Is Demography Still Destiny? - Annenberg Institute for School Reform

MAN H AT TA N

B R O N X

Q U E E N S

B R O O K LY N

MAN H AT TA N

B R O N X

Q U E E N S

B R O O K LY N

A R E S EARCH AND PO L I C Y BR I E F

Is Demography

Still Destiny?Neighborhood Demographics and

Public High School Students’ Readiness

for College in New York City

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ABOUT THE ANNENBERG INSTITUTE FOR SCHOOL REFORM

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) is a national policy-research and reform-support organiza-tion, affiliated with Brown University, that focuses on improving conditions and outcomes for all students inurban public schools, especially those attended by traditionally underserved children. AISR’s vision is thetransformation of traditional school systems into “smart education systems” that develop and integrate high-quality learning opportunities in all areas of students’ lives – at school, at home, and in the community.

AISR conducts research; works with a variety of partners committed to educational improvement to buildcapacity in school districts and communities; and shares its work through print and Web publications. Ratherthan providing a specific reform design or model to be implemented, AISR’s approach is to offer an array oftools and strategies to help districts and communities strengthen their local capacity to provide and sustainhigh-quality education for all students.

Written byNorm Fruchter Megan HesterChristina MokhtarZach Shahn

EditingMargaret Balch-Gonzalez

Graphic DesignHaewon Kim

The authors would like to acknowledge Leonard Rodberg for access to the Infoshare Community InformationSystem – a computerized database that allows community groups, nonprofit organizations, and others toaccess demographic, health, and economic information about New York City at different geographic levels –and for assistance in identifying the overlap between New York City zip codes and neighborhoods.

Suggested Citation: Fruchter, N. M, M. Hester, C. Mokhtar, and Z. Shahn. 2012. Is Demography Still Destiny?Neighborhood Demographics and Public High School Students’ Readiness for College in New York City.Providence, RI: Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University.

This publication is available online at: http://annenberginstitute.org/product/IsDemographyStillDestiny

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Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University 1

Summary

During the past decade, theBloomberg administration has

explicitly prioritized narrowing theracial achievement gap. FormerChancellor Joel Klein has oftenargued, “neither resources nordemography is destiny in the class-room,” and the New York CityDepartment of Education hasinvested heavily in school choice toachieve this goal, remaking the highschool choice system to increase thescope and equity of student assign-ment to high school. Yet a new study by the Annenberg Institute forSchool Reform at Brown Universityindicates that the college readiness of New York City high school gradu-ates is still very highly correlatedwith the neighborhood they comefrom. In particular, the racial compo-sition and average income of a stu-dent’s home neighborhood are verystrong predictors of a student’schance of graduating high schoolready for college. The gaps betweenneighborhoods are enormous:• Only 8 percent of students from

Mott Haven graduate ready for

college, while nearly 80 percent ofstudents from Tribeca do.

• In the city’s neighborhoods with100 percent Black and Latino res-idents, no more than 10 percentof high school students graduateready for college.

• In the Manhattan neighborhoodswith the highest college-readinessrates, fewer than 10 percent of theresidents are Black or Latino.

• Eighteen of the twenty-oneneighborhoods with the lowestcollege-readiness rates are in theBronx (the other two are inBrooklyn).

• Thirteen of the fifteen neighbor-hoods with the highest college-readiness rates are in Manhattan(the other two are in Queens).

In spite of the city’s efforts toincrease equity by expanding highschool choice and creating five hun-dred new small schools and one hundred charter schools, collegereadiness rates are still largely pre-dicted by the demographics of a stu-dent’s home neighborhood. Thissuggests that the strategies of schoolchoice and school creation are notsufficient to create the equity thatthe administration has envisioned.

Is Demography Still Destiny?

Other policies that would begin toaddress these gaps are:• Create a more equitable distribu-

tion of in-school guidance andcounseling resources to help fami-lies successfully navigate theschool choice maze.

• Significantly increase the numberof educational-option seats toensure that students of all aca-demic levels and all neighbor-hoods have a fair shot at seats inthe high schools that are mostlikely to prepare them for college.

• Invest heavily in school improve-ment strategies, rather than justschool creation and choice, toincrease the capacity of existingschools to prepare students forcollege.

Without such comprehensive efforts,the vast disparity in opportunity thatseparates the city’s neighborhoodswill persist.

