their choices, when just six years ago more than one out of three students was administratively assigned a school in a choice system.
The fact that the number of unmatched students continues to fall is a good thing, but it also poses the question of how many is acceptable. How do we know what's good enough? Do the positives of school choice--harnessing the power of parental preferences, opening more schools to more students--outweigh the non-trivial pain experienced by the unmatched families? Not to mention the costs of implementing a choice system, the school fairs, the public relations efforts to explain choice options, the investments in technology to match students, etc.
In almost every other public school system in the country, seats are filled based on who lives nearby. If a student happens to live in a neighborhood zoned to a crappy school, they don't have many options. New York City has been one of the leaders in changing that paradigm; unmatched students are a side effect of that process, but fortunately, a diminishing one.
1 comment:
Chad, in NYC, zoned high schools, or neighborhood schools, are not options for most of the city, although they exist in pockets of Queens and Staten Island. So there's no zoned default, good or bad, for kids who aren't placed. And the schools offered on the second round don't compare favorably (or equally) with the range of schools the city offers during the first round. They are mainly brand-new schools and schools that didn't fill on the first round -- it's a much bigger gamble with a child's high-school experience.
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