One of our daily readers, who signs as “New York City Public School Parent,” pointed out recently that the wait list for popular public high schools in New York City is far larger than the alleged wait list for charter schools.
I checked the sources, and by golly, NYC PSP is correct. More than 155,000 students applied for but did not win admission to the high school of their choice. Of course, NYC PSP points out that there are only 78,000 eighth-graders applying for multiple schools, but that is the nature of wait lists. There are always duplications, triplications, and students applying to multiple schools at the same time. A few years ago, a journalist in Boston told me that he reviewed the celebrated “wait list” and discovered that it not only included the same students applying to multiple charters, but students who had already been placed, and students who were registered in a public school that they liked, and even students who no longer lived in the city. So, when you hear about “wait lists,” don’t believe it until it has been audited by a reputable and independent source.
InsideSchools writes:
There is greater demand than ever for the large, popular high schools. For the fourth year in a row, Francis Lewis in Queens took the number one spot for the most applicants of any high school in New York City—a whopping 17,440 students applied to this huge neighborhood school, compared to 10,403 in 2018.
According to data released by the Department of Education (DOE), large high schools in Queens and Brooklyn and highly selective schools in Manhattan were the most popular. (This list does not include the specialized high schools, which students apply to separately.)
The other schools rounding out the top five—also large, neighborhood high schools—were at the top of the last year’s list too and all had big increases in applicants over 2018.
Brooklyn’s Midwood High School, which has a very selective medical science and humanities programs, came in second, with 14,137 applications compared to 9,927 in 2018. Bayside, Benjamin N. Cardozo and Forest Hills, three large neighborhood high schools in Queens, were third, fourth and fifth.
It is interesting that some of the schools in highest demand are the few remaining large schools. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein closed most of the large high schools. The few that remain are very popular with students, who apparently like the wide variety of courses, programs, electives, foreign languages, advanced courses, and sports that they offer. Bloomberg and Klein bet on small schools as the wave of the future, but students are voting with their feet for schools like Francis Lewis High School, Midwood High School, and Edward R. Murrow, all with large enrollments and varied programs.
This is what NYC PSP wrote:
Here are links to info on public school “wait lists”. The Inside Schools website posted this article:
It links to this recently released document that lists how many NYC public school students are on “wait lists” (as charters insist wait lists must be defined) for 20 of the 400 public high schools.
http://static.ow.ly/docs/top%2020%202019_8hzb.pdf
If you go to the above link, you can see that there are a total of 171,144 8th graders who “applied” to these 20 schools and 16,247 8th graders who got seats.
Leaving a grand total of 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for NYC public high schools.
To repeat — according to the methodology that charters insist we must use, there are currently 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for 20 public high schools and certainly tens of thousands more on “wait lists” for the other 380.
Of course, there are only about 78,000 8th grade students in NYC public schools! But there are 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for just 20 of the 400 public high schools. Twice as many 8th graders on wait lists as there are actual 8th graders! Using false charter accounting methodology.
Does Meryl Tisch want to build more public high schools for those 155,497 NON-EXISTENT 8th graders that charter supporters would have to agree that by their methodology must be counted as being on “wait lists” for public high schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charter schools’ claims of “long waiting lists” should always be qualified, including in every mainstream press report, as “unverified” or “self-reported.” The “long waiting list” claim is a PR tactic the charter sector has used for years.
Even honest waiting lists aren’t solid. When my kids were young, I was on the board of our parent-run co-op preschool. We had a decent waiting list — we thought. When we had an opening, we had to fill it fast, for economic reasons. We’d call the waiting list names and discover that they weren’t actually sitting around waiting for us to call, and no longer wanted to enroll. They’d found other preschools or had other life changes. That would, of course, be true of the most of the names on the New York public high school waiting lists too.
In the past, I studied attrition at KIPP charter schools. They always claim to have “long waiting lists,” but their upper grades were tiny compared with their early grades, apparently due to departures/pushouts of students who weren’t replaced. If they had “long waiting lists,” why not replace those students?
I also studied the Bay Area charter chain Envision Schools, which were much hailed in the local press for a time. They also claimed to have “long waiting lists.” But for a period in the past, the minutes of Envision’s board meetings were posted online where the public could see them (probably until I found them and blogged about this). At the board meetings, there was much discussion of the difficulty of filling all the seats at their charter schools, “long waiting list” or not. And some friends toured one of Envision’s San Francisco charter high schools (Envision is now down to one S.F. school) when their son was in eighth grade. The friends weren’t impressed and immediately discarded the school as an option, but they told me they learned that their name was on the “long waiting list” anyway, because Envision put the names of everyone who visited or inquired about the school on the “long waiting list.”
“…due to departures/pushouts of students who weren’t replaced. If they had “long waiting lists,” why not replace those students?” — Thus exposing the recipe for having highest graduation and college admission “rates.”
New York students are voting “with their feet.” They want more options for specialized schools where students are taught by authentic, trained teachers. Instead of pouring more taxpayer dollars down the drain of privatization, the city should be building more public schools that can accommodate more students.
Deform continues to be a distraction with no evidence behind it. Politicians like Bloomberg toy with students’ lives based on nothing more than their own personal bias or opinion. Charters inflate their numbers, and nobody notices except for NPE.
One of the biggest lessons of so-called reform is that is sheds a light on how corrupt our system is. Our system works for the 1% because politicians depend on their money. We need to get the money out of politics.
Retiredteacher, I could not agree more about increasing the # of sought-after schools. In Jax, we have one (of each) spectacular, nationally-ranked middle and high school Arts magnets. At the high school level there are 10 Arts areas offered at different levels and with several teachers for each Arts area. Phenomenal—for them. Meanwhile, at our neighborhood high school, we have 2 Art teachers. Period. We could either offer more magnets or amp up neighborhood schools’ offerings. If we don’t offer more choice right in the neighborhood schools, however, that’s where parents will seek choice elsewhere—which is what our legislature is counting on.
I love NYCPSP’s conclusion: “Does Meryl Tisch want to build more public high schools for those 155,497 NON-EXISTENT 8th graders that charter supporters would have to agree that by their methodology must be counted as being on “wait lists” for public high schools?”
My guess Meryl would say no we don’t plan on spending a dime, we’ll just squeeze those suckers into your public schools– move over & dibs on the cafeteria!
was trying to be clever but that came out backwards – that’s Tisch’s plan for the “real” charter waitlisters. The phantom highschoolers, should they materialize, are free to overcrowd the traditional public high schools…
“Waiting for Superman” lives on.
Thank you for posting this!