It can be hard for parents to assemble information about schools

Here's a critique of the NYC high school choice system, from a former Dept of Ed administrator who now runs a public- and private-school admissions consulting firm that helps parents navigate the system. He calls for better advising...

Why high school admissions actually doesn’t work for many city students — and how it could
by Maurice Frumkin on August 7, 2015

"It was my pleasure to read Professor Alvin Roth’s recent piece on why New York City’s high school admissions process now works most of the time. And as the city’s former deputy director of high school enrollment and a current admissions consultant who has helped thousands of families navigate the process, I see his observations play out every day.

Given how massive the New York City process is, the mechanism of assigning students to schools after families have made their choices does, indeed, work well. But the process by which those choices are made remains complicated, and very much depends on expertise or the ability to spend an excessive amount of time understanding how it works. Many students still go without either.

...

"Part of my role at the DOE was to train middle school counselors, whose workloads, savvy, and degree to which their students’ parents were engaged in the process varied widely. Over time, many counselors have developed into admissions experts who do an outstanding job informing their families. A Manhattan school counselor entering her third year recently told me, though, that it was a challenge for her to become familiar with schools beyond the “brand name” schools that everyone talks about.

"It’s a problem Roth acknowledges. “Although it’s great to have a marketplace that gives you an abundance of opportunities, these may be illusory if you can’t evaluate them, and they can cause the market to lose much of its usefulness,” he writes.

 ...

"I speak with families every day who are convinced that although there are 5,000 applicants to a selective program with 100 seats, an offer is inevitable because their child meets the published selection criteria. They will, therefore, list fewer choices – and often only choices that represent the most sought-after, screened programs."

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I'm reminded of this earlier post, and the advice I gave to "Jimmy," who had suffered from just this mistake...

Saturday, May 7, 2011

High school choice in New York City: some advice for next year

New York City’s high school admissions process: an excerpt from Who Gets What and Why, in Chalkbeat

Chalkbeat has a brief excerpt from my new book, Who Gets What and Why:

Here's the link to what they have to say (or rather what they have me saying, in an excerpt from Chapter 9 "Back to School"):
Why New York City’s high school admissions process only works most of the time

Below are two paragraphs from the excerpt, concerning Neil Dorosin, who worked for the NYC Department of Education at the time, and is now the Johnny Appleseed of school choice as the director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC):

One reason that principals gained confidence was that DOE staffers did a good job communicating to them how the new system would work. Crucial in that effort was Neil Dorosin, the DOE’s director of high school operations. The task of informing everyone about the new algorithm fell to Neil and his colleagues in the Office of Enrollment Services. Among those he had to educate was his ultimate boss, Chancellor Joel Klein.

“One day I got called down to talk to him,” Neil recalls. “He was upset because he had a friend whose child didn’t get into their first-choice school. The friend had a cousin whose child had gotten into the school, and it was their last choice. I had to explain why the system had to function that way” (i.e., to make it safe to list true preferences).