Elusive Equity: The Limits of High School Choice in New York City

• In Event: When Education Policy Backfires and What We Can Learn

Abstract

School choice has been a longstanding focal point of education reform debates in New York City. Today, under the current mandatory high school choice policy, all eighth grade students who wish to attend a district public high school must submit an application ranking up to twelve high school programs out of 700 possibilities city-wide. The direct intention of this policy was to address the fact that low-income students (who have historically attended the worst schools in the poorest neighborhoods) may now apply to attend any school across the city. The official goals for the current iteration of the high school choice policy, which was revised in 2004, are to increase both choice and equity for New York City public school families. To that end, the new high school “matching” formula was designed to improve the likelihood that a student would see increased school choice and to distribute low-achieving students as evenly as possible across high schools.

Rather than expanding choices, the evidence shows that school choice policies constricted access to the limited supply of high performing high schools based on students’ SES and racial/ethnic background. Students of color are even more disproportionately enrolled in low performing schools. In addition, the school choice policies have created a system where low-achieving middle school students are matched to high schools that are lower-performing, on average, than those of their higher-achieving peers, race and SES aside thereby providing evidence of increased school segregation.

This study draws on data collected through ethnographic observations of school choice events, document analysis, administrator interviews, and a case study of a New York City middle school implementing the choice policy during two academic years (2008–2010) to describe some of the possible reasons for this backfire. In essence, the policy backfired via three fundamental errors: First, the policy was based on assumptions about parental involvement and access to resources that were out of sync with actual behaviors and practices of predominantly low-income, minority students. Students with parents who already had sufficient access to resources and time jumped ahead of the curve in choosing a high school, while those whose parents did not fell dramatically behind in terms of school selection. Second, the policy was designed with unrealistic expectations of intensive student engagement in school search activities. Like with parents, those students who already had high engagement tended to be White, of higher SES, or of higher academic ability. Consequently, schools become even more segregated than before the expansion of school choice city-wide. Finally, the district failed to require that middle schools provide even basic informational and decision-making supports to eighth grade students and families charged with choosing high schools, and it erroneously expected that such school-based guidance would be provided without mandates or oversight. Thus, middle schools with greater involvement from its teachers and administrators (i.e., higher-performing middle schools) offered richer, more substantive programming to inform and elicit school choice from its students and families.

Author

• Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, Seton Hall University