Testimony on DOE’s new admissions processes
Testimony submitted to the City Council Committee on Education’s Oversight Hearing
Good afternoon. My name is Janella Hinds, and I am the UFT’S vice president for academic high schools. I am joined by Leo Gordon, our vice president for career and technical education high schools, and by Richard Mantell, our vice president for middle schools. On behalf of the union’s more than 190,000 members, we would like to thank Speaker Adrienne Adams and Education Committee Chair Rita Joseph for holding today’s hearing. We value your committee’s stewardship over these issues and your consistent advocacy for excellent schools for all children.
To start, we would like to express our support for the bills being voted on at today’s hearing. Establishing a bullying prevention task force, amending the administrative code of the city of New York in relation to distributing IDNYC applications to all high school students, and calling on the New York City Department of Education to carry out instruction in bicycle safety in all New York City schools are all worthy of Council action.
On the issue of the DOE’s new admission processes, the UFT is committed to using multiple measures to allow students to show what they know and can do academically and creating rich high school and middle school experiences for all students in all communities. Our city’s education system is weakened when we oversimplify the definition of academic success as higher scores on standardized tests rather than the demonstration of critical thinking and other skills that are harder to assess with current testing models. We believe there are many students in our schools who have the capacity to benefit from greater