Experts find DOE must Standardize and Step up Oversight of Selective Screened High School Admissions as COVID-19 Upends Current Admissions Process

Fordham Law School’s Feerick Center for Social Justice today released Public Schools, Public Oversight: Principles and Policy Recommendations during COVID-19 and Beyond, a report addressing changes to admissions policies for New York City’s highly-selective public high school screened programs in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2012, Fordham Law School has convened the New York City High School Application Advisory Committee (HSAAC), which brings together a broad array of stakeholders, including city officials, to improve policies and practices related to high school admissions. The principles and recommendations in today’s report were issued jointly by an HSAAC subcommittee (Subcommittee) convened by the Feerick Center at the invitation of the Department of Education (DOE) to gather feedback and provide recommendations on the admissions process for screened high school programs. The Subcommittee calls for DOE to centralize and standardize the administration of high school screening to secure meaningful transparency and oversight in admissions as COVID-19 widens the gap—and threatens to create a gulf—between well-resourced and under-resourced students and schools.

Dora Galacatos, Executive Director of the Feerick Center, states “The pandemic has caused tremendous disruption and suffering — disproportionately impacting the students and families with the least resources. For the fairness of all students, the high school admissions process should address this problem by creating a more centralized and standardized system and boosting chances of admissions for the most vulnerable students.”

“Rubrics” or admissions guidelines dictate how screened programs evaluate and rank student applicants. In the best of circumstances, they are critical to helping parents and students understand how programs select applicants, and, in turn, how students evaluate their own viability as candidates. Even before the crisis, the Feerick Center’s October 2019 Screened Out report sounded the alarm on DOE’s near total failure to make rubrics publicly available with fact-finding efforts yielding only 20 of 157 rubrics. As grades and other metrics used to screen students are unavailable or unreliable this year, without DOE action, high schools will be improvising in the dark.

As the NYC public school system is one of the most segregated in the country and struggles to deliver on the promise of equity for students and families, the Subcommittee believes that the only long-term solution is to eliminate screens. But given the demands of the crisis, the Subcommittee does not call for dismantling all aspects of screens in high school admissions for this school year. Instead, we call for DOE to lead an incremental and centralized approach that creates greater consistency across programs. This includes DOE’s standardization of permissible screens and additional steps to make screening more equitable by boosting chances of admission for students from the groups most likely to be affected by the crisis. Our recommended approach would undoubtedly benefit students, schools, and the system at large.