The schools left behind
Fifteen-year-old Jaquan Brown remembered the shocking day last year when he and his fellow eighth grade classmates heard about their high school admissions results. They were all waiting inside the auditorium at their intermediate school in Gravesend, Brooklyn.
Brown was expecting to hear that he would be selected for at least one of his eight choices, such as the top-rated Edward R. Murrow High School, Kingsborough Early College School or Life Academy High School. All three of those schools graduate more than 80 percent of their students, according to city data.
As it turned out, he was the only one in his class who wasn’t assigned to any high school at all.
“Everybody’s cheering, and I’m just watching,” said Brown, a Coney Island native and above-average student. “I just kept thinking, am I going to stay back? My heart was pumping. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
That’s when he was told that he would have to enter the second round of New York City’s complex admissions cycle, along with more than 3,000 eighth graders who didn’t get into any of their chosen schools.
At a loss, Brown applied to William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School, a school near his home that still had open seats. Grady ended up accepting Jaquan along with 37 eighth graders and 10 ninth graders in the second-round for the 2018 to 2019 school year.
“I didn’t want to go to Grady,” said Brown. “I heard it was a bad school.”
That reputation may have been accurate nearly ten years ago, when Grady was labeled by nearly all federal, state and city metrics to be a failing school. But the school had improved in nearly all its benchmarks by the time he applied.
According to the New York City Department of Education’s now discontinued grading system, Grady was labeled a “D” school back in 2009. Its graduation rate had toggled between 44 percent and 50 percent for at least four years, well below the government’s targeted goal of 80 percent for all schools. The passing rates for all of the core subjects were below 60 percent. Grady’s attendance rate had been on a consistent decline.
In 2010, New York State placed Grady along with 56 other middle and high schools on a list of persistently low-achieving schools, which included the bottom 5 percent of Title 1 schools. As part of an Obama-era national education incentive program, the schools were given the option of choosing three models in order to receive a federal school improvement grant — restart, turnaround, or transformation.
Restart meant the school would be shut down and replaced, most often by a charter school. Turnaround meant the principal and up to half of the staff would be removed. Transformation, the least disruptive of the three, meant the principal would be removed and the school would be given three years to improve with support services in place.
Grady was placed in the “transformation” category and made a rapid recovery. In just a year and a half, the school went from a “D” to a “B.”
“What that meant was is that we increased metrics in every area — Regents, graduation, attendance — everything that you could raise, we did,” said Tarah Montalbano, Grady High School principal.
Its graduation rate had gone from a low of 49 percent to 65 percent in just a year and a half.
But then, something happened that stopped recovery in its tracks.
Even with all this rapid improvement, in January 2012, the city slated Grady for closure, along with every one of the 33 NYC schools that were placed on the list of persistently low-achievers two years before. Most baffling, among the 33, Grady and six other schools had improved to the point of receiving an A or a B ranking from the city.
The reason was a politically driven technicality. The city and the United Federation of Teachers had failed to reach an agreement in time on one of the contentious federal requirements to create a data-driven teacher evaluation system. The school improvement money for all the transformation schools temporarily pulled. Grady and the other schools were trapped in the middle of the standoff.
Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had closed over 100 schools during his 11-year tenure, decided to demote all seven schools to “turnaround” status. Instead of being rewarded for their successes, Grady and the others were all of a sudden under threat of closing for good if they didn’t implement drastic measures.
“We went from having the principal removed and everybody else intact, to being told overnight, that now we’re a turnaround school. We’re going to close, we’re going to reopen under a new name, and a minimum of half of our staff were going to return and everybody else was going to go,” said Montalbano. “So needless to say, Grady high school as well as all the other schools that were identified like that we’re very up in arms. The community was up in arms, the staff were up in arms, the parents are up in arms. It was a very dramatic time.”
Three months later, all seven schools were given a reprieve. But by that time, the damage had already been done. A flurry of media attention insured that Grady was branded in the public’s mind as a closing, failing school.
In a system of school choice, where all entering high school students ballot for their more desirable schools, that false reputation became a hurdle almost impossible to overcome. In ten years, Grady went from having approximately 1,400 students to enrolling 405 students this current school year.
“Our applications were cut in half, the quality of our students that were applying changed dramatically and drastically. We suffered tremendous losses of finance and staff,” Montalbano said. “I mean think about it. When you’re losing half of the students that you had in your building, that means you’re losing half of your funding, and your funding is what pays for your staff.”
Because of the drastically decreasing student enrollment and the increasing number of students who are graduating, Montalbano and her staff have had to figure out ways to recruit high achieving students like Brown to the school.
Brown is a well-adjusted freshman, content to be at Grady.
“I know a lot of people,” Brown said, who recently decided to join the nursing career track. The other choices are automotive, culinary arts, construction and Information Technology. “It’s not how I first thought it was from before. Before I was scared. When you get used to it, it’s a regular school.”
For the past five years, Montalbano has found it necessary to add recruitment and public relations to her workload as a NYC high school principal. She and her staff receive little extra help in their do-or die quest to get the word out to potential students about Grady’s academic and career opportunities. It is not on the chopping block.
Two of her staff members drive throughout Brooklyn on a weekly basis, meeting middle school students and guidance counselors, handing out burgundy and yellow hats, hoodies and other Grady paraphernalia to raise the school’s profile. Montalbano launched a middle school culinary arts exchange program with Seth Low, a nearby middle school, in order to expos interested sixth through eighth graders to the school’s most popular track.
