After a pandemic moratorium, city leaders are letting school superintendents decide whether to bring back some admissions requirements that critics say feed racial disparities.
For years, many middle schools in New York City chose students using test scores, grades, attendance and even interviews — a system that felt to some like a precursor to the college search process, but for 10-year-olds.
But in a city that by some measures is one of the most segregated in the nation, that process, which was suspended during the pandemic, has come under criticism for sharpening New York’s racial and economic divides.
This fall, the schools chancellor, David. C. Banks, waded into the debate, one of the most contentious in education, saying that while all children have value, those who work “really hard” should get priority over “the child you have to throw water on their face to get them to go to school every day.”
But he also left ultimate decisions over the selection process for middle schools to lower-level superintendents. They, in turn, listened to principals and parents about whether to bring back merit-based admissions, or whether to continue a new approach, which uses a random lottery and which has helped fuel a modest shift in the demographics of some of the city’s most desired middle schools.
Now, several of the superintendents, who oversee the city’s 32 community school districts, have signaled that they will reduce selective admissions at middle schools, or eliminate them entirely. That means that when fifth graders begin applying for public middle schools on Wednesday, some schools in the city could continue down a gradual path toward some measure of racial and economic integration.
In District 30, for example, which includes immigrant neighborhoods and the nation’s largest public housing complex in a diverse swath of northern Queens, principals did not take long to reach a decision.
“I put them in a room,” Philip Composto, the superintendent of District 30, said at a recent Community Education Council meeting, referring to the principals. “Two hours later, we decided that we weren’t going to apply for screened schools.”
(For high schools, superintendents will not have the same discretion. When applications opened on Oct. 12, the city had designated a more limited set of students to receive top priority, based on grades, for most of the city’s selective high schools, ending a more open system introduced during the pandemic.)
Before the city’s roughly 500 middle schools adopted a lottery during the pandemic, when testing, grading and attendance were disrupted, about 40 percent used selective requirements in choosing at least some of their students. Many of those schools were concentrated in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and often enrolled lower percentages of Black, Latino and low-income students than the rest of their districts.
The policies helped to magnify the school system’s stark class and race divides, which are also fueled by housing segregation. Supporters of the lottery hoped that it could help break down barriers to integrating schools.
But others have demanded a return to selective admissions, including many Asian American families from a variety of economic backgrounds, whose children often did well in the selective process relative to other groups. These families have said that random lotteries have prevented children from challenging themselves in schools with like-minded students, and have unfairly limited their opportunities.
Mayor Eric Adams has argued that creating more selective programs is more equitable than getting rid of them altogether, though the schools chancellor has couched his support of these programs by saying the number of middle schools that consider grades “will be limited” and based on a community’s needs.
When applying for middle school in New York, students are able to rank their top 12 preferences. Under the lottery system, more than 90 percent of middle school applicants received one of their top three choices.
This year, students will learn the new admissions rules for their districts when middle school applications open Wednesday. The application window closes Dec. 1. For schools that reintroduce admissions requirements, students will be ranked based on their fourth-grade marks.
Declining student enrollment is one reason some superintendents are abandoning admissions screening. Since 2019, citywide enrollment in grades six through eight has fallen by about 20,000 students. The declines mean that some middle schools, once highly competitive, can no longer fill all of their seats.
“Everyone is in agreement that it doesn’t make sense to have these screeners because we still have so many empty seats,” Carry Chan, the superintendent of District 1, which includes parts of the Lower East Side and the East Village, said at a recent meeting of the district’s Community Education Council.
The majority of the district’s nine middle schools used selective admissions before the pandemic. Now, Ms. Chan said that “while we are struggling with enrollment and trying to obviously attract as many students as possible,” restoring those policies would represent a barrier to those efforts.
Across the borough in District 3, made up of the Upper West Side and sections of Harlem, school leaders reached similar conclusions as the overall applicant pool for their middle schools shrank by about 200 students over the past three years. In the fall of 2020, six of the district’s 11 middle schools that once used screens filled all of their seats; only three did last year.
“The historic issue is that there has been a scarcity of what many families consider quality seats,” the District 3 superintendent, Kamar Samuels, said at a Community Education Council meeting last week. “Because of the current environment, that’s been significantly removed.”
Integration was already a priority in the district. All middle schools there were required in 2018 to set aside a quarter of seats for low-income and lower-performing pupils. Almost all of the area’s middle schools have met that target, though some have struggled to enroll a more diverse set of children.
Elsewhere, the shift to a random lottery during the pandemic also led to a slightly more even mix of student groups in each school. Within the city’s 50 most-selective programs, for example, the share of students learning English as a new language rose from 3 to 7 percent last year.
But the lottery has also prompted concern among some families, who worry that their children will miss out on a rigorous education.
“I definitely have been hearing from parents, the lottery system was deflating and demoralizing,” said Deborah Alexander, an elected parent leader in District 30 with a seventh-grade daughter at Public School 122 in Astoria, Queens. “I don’t know very many people who were happy.”
The district has nine elementary schools with gifted and talented programs, and Ms. Alexander said that those enrolled will “continue to need that advanced programming in middle school.”
Mr. Composto, the superintendent in Queens, said that each middle school in District 30 would offer options for a more rigorous educational track for students in eighth grade.
It remains unclear what the final plans will look like in many districts. Parents in several areas — like District 2, which includes the Upper East Side and the West Village, and southwest Brooklyn’s District 20 — have fought for the return of selective admissions. In northeast Queens, a quarter of the 12 middle schools in District 25 asked to use selective admissions, the superintendent said.
Some parents have argued that without selective admissions, enrollment may further decline, because selective schools often appeal to middle-class families. Enrollment declines have been largest among students in prekindergarten and second grade, however, and there is little evidence so far linking those declines to changes in middle school admissions.
A separate diversity initiative in District 15 in northwest Brooklyn offers some insight into what might happen if a wider swath of the city ends the merit-based system. The district’s 11 middle schools removed all academic requirements for admission in 2018, and set higher targets than District 3 for the share of low-income students each school should admit.
Before the plan, more than 75 percent of District 15’s white students were concentrated in just three middle schools, including Middle School 51 in Park Slope, where Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his children.
Five years ago, 51 percent of the school’s students were white, 20 percent were Latino and 16 percent were Asian. But last year, about one in every three students was Latino, while white and Asian pupils each made up roughly a quarter of the class.
Some families worried that mixed-ability classrooms would leave both lower- and higher-performing students underserved. While a large body of research has shown that mixed classrooms can raise achievement, particularly for low-performing students, in District 15, the gaps in standardized test scores in math and reading have persisted between white and Asian students and their Black and Latino peers.
But several parents in the district say they have been happy with the changes, and many educators are optimistic that they will pay off.
“The students don’t even think about this idea of mixed abilities,” said Julia Meade, who teaches in classrooms with both general and special-education students at Park Slope Collegiate, once regarded as a low-performing school ignored by white and higher-income families. “They learn from each other. And they learn to accept each other.”
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