Neighborhood Demographics and Public High School Students’ Readiness for College in New York City

Introduction

Over the past decade, MayorMichael Bloomberg has reor-

ganized the New York City schoolsystem using principles and strategiesextrapolated from his corporate sec-tor experience. The mayor and hisadministration have restructured thepublic school system into a portfoliodistrict centered on choice, auton-omy, and accountability. Thesestrategies have been promoted as themost effective and efficient way toreduce the school system’s substantialracial achievement gap and improvethe quality of education for all thecity’s students. As a consequence,New York City’s restructuring efforthas been replicated in districts acrossthe country, and the New York Cityschool system is often defined as thenation’s foremost exemplar of a port-folio district.

After a decade of implementation, a variety of student, school, and system-level outcomes offer a win-dow into the successes and shortcom-ings of New York City’s portfoliodistrict reforms. This research briefexamines one aspect of the impact of

the nation’s most comprehensive sys-tem of high school choice on equityof opportunity for the system’s highschool students. Our findings sug-gest that while high school choicemay have improved educationaloptions for individual students,choice has not been sufficient toincrease systemic equity of opportu-nity. Our results indicate that univer-sal high school choice has notdisrupted the relationship of demog-raphy to educational destiny acrossthe city’s struggling neighborhoods.

Evolution of High SchoolChoice

The New York City school sys-tem has developed the nation’s

most comprehensive system of high school choice. In the century sinceStuyvesant High School was openedas a citywide choice school, students’selection of high schools (and highschools’ selection of students) hasbecome an almost universal process.1

High school choice in New YorkCity has expanded and grown morecomplex as efforts to extend thescope and quality of student choicehave alternated with efforts to createan equitable mix of students withinschools. In the late 1960s, JohnDewey High School opened as thefirst educational option (or “ed-op”)high school. Dewey offered place-ments to students categorized intothree admissions groups – high, low,and average achievers – according totheir citywide reading test scores.Dewey selected half the students in

each of the three groups, while theother half were randomly assignedby computer. Edward R. Murrow,Murray Bergtraum, and NormanThomas High Schools were subse-quently opened as educational optionschools in the 1970s and employedthe same selection criteria.

These large ed-op schools expandedthe equity dimensions of choice byattracting a diverse mix of studentsranging from academically strug-gling to high achieving. In the fol-lowing decades, more ed-op highschools were created and other highschools added discrete ed-op pro-grams, significantly expanding the

range and equity of high schoolchoice offerings. These ed-opschools and programs represent anearly form of controlled schoolchoice by offering placements withindesignated schools to a mix of stu-dents with varying academic abilities.

In the mid-1980s, the creation ofCentral Park East Secondary Schoolas a high school of choice helped initiate a wave of small high schooldevelopment, pioneered by NewVisions for Public Schools and theCenter for Collaborative Educationand supported by the Aaron Dia-mond Foundation. Through theseinitiatives, in the early 1990s somethirty-five new small high schools ofchoice were developed. An equiva-lent number of new small high

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1 Stuyvesant High School began restrictingadmission based on academics in 1919. In1972, the New York State legislature linked itwith the Bronx High School of Science andBrooklyn Technical High School and man-dated admission to those three schools tostudents with the highest scores on a specialcitywide test. Five additional high schoolswere subsequently added to this elite cate-gory of specialized schools by the New YorkCity Department of Education during theBloomberg administration.

Choice has not been sufficient

to increase systemic equity of

opportunity.


schools were developed as part of the New York Networks for SchoolRenewal, the Annenberg Founda-tion’s New York City Challengegrantee, in the mid-1990s. Theseefforts considerably expanded theuniverse of high school choice.

Starting in 2002, the Bloombergadministration, supported by grantsfrom the Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation, Carnegie Corporation,and the Open Society Institute,greatly intensified the pace of smallhigh school creation. The adminis-tration also recalibrated the highschool choice process. Under former Schools Chancellor JoelKlein, the process was refined toincrease the number of individualschools each student could select,and the selection process wasimproved by using a computer-driven algorithm similar to the formula that matches teaching hospi-tals and medical student interns topair students’ choices with schools’selections.

