I appreciate the choice New York City offers our children - but finding the right school needs to be made easier, more consistent, and more equitable. Create an app that would let a student plug in their interests, their random number, the distance they’re willing to travel, their grade tier, and generate a list of possible schools.Provide meaningful help at school in navigating the process, including SHSAT prep, now mostly only available to families who can pay for a prep course.Provide a centralized list of open houses, and provide more weeks to visit them.Consolidate the process with a common application.Have clear guidelines on admissions standards and keep them the same year after year.He did get excited about a couple of schools and is now finishing up his portfolio and essays, which are due tomorrow. My son was mostly interested in how much homework there will be, how long the commute is, and whether any of his friends would go there. Our 12- and 13-year-olds are supposed to weigh their interests with admissions requirements and the quality of their random number, a 32 digit string of letters and numbers that is itself hard to figure out.Īt open houses, they are supposed to ask questions about teaching methods, AP courses, the quality of college advisory assistance, intellectual rigor, and after-school clubs. Popular schools fill up quickly, so if you miss the window in between the school posting the open houses filling up, you are out of luck. You need to go to each individual school website and sign up. Most schools offer open houses but there is no central calendar. Art schools require auditions or portfolios. The specialized high schools look only at a student’s score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, a grueling 3-hour exam. Others select students solely based on their random number. Others require interviews or video statements.Ī few Educational Option schools, called Ed-Opt, take an equal number from each tier. But all the other schools require their own. A group of “consortium schools” conveniently use a common essay. Other schools screen based entirely on essays. Most only accept students in tier 1, and only if the student has a good random number. Some schools screen applicants based on grades. The choice is overwhelming, as are the admission requirements. They have eight weeks and are given next to no guidance. They are then told to go to MySchools, a clunky Education Department website, look through more than 400 schools and make a list of 12, in order of preference. ![]() It works like this: Each student is assigned a random number and put into a tier from 1 to 5 based on their grade point average, with tier 1 the highest. My son is one of the roughly 80,000 New York City students going through the process, with tomorrow being the deadline. I had always heard that applying to high school in New York City was complex, but nothing could have prepared me for how overwhelming, exhausting, and unsettling this process is for our eighth-graders and their families.
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