Education Week - May 8, 2019 - 8

high schools is a struggle everywhere. I don't know of a place where
highly selective schools wonderfully
mirror the general population," said
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior
fellow at the Century Foundation
who's a leading proponent of using
socioeconomic criteria to diversify
schools, and helped Chicago craft
its plan.
"The underlying problem is that
selective high schools measure student achievement, and achievement
is a reflection of opportunity," he
said. "Talent is distributed equally,
but opportunity is not."

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

gle-digit presence in its eight most
prestigious high schools.
A snapshot of New York schools
in 2017-18, the most recent audited
figures available, shows a student
population that's 41 percent Latino
and 26 percent African-American.
But in its selective-admissions high
schools, only 6 percent were Latino and 4 percent were black. Just
seven black students were offered
spots in next fall's freshman class of
nearly 900 students at Stuyvesant
High School.
Those big gaps in New York have
prompted yet another round of feverish debate in a years-long struggle to
diversify its most famous high schools.
Mayor Bill de Blasio's bid to
dump the single test that governs
admission has been met with furious opposition by some parents
and alumni, who argue that basing
admissions on other criteria would
water down those schools' rigor and
ruin their reputations. Activists,
city leaders, and state lawmakers
are stalemated in their battle about
how to move forward.
"The issue of diversity at selective

Multiple Admissions Factors
Like New York, Chicago came
under attack when it began considering a new admissions system in
2009 to admit students to its specialized high schools. It had been
using racial quotas to desegregate
its schools under a 29-year-old federal consent decree.
Worried that an admissions
change at the elite high schools
would net fewer seats for their children, black and Latino parents descended on school board meetings,

Photos by Taylor Glascock for Education Week

In Chicago, Keeping
Elite High Schools
Diverse Is High Priority

Rochelle Borden, 17, works in the office of Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago, one of the city's 11 selective
admissions high schools. To maintain diversity, Chicago uses a mix of factors to select students for its elite schools.

chanting "educate or die." As in New
York, Asian and white teenagers
were-and still are-overrepresented in Chicago's selective-admissions high schools.
Chicago had to design a new way
to assign students to schools because the federal court had ended
its oversight. And any new plan
would also have to abide by a 2007
U.S. Supreme Court ruling that
barred the use of race in assigning
individual students to schools.
With that legal restriction, some
districts had begun to venture onto
new turf to create more-equitable
assignment plans: They were using

WHO ATTENDS SELECTIVE HIGH SCHOOLS?
The majority of students in both the New York City and Chicago public school
systems are black and Latino. Neither city's elite high schools mirror those diverse
demographics, but Chicago comes much closer to doing so.

IN NEW YORK CITY:
Selective-enrollment high schools
6

Overall enrollment
4

15%

24%

n White
n Asian

IN CHICAGO:

n Black

Selective-enrollment high schools

Overall enrollment

n Latino
n Other/multiple

11%

23%

4
2

47
10
37
29

NOTE: Enrollment data for New York City is from 2017-18; enrollment data for Chicago is from 2018-19.
SOURCES: New York City Department of Education and Chicago Public Schools

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 8, 2019 | www.edweek.org

poverty and other indicators of disadvantage as a proxy-although an
imperfect proxy-for race. Chicago
decided to try that approach.
Katie Ellis, who is now the deputy
chief of staff to the Chicago Board of
Education but played a leading role
in designing Chicago's plan when
she was a top official for studentassignment, said the district conducted many analyses in its search
for criteria that would maintain the
diversity in its selective programs
that racial quotas produced under
the court's consent decree.
It grouped the city's census tracts
into four "tiers," and ranked each
tier by five characteristics that influence children's chances of success in
school: household income, parental
educational attainment, the share of
home ownership and single-parent
households, and language spoken at
home. The most disadvantaged students were in Tier 1, and the most
fortunate in Tier 4.
Unlike New York's system, which
considers only one thing-an exam
score-in its selective-admissions
high schools, Chicago bases students' admission on a composite
score derived from four things: standardized tests and course grades
from 7th grade, an 8th grade admissions test, and, in most cases, the
city tier where students live.
In the first version of its new plan,
in 2010-11, Chicago filled half the
seats in those elite programs with
the top-scoring students from across
the district and divided the other half
equally among the top-scoring students from each socioeconomic tier.
The results sparked a new round
of community opposition. The city
tweaked the plan, setting aside 25
seats in some of those high schools
for students from low-performing
K-8 schools.
It would revise the plan further,
too, reducing from 50 percent to 40
percent and then 30 percent the
share of seats given to the city's top
scorers without regard to socioeconomic factors, and adding neighborhood school performance to the
criteria in each tier.
Today, 70 percent of the seats in
selective-admission high schools go
to students chosen equally from the
four socioeconomic tiers.
Even under the court's consent
decree, Chicago's admissions high

schools never perfectly mirrored
the city's racial makeup, Ellis said.
A district must grapple with challenges to that goal any time it
chooses selective criteria to assign
students to schools, she said.
And challenges persist. The African-American presence in Chicago's
selective high schools has declined
by 3.5 percentage points since
the consent decree was lifted in
2009. The picture is worse in some
schools: At two of the most selective
Chicago high schools, only 8 percent
of the students are black.
Latino students are still underrepresented at many of the schools,
but overall, their presence in those

Talent is distributed
equally, but
opportunity is not."
RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG
Century Foundation

hallways has risen more than 5 percentage points in the last decade, as
Latinos surpassed African-Americans to become the district's largest
student minority group.

Questions About Equity
Studies of Chicago's high school
assignment plan have raised questions about its equity. One, by the
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,
found "no doubt" that its system still
favors "the most advantaged" students. Wealthier students seek out
selective high schools far more often
than lower-income, black, and Latino
students, who often go to charter or
neighborhood schools, it said.
Joyce Kenner sees plenty of
emails from those better-positioned
parents. Sitting in the principal's
seat for 24 years at Whitney M.
Young Magnet High School, one of
Chicago's most coveted,
Kenner said the parents who most
often "express concerns" that their
children weren't admitted are white
and well-off. Because of the city's
tier system, their children "might

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - May 8, 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - May 8, 2019