As a result, the percentage of stu-dents placed in one of their topchoices of high school has increasedevery year since 2009. In 2011, forexample, 83 percent of high schoolapplicants were matched with one of their five top choices. MayorBloomberg and former ChancellorKlein frequently linked their schoolreform efforts to the goals of the civilrights movement; for example, in2009 Klein proclaimed that “neitherresources nor demography is destinyin the classroom.” One of the goalsof the administration’s efforts to

improve the high school selectionprocess was to ensure that demogra-phy was not destiny for the city’shigh school students. As the econo-mists who developed the high schoolchoice matching process observed ina journal article about the newprocess,

One impetus for increasingschool choice was to make surestudents who lived in disadvan-taged neighborhoods were notautomatically assigned to disad-vantaged schools. (Abdulka-diroglu, Pathak & Roth 2005, p.364)

High School Choice andDemography/Destiny

But has the high school choicesystem succeeded in breaking

the link between demography anddestiny? The analysis in this briefbegins to address that question.

In 2010 the New York State Educa-tion Department developed a set ofindicators to assess student capacityto succeed in college, based on stu-dent performance on Regents examsand CUNY assessment tests. If stu-dents pass the Math Regents examwith a score of at least 80 and theEnglish Regents exam with a score ofat least 75, they are now defined byNew York State as college ready.2

This metric is based on research by

testing experts Howard Everson andDaniel Koretz (2010) showing thatstudents who reach these bench-marks are significantly more likely to earn at least a C in a college-levelcourse in that subject.

�Methods

In 2011, the New York City Depart-ment of Education (NYCDOE)released data on college readinessindicators for each New York Cityhigh school, as an additional measureof school performance on the NYC-DOE’s Annual Progress Reports. But

2 New York State’s definition of college readi-ness, based strictly on Regents scores, iscalled the Aspirational Performance Meas-ure. For the purposes of this analysis, wehave used the NYCDOE’s more expansiveCollege Readiness Index, which is defined asthe percentage of students who graduatewith a Regents diploma, earn a 75 or higheron the English Regents or score 480 or higheron the Critical Reading SAT, and earn an 80or higher on one Math Regents and completecoursework in Algebra II/Trigonometry or ahigher-level math subject, or score 480 orhigher on the Math SAT. A student candemonstrate completion of math courseworkby: (a) Passing a course in Algebra II/Trigonometry or higher and taking one of the following exams: the Math B Regents,Algebra II/ Trigonometry Regents, AP Calcu-lus, AP Statistics, or IB Math; or (b) Passingthe Math B or Algebra II/TrigonometryRegents. We used this metric because it wasthe latest data available at the time of ouranalysis.

“Neither resources nor demogra-

phy is destiny in the classroom”

––Joel Klein

because the choice system often sev-ers the connection between students’home neighborhoods and the highschools they attend (since studentschoose schools throughout the city),the data did not connect the demo-graphics of students’ neighborhoodresidence with their college readinessscores to assess the extent to whichneighborhood demographics areassociated with students’ collegereadiness rates.

In 2011, researchers at the Annen-berg Institute for School Reform(AISR) at Brown Universityrequested and received data from the NYCDOE on the high schoolgraduation and college readiness

3 We use Infoshare’s definition of a New York City neighborhood: “one of 292 neighborhoods in which New Yorkers gener-ally think of themselves as residing”(www.infoshare.org).

4 These residential neighborhood demo-graphic factors were culled from the U.S.Census 2005–2009 American Community Sur-vey averages for New York City. The five-yearaverages are the most reliable, have thelargest sample size, and are best used whenexamining Census tracts and small areassuch as neighborhoods.

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scores of all the city’s public highschool students, broken down by thestudents’ residential zip code. AISRamalgamated the student data forindividual zip codes into a citywideneighborhood index3 and then car-ried out a series of analyses to assessthe relationship between students’residential neighborhood demo-graphic factors4 and students’ collegereadiness scores, aggregated up tothe neighborhood level.

AISR used an online data tool, devel-oped by the Infoshare CommunityInformation Service, to merge U.S.Census data, primarily neighborhoodindicators by New York City zipcode, with the college readinessscores by students’ residential zipcode provided by the NYCDOE. Toaggregate from the zip code to theneighborhood level, we used dataprovided by Infoshare that specifiesthe overlap of neighborhoods andzip codes. Whenever neighborhoodboundaries did not coincide withthose of zip codes, we used 2009Census tract populations, brokendown by the Census tracts in eachzip code and neighborhood, to calcu-late the proportion of the neighbor-hood’s population that comes fromeach zip code. We assigned eachneighborhood a college readinessscore that represents the weightedaverage of the college readinessscores of those zip codes that overlapwith the neighborhood. We used the same procedures for any demo-graphic variable we converted to theneighborhood level.