Every year, she has been able to recruit around 500 applicants. Once students apply, Montalbano ranks half of them. She doesn’t know where the students ranked Grady out of their 12 choices. Because students get into the highest-ranked high school that chooses them in return, the applicant pool may look totally different than the students who actually get matched to a school.
For example, last year, even though Grady received 500, her school only matched with 122 students in the first round and 135 altogether after the second round.
She in turn ranks 50 percent of the student applicants. The remaining 50 percent are randomly selected to go to the school. These are usually the students who don’t fit the academic, behavior, or attendance criteria of the schools they selected. By Montalbano’s calculation, if she receives 20 percent of her total applicants, she will be happy.
This year, Montalbano’s recruitment plans and school improvement have reaped some tentative rewards. Grady received over 1,000 applicants — a record number for the school in recent years. Once she ranked them according to her academic criteria, she ended up with 181 matches, the highest she has seen as principal. That was by the end of Round One in March.
Her school is an educational option, or “ed-opt” school– a criteria created in the 1970s that was meant to integrate schools that had poor racial and academic diversity. The thought was that if schools take a certain percentage of students from high-, mid- and low academic levels, it would help integrate the school.
However, ed-opt has the reverse effect on schools like Grady. High school administrators soon realized that it was virtually impossible to fill their open seats in an admissions system with a growing number of selective, elite and historically high performing schools that more affluent, white students choose instead. It was already hard to integrate Grady. It worsened once it was falsely slated for closure.
“The applicants that we were receiving were very high special needs, disciplinary infractions, attendance issues, “said Montalbano. “So on top of losing enrollment, having bad press, the applicant pool was much more challenging, it was really a recipe for the downfall of a school.”
To Grady’s dismay, the damaging reputation has them already facing closure for a different reason. The choice system sets up an unfair balance that only becomes more imbalanced over time.
You don’t have to be a genius to know that the average student is not going to get into an already elite, selective school that has 10,000 or 20,000 applicants, Montalbano said. “But if I wanted to fill 300 seats, I would need to rank between 1,500 and 2,000 students.” That’s a problem, she added, because she doesn’t have that many to rank.
Every year, nearly 80,000 eighth graders navigate through a 600-page textbook thick high school directory book filled with the profiles of roughly 400 high schools with over 700 programs. And every year, those high school principals must choose what students they want from a variety of different applicant pool sizes. The pool sizes depend on how well the school is advertised by district representatives, familiarity, location, peer influence or historical prestige.
This complex high school admissions system, whose aim is to create equal choice for all, began in the early 2000s when three economists created an algorithm based on how medical students get matched for residency appointments. With this completely computerized system, many students were matched to multiple schools, while thousands of other students were not matched to any of their top choices. The latter ended up in lower performing schools.
Throughout the years, the district has made a few tweaks to the application process. Students were once allowed up to seven choices. Now they can choose up to 12.
Also, last year, the city eliminated the limited screened designation, which gave students priority admission if they attended a school’s tour or open house. This was eliminated, because it was feared to discriminate against poor and working class families who couldn’t take time off from work.
In addition, the DOE now makes certain that every eighth grader is matched with a high school, even if it’s not one they chose.
Even so, thousands of students still have to go through the process twice. If they don’t get into any schools of their choice in the first round, they have to begin again with the second round. The schools with seats available for round two tend to be those like Grady that have struggled for years.
Schools with top reputations tend to soar. Those without tend to lose out in increments, year after year. For example, last year, Edward R. Murrow High School, one of Jaquan’s first choices, had 5,667 applicants for only 562 seats. That translated to 10 applicants for every available seat.
Grady on the other hand had 158 applicants for the 46 seats in Grady’s most popular program — culinary arts. That translated into three applicants per seat. Murrow has no open seats after Round One. Grady always has open seats.
Aaron Pallas, a school policy researcher at Teachers College said that in the early 2000s, Mayor Bloomberg wanted to shift from a model of having a great school system to having a system of great schools. “It was intended to put schools in competition with one another for resources and for students,” Pallas said. “The role of the district became simply to present information about school performance to allow families to decide.”
The problems came when students began fleeing their neighborhood schools, leaving them to scramble for survival.
If diversity is left up to parent choice, the opposite tends to take place. “The selection process doesn’t seem to result in diverse schools,” Pallas said. “I think it’s going to take something more direct from the Department of Education to build into the matching process some mechanisms that create diversity that aren’t there because right now, it’s really entirely the individual interest of the families that’s going to drive ethnic diversity of the schools.”
Some academics are devising solutions to the inequitable selection process. Sarah Cohodes, an assistant professor of Education Policy and Economics at Teachers College, worked with three other Princeton and NYU professors to create a high school admissions process tool for disadvantaged, underprivileged students.
They discovered that a huge hurdle is getting information to the most disadvantaged. Some families just don’t know how to navigate the months-long, overwhelming, admission process. A second hurdle is that disadvantaged students were consistently choosing schools with graduation rates below 65 percent.
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In May, Montalbano received her first and second round matches. For the first time in her six years as principal, her efforts had shown positive results. Grady had 253 matches in total, surpassing her goal of 200 new students.
She feels that she may be on her way to saving the school’s reputation. “It’s extremely promising,” Montalbano said, “because we feel like five years of work is finally starting to show some actual progress.”
However, the work is not done. Students have the option to reject or appeal the placement. Grady still could lose students in the summer or in the fall. Or they could gain even more. Montalbano and her team will be in enrollment centers throughout the summer to encourage families to choose Grady.
So Montalbano is cautiously optimistic. “We want it to happen fast,” she said. “We know it’s not going to happen fast.”
