The Impact of Exam Schools on Disadvantaged Students: Evidence from NYC's Discovery Program

• In Event: Rethinking Admissions Policies: Access, Equity, and Student Success

Abstract

Expanding access to selective schools is critical for addressing educational inequities in the United States. Prior work has been devoted to the inequities that exist in elite institutions of higher education and the affirmative action policies set up to address them. However, less is known about the inequality in access to selective high schools and the impact of affirmative action admission policies established to expand access to underrepresented groups (Cheng and Weingarten, 2025). This paper studies the New York City Department of Education Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged students who successfully complete the course requirements of a summer program. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and student-level administrative data I estimate the causal impact of exam school admission through the Discovery Program on educational outcomes. I find that while students experience an initial reduction in high school GPA, this negative effect does not persist into later years. Conversely, reserve seat offers increase performance on standardized math test scores. Test score gains are larger for female students, while the initial drop in high school GPA is strongest for male students. Reserving seats for economically disadvantaged students at exam schools requires diverting regular offers and gaining a complete understanding of the effect of this reserve seat system on students requires estimating the impact of reserve seats on disadvantaged students as well as the effect of exam school displacement (Black et al., 2023). Under a counterfactual school assignment match with no reserve seats, I show that exam school displacement as a result of the Discovery Program has no effect on math scores, but boosts high school GPA. Overall, my findings indicate that disadvantaged students benefit from an admissions policy designed to increase access to NYC’s elite specialized high schools. These results suggest that affirmative action admission policies based on household socioeconomic status may increase diversity at elite public high schools and translate to achievement gains for disadvantaged students.

Author

• Michael Joseph Darisse, Florida State University
  Presenting Author