�Findings

AISR’s analysis found that severalneighborhood socio-economic fac-tors, such as single motherhood,extent of mother’s education, unem-ployment rate, and citizenship status,were significantly correlated withstudents’ college readiness rates. For example, the higher the averagemother’s level of education in anyNew York City neighborhood, thehigher the college readiness scores of the students residing in thatneighborhood. Conversely, thehigher a neighborhood’s percentageof single mothers, the lower the col-lege readiness scores of students liv-ing in that neighborhood. The meanincome level in each neighborhoodwas particularly strongly correlatedwith students’ college readinessscores – the lower a neighborhood’smean income, the lower the collegereadiness scores of the students livingin that neighborhood.

No single neighborhood factor wasas strongly associated with collegereadiness as racial/ethnic composi-tion. The strongest negative rela-tionship to students’ collegereadiness scores was the percentageof Black and Latino residents in thecity’s neighborhoods – the higher thepercentage of Black and Latino resi-dents in specific neighborhoods, the

No single neighborhood factor

was as strongly associated

with college readiness as racial/

ethnic composition.

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60

40

20

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FIGURE 1

Proportion of Black and Latino neighborhood residents vs. college readiness

Percent college re

ady

log(Proportion Black or Latino)


lower the college readiness scores ofthe high school graduates (in 2011)in those neighborhoods. Figure 1,with all the city’s neighborhoods represented by circles, illustrates this very strong negative log-linearrelationship.

The relationship between the twovariables – students’ college readi-ness scores and the racial composi-tion of neighborhoods across NewYork City – is remarkably tight.When we examined the relationshipof other demographic factors (e.g.,income, single motherhood, citizen-ship status) to college readiness rates,we could identify several outliers –neighborhoods that broke the pat-tern. But the very strong relationshipbetween race and college readinessyielded only one neighborhood(Woodlawn – see Figure 2 on nextpage) as a possible outlier, and this isexplained by unusual population pat-terns in the neighborhood.

Figure 2 shows that no more than 10percent of the high school studentsin the Bronx neighborhoods of Mor-risania, Woodstock, Longwood,Claremont, and Mott Haven gradu-ated high school college ready in2011. These neighborhoods with lowcollege readiness rates have the high-est percentages of Black and Latinoresidents in New York City. In fact,eighteen of the twenty-one neigh-borhoods with the lowest collegereadiness rates are in the Bronx, theborough with the highest percentageof Black and Latino residents.

Neighborhood BoroughCollege

Readiness (%)Black/Latino*

(%)

East New York Brooklyn 12 96

Ocean Hill Brooklyn 12 99

North Baychester Bronx 12 93

Edenwald Bronx 12 93

Melrose Bronx 12 100

Hunt's Point Bronx 12 100

East Tremont Bronx 12 98

Mount Hope Bronx 11 98

Bathgate Bronx 11 95

Brownsville Brooklyn 11 100

Crotona Park Bronx 11 99

Port Morris Bronx 11 96

East Concourse Bronx 11 100

Wakefield Bronx 11 83

Mount Eden Bronx 11 99

Morrisania Bronx 10 100

Woodstock Bronx 10 100

Longwood Bronx 10 100

Claremont Bronx 10 100

Mott Haven Bronx 8 100

Woodlawn Bronx 8 52**

FIGURE 2

New York City high schools with lowest college readiness ratesNote high percentages of Black and Latino neighborhood residents

* Black/Latino refers to the proportion Black plus the proportion Latino, which cansometimes be more than 100 percent because some people identify as both. Wherepercentages added up to more than 100, we rounded to 100.

**Woodlawn, which has a large White population, shares a zip code with Eastchester,a neighborhood that is predominately Black. There are disproportionately moreBlack high school students in this zip code, so its low college readiness rate reflectsthe characteristics of Eastchester.

