Until recently, I thought my worst New York City experience was the time I was waiting to cross Houston Street and a cackling vagrant punched me in the face. That, however, was before I started the process of getting my oldest kid into a public high school.
New York has an almost purely school choice system; most families don’t have a default high school that they’re zoned for. The admissions process, a mix of meritocratic culling and sheer chance, is time-consuming, psychologically taxing and so byzantine that it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t endured it.
“By many measures, New York is the kind of city where school choice is supposed to shine,” writes the Princeton sociologist Jennifer L. Jennings in her recent book about school choice, “The Scarcity Loop.” It’s huge and wealthy, with hundreds of options and good public transportation. But the problem in New York is that there aren’t enough seats in excellent schools to go around.
Families list schools in order of preference. Students are divided into five tiers based on seventh-grade marks and assigned a hexadecimal lottery number that determines priority in the city’s school-matching algorithm. Some schools take kids only from the highest tier, which can shut out those who get a single A- in seventh grade.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing