This article appeared in the New York Times in 2017. It evaluated Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s legacy in high school admission.
Mayor Bloomberg eliminated zoned high schools and instituted a policy of citywide choice. Students could apply to any high school in the city.
This was supposed to reduce racial segregation, but instead it increased it.
Bloomberg, who had sole control of the New York City school system, also increased the number of schools with selective admissions policies.
This too increased the segregation of schools.
Graduation rates are up, but graduation rates are always suspicious since they are easily manipulated and manufactured by devices such as “credit recovery.”
What is certain is that segregation has intensified.
Fourteen years into the system, black and Hispanic students are just as isolated in segregated high schools as they are in elementary schools — a situation that school choice was supposed to ease.
Within the system, there is a hierarchy of schools, each with different admissions requirements — a one-day high-stakes test, auditions, open houses. And getting into the best schools, where almost all students graduate and are ready to attend college, often requires top scores on the state’s annual math and English tests and a high grade point average.
Those admitted to these most successful schools remain disproportionately middle class and white or Asian, according to an in-depth analysis of acceptance data and graduation rates conducted for The New York Times by Measure of America, an arm of the Social Science Research Council. At the same time, low-income black or Hispanic children like the ones at Pelham Gardens are routinely shunted into schools with graduation rates 20 or more percentage points lower.
While top middle schools in a handful of districts groom children for competitive high schools that send graduates to the Ivy League, most middle schools, especially in the Bronx, funnel children to high schools that do not prepare them for college.
The roots of these divisions are tangled and complex. Students in competitive middle schools and gifted programs carry advantages into the application season, with better academic preparation and stronger test scores. Living in certain areas still comes with access to sought-after schools. And children across the city compete directly against one another regardless of their circumstances, without controls for factors like socioeconomic status.
Ultimately, there just are not enough good schools to go around. And so it is a system in which some children win and others lose because of factors beyond their control — like where they live and how much money their families have.
Choice does not solve the problem of scarcity. Instead of concentrating on increasing the number of good schools, Bloomberg focused on choice.
Each year, about 160 children from Pelham Gardens join the flood of 80,000 eighth graders applying for the city’s public high schools. The field on which they compete is enormous: They have to choose from 439 schools that are further broken up into 775 programs. One program may admit students based on where they live, while another program at the same school may admit only those with strong grades.
The sheer number of choices offers up great possibilities, but it can also make the system maddeningly complex, with so many requirements, open houses, deadlines and portfolios to keep track of. Yaslin Turbides helps middle schoolers apply through the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn. She said that she and her colleagues called the application system “the beast.”
Rare is a 13-year-old equipped to handle the selection process alone.
The process can become like a second job for some parents as they arm themselves with folders, spreadsheets and consultants who earn hundreds of dollars an hour to guide them. But most families in the public school system have neither the flexibility nor the resources to match that arsenal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
CRAZY and INSANE.
I would be so tired from jumping through loops and hoops, I would resent going to school.
Bloomberg is nuts.
Mayor Bloomberg instituted many reprehensible policies, especially those designed to promote the privatization of public education.
That being said, I think the issue of “choice” when all choices are public schools run under the auspices of the DOE is not necessarily a bad thing, even if some of the effects turned out to be very bad. There were definitely serious problems that needed to be addressed and they were not, because it did not seem that Bloomberg cared enough to address them. (The de Blasio DOE is trying to address some of those problems despite getting enormous pushback).
“Choice” in public school definitely has its problems, but so do the alternatives – i.e. students must go to zoned high schools. And there is a false idea that a student who doesn’t go to a so-called “top” high school is in a failing school and that isn’t true. There are still large high schools in NYC that look like large high schools in other communities — there are honors classes and classes for teenage students who have very little interest in being in school. A public school can have an 80% graduation rate and still have its top students getting an excellent education.
Although NYC gets tagged as having a “segregated public school system”, that means something very different than what people outside of NYC understand. NYC is 14.7% white and most white students attend high schools that have a much higher percentage of white students than 14.7% but that are still incredibly diverse by the standards of most communities outside NYC.
Here are a few:
Edward R. Murrow High School: 27% white, 23% African-American, 21% Latino, 25% Asian (71% economically disadvantaged)
Midwood High School: 22% white, 27% African-American, 12% Latino, 25% Asian (75% economically disadvantaged)
Fort Hamilton High School: 36% white, 4% African-American, 31% Latino, 27% Asian (73% economically disadvantaged)
Even the most segregated schools like the infamous Beacon High School are more diverse than many suburban high schools: Beacon is 50% white, 14% African-American, 19% Latino, 9% Asian.
Some people outside of NYC probably assume that white students attend mostly white high schools, but that is rarely the case. They usually attend diverse, multicultural public high schools in which white students are disproportionately represented but the school population itself is still quite diverse compared to many public high schools outside of NYC.
(The issue of specialized high schools is a completely different matter since the state requires them to be filled via a single test).
The idea of having public school choice (not charter school choice) in NYC is far from perfect and the resulting schools has resulted in white students being disproportionately represented in fewer schools instead of evenly dispersed in all public high schools. But I think that the idea that “there just are not enough good schools to go around” is not really true. Just because those aren’t public schools that affluent white kids rank high does not mean that they are not good. And the bigger issue is how to address the needs of severely disadvantaged teens who may not be interested in being serious students who are disproportionately concentrated in some high schools that more motivated students now have the choice to opt out of.
” Just because those aren’t public schools that affluent white kids rank high does not mean that they are not good.” EXACTLY said.
How would you like to have Buttugieg behind you on the battlefield?
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/24/corporate-tool-buttigieg-now-hammer-bash-sanders
We need to stop talking about “bad” schools. A bad school is any school where there’s a high-concentration of needy students. Rather than encouraging families in “bad” neighborhoods to hunt for good schools, we should be insuring that all schools lift up the students they have. The way to do that in “bad” schools is by providing a sequential, systematic knowledge-building curriculum, ditching obtuse and inappropriate standards that induce despair in kids, giving teachers the tools they need to prevent classroom anarchy, and halving the teaching load of teachers in these schools –give them the time they need to craft the brilliant lessons that are needed to close the achievement gap. E.D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters shows how a knowledge-centric currculum in France once closed their achievement gap (sadly, they’ve Americanized their curriculum to the detriment of their needy students).