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Conversely, as Figure 3 shows, 74percent or more of the high schoolstudents in more advantaged Man-hattan neighborhoods such asTribeca, Little Italy, Soho, andLenox Hill graduated college readyin 2011. All four of these Manhattanneighborhoods with very high col-lege-ready rates have 10 percent orless Black and Latino residents. Ananalysis of graduate rates showed asimilar negative log-linear associa-tion with the proportion of Blacksand Latinos in the neighborhoodpopulations. But there was morevariation in graduation rates thancollege readiness rates among neigh-borhoods with the most Black andLatino residents, indicating thatthere is more equity in opportunityfor high school outcomes than forcollege readiness.

Given that only 13 percent of thecity’s Black and Latino students currently graduate high school pre-pared for college, compared with 50 percent of White students and 50 percent of Asian students,5 thesefindings are not surprising. Yet it isquite sobering that despite efforts toimprove the high school choice sys-tem to increase educational opportu-nities for the city’s students, therelationship between demographyand college readiness is so strongacross the city’s neighborhoods.Because the college-ready indicatoris so new, it has not been possible toconstruct comparisons to determinewhether the relationship betweenneighborhood demographics andcollege readiness has changed acrosstime. Thus our analysis is very time-limited – a snapshot based on oneyear of data. However, because the

Neighborhood BoroughCollege

Readiness (%)Black/Latino

(%)

Tribeca Manhattan 79 9

Little Italy Manhattan 77 10

Soho Manhattan 74 9

Lenox Hill Manhattan 74 6

Douglaston & Little Neck Queens 74 13

City Hall Manhattan 71 12

Upper East Side Manhattan 70 8

Chinatown Manhattan 68 16

Yorkville Manhattan 66 9

World Trade Center Manhattan 66 9

Battery Park Manhattan 66 9

Oakland Gardens Queens 65 15

Bellevue Area Manhattan 65 13

Turtle Bay Manhattan 65 8

West Village Manhattan 65 11

FIGURE 3

New York City high schools with highest college readiness ratesNote low percentages of Black and Latino neighborhood residents


relationship between race and out-comes demonstrated in Figure 1could hardly be more tight, it is notlikely to have lessened significantlyin recent years.

In a broadside that former Chancel-lor Klein and Michelle Rhee pub-lished in 2010, they declared, “Thesingle most important factor deter-mining whether students succeed inschool is not the color of their skinor their ZIP code or even their par-ents’ income – it is the quality oftheir teacher.” Yet our findings indi-cate that ZIP code, income, and,above all, the racial composition of students’ neighborhoods is verystrongly correlated with student success.

In spite of the NYCDOE’s efforts toenhance both the extent of selectivityand the equity of high school choice,demography is still – and quiterelentlessly – destiny in terms of therelationship between neighborhoodrace/ethnicity and college readinessacross the city’s public school system.Universal high school choice seemsnot to have provided equity of out-comes for the city’s high school students.

5 According to the NYCDOE School-LevelRegents-Based Math/ELA Aspirational Per-formance Measure (2010), which is the onlycollege readiness metric provided that is bro-ken down by race. See http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/193BBD8A-5DE1-4EEE-B49B-C8C45357441B/0/Graduation_Rates_Public_School_Apm.xls.

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Exploring the Causes of the Choice/Demography Link

What might help to explainthese disturbing results?

Sean Corcoran and Henry Levin’s(2011) comprehensive analysis of thecity’s high school choice system pro-vides some suggestions. Corcoranand Levin found that under theBloomberg administration, educa-tional option program offerings,which control school choice toincrease equity of student opportu-nity, have significantly diminished.Unscreened programs, in which stu-dents are randomly selected by com-puter, with priority given to thosewho attend a school open house orinformation session, have signifi-cantly increased. Researchers need toexamine the equity implications ofthese policy changes.

found that even given the students’tendency to choose schools thatmatched their own backgrounds:

Students’ first-choice schools areon average more advantaged andless racially isolated than stu-dents’ middle schools . . . [but]students’ final school assignmentis more similar to the students’feeder school. (p. 218)

Thus, student preferences forschools that match their back-grounds, combined with the opera-tion of the matching processformula, tend to assign students toschools more similar to their middleschools than the schools theyselected as their first choice.

Corcoran and Levin acknowledge in their study that the Bloombergadministration has improved thechoice system’s transparency andequity. If there is a cost, they suggest,it lies in the system’s increased com-plexity and the administration’s neu-trality: “The DOE has shifted theburden of a complex choice decisiononto students, their parents, andschools.” They conclude:

Whether or not this shiftimproves academic outcomes . . .will depend on how students andtheir families make schoolchoices. If demand is relativelyinsensitive to academic qualityand more responsive to locationand/or social influences, even afair system of choice will fail toprovide an impetus for academicimprovement. Moreover, to the

Corcoran and Levin discovered thatthe average number of high schoolchoices students made varied signifi-cantly by the middle school theyattended. After controlling “for stu-dent characteristics (e.g., achieve-ment, race, poverty) and residentialarea,” the authors observed “sizablemiddle school effects on choices” (p. 212). Efforts by the New YorkCity Coalition for Educational Jus-tice (2007, 2008) have demonstratedthat patterns of inequity in middleschool curricula, as well as disparitiesin resources such as teacher qualityand student support, are associatedwith low student achievement in thecity’s middle schools. Given Corco-ran and Levin’s finding of “sizablemiddle school effects,” researchefforts should assess whether pre-dictable disparities in guidance-counselor-to-student ratios in middleschools are shaping these effects onhigh school choice.6

Corcoran and Levin (2011) alsofound:

Students tended to prefer highschools that matched their ownacademic, racial, and socioeco-nomic background. . . . Thesepatterns suggest that universalchoice will be limited in its abilityto prevent stratification of stu-dents across schools by race,socio-economic status, and aca-demic ability. (pp. 214–215)

But Corcoran and Levin alsoobserved a pattern of disparitybetween students’ first choice of highschool, students’ middle schools, andthe high schools students were ulti-mately assigned to. Essentially, they

“Students’ first-choice schools are

on average more advantaged and

less racially isolated than students’

middle schools . . . [but] students’

final school assignment is more

similar to the students’ feeder

school.”

––Sean Corcoran and Harry Levin,“School Choice and Competition inthe New York City Schools”


extent students vary in the valuesthey place on school characteris-tics, decentralized school choicehas the potential to increasestratification by race, academicability, and socio-economic sta-tus. (p. 224)

That last observation may offer aninitial explanation of the very strongrelationship we found between col-lege readiness and racial compositionacross the city’s neighborhoods.

Reducing the Choice/Demography Link

What policies might reduce thestrong correlation between

neighborhood characteristics andcollege readiness? Because ourresearch represents only an initialstep in exploring the relationshipsamong these variables, our recom-mendations are necessarily prelimi-nary and limited. But one obviousway to begin is to investigate themiddle school effects on choice thatCorcoran and Levin observed. It maywell be, for example, that the rela-tively small numbers of the system’smiddle schools that serve more-advantaged students have lower stu-dent/guidance counselor ratios andmore experienced and effectivecounselors. If there are such in-school counseling advantages, theymay well produce more appropriatechoice of and placement in highschools.

Moreover, such in-school advantagesare often buttressed by the socialcapital that more-advantaged familiesand neighborhoods can wield. Fami-lies and neighborhoods that have

accumulated years of knowledgeabout how to identify the mostappropriate high schools, combinedwith the accumulated experience of how to effectively negotiate thechoice process, can provide signifi-cant advantages to students’ choice.

Evening out these imbalances willnot only require a more equitabledistribution of in-school guidanceand counseling resources. It willalso require mobilizing neighbor-

hood-based guidance and supportefforts provided by community serv-ice and advocacy organizations7 – andperhaps by middle and high school students through forms of peercounseling8 – to help students andfamilies in low-income Black andLatino neighborhood successfullynavigate the choice process.

Corcoran and Levin’s finding thatthe number of placements availablein education option schools and pro-grams has been significantly reducedsuggests another appropriate policyintervention. To increase the possi-bility that Black and Latino studentswith low levels of achievement haveappropriate placements available tothem through the choice process,educational options seats shouldnot only be restored to their pre-

6 The New York City Coalition for EducationalJustice has also promoted a series ofimprovement measures, including expandedlearning time and social/emotional supportssuch as improved guidance services, partic-ularly focused on the high school choiceprocess, which might improve the appropri-ateness and effectiveness of student selec-tion of high schools.

7 Forms of community-based guidance andcounseling have been developed during thepast decades to help students and their fam-ilies negotiate the college admissionsprocess. But to our knowledge, very few ofthese local forms of support have been mobi-lized to help negotiate the high school choiceprocess.

8 One example of such programs is the effortto adapt the Urban Youth Collaborative’s Stu-dent Success Center model to the middleschool level, now being explored at I.S. 302 inCypress Hills.

9 These recommendations are similar to thosemade by Hemphill and Nauer (2009).

In-school advantages are often

buttressed by the social capital

that more-advantaged families

and neighborhoods can wield.

2002 levels, but significantlyincreased. The goal should be toensure that students from all neigh-borhoods have a fair shot at seats inthe high schools that are most likelyto prepare them for college.9

Providing effective guidance andcounseling support for studentsnegotiating the high school choiceprocess – and increasing the number

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of ed-op placements – wouldundoubtedly improve the quality and equity of student choices (andultimately, their college readinessscores). But such support will not besufficient to provide the new highschool placements necessary to cor-rect the equity imbalances across thechoice system. Corcoran and Levin’sfinding that students choose more-advantaged and less-segregatedschools than those in which they are

ultimately placed suggests a muchlarger problem: there are not enoughgood schools available within thematching process. Indeed, the threeeconomists who developed thechoice process’s matching algorithmsconcluded, in a paper written afterthe new process was implemented,that “New York City needs moregood schools” (Abdulkadiroglu,Pathak & Roth 2005, p. 367).

Over the past decade, the Bloombergadministration has explicitly priori-tized narrowing the racial achieve-ment gap and has invested heavily in

school choice (and school creation)as policies to achieve these goals.However, our analysis suggests thatthe restructured system of choicethey created is far from sufficient tomeet the citywide equity challenge.

After a decade of expanding highschool choice and creating five hun-dred new small schools and one hun-dred new charter schools, collegereadiness rates are still largely pre-dicted by the demographics of a student’s home neighborhood. Ifdemography is no longer to deter-mine destiny for the city’s students,the administration must not onlyrestructure the school choice systemin the ways suggested above, butmust also invest heavily in schoolimprovement strategies toincrease the capacity of all schoolsto effectively prepare students forcollege. Without such comprehen-sive efforts, the vast disparity inopportunity that separates the city’sneighborhoods will persist.

ReferencesAbdulkadiroglu, A., P. A. Pathak and

A. E. Roth. 2005. “The New YorkHigh School Match,” AmericanEconomic Review 95, no. 2, p. 364.

Corcoran, S. P. and H. M. Levin.2011. “School Choice and Compe-tition in the New York CitySchools.” Invited chapter for theAmerican Institutes for Research.In Education Reform in New YorkCity: Ambitious Change in theNation’s Most Complex School System, edited by J. A. O’Day, C. S. Bitter, and L. M. Gomez.Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educa-tion Press.

Everson, H. T. 2010. “Relationshipof Regents ELA and Math Scoresto College Readiness Indicators.”Memo to David Steiner. NewYork: City University of New York,Center for Advanced Study inEducation, usny.nysed.gov/scoring_changes/MemotoDavidSteinerJuly1.pdf.

Hemphill, C., and K. Nauer, with H. Zelon and T. Jacobs. 2009. The New Marketplace: How SmallSchool Reforms and School ChoiceHave Reshaped New York City’s HighSchools. New York: Milano, TheNew School, Center for New YorkCity Affairs.

Klein, J. 2009. “Urban Schools NeedBetter Teachers, Not Excuses, toClose the Education Gap,” U.S.News & World Report (May 4),www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/05/04/urban-schools-need-better-teachers-not-excuses-to-close-the-education-gap.

The finding that students choose

more-advantaged and less-seg-

regated schools than those in

which they are ultimately placed

suggests a much larger prob-

lem: there are not enough good

schools available within the

matching process.


New York City Coalition for Educa-tional Justice. 2007. New York City’sMiddle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure?Providence, RI: Brown University,Annenberg Institute for SchoolReform, http://annenberginstitute.org/publication/new-york-citys-middle-grade-schools-platforms-success-or-pathways-failure.

New York City Coalition for Educa-tional Justice. 2008. Our ChildrenCan’t Wait: A Proposal to Close theMiddle-Grades Achievement Gap.Providence, RI: Brown University,Annenberg Institute for SchoolReform, http://annenberginstitute.org/publication/our-children-cant-wait-proposal-close-middle-grades-achievement-gap.


Documents

Is Demography Still Destiny? - Annenberg Institute for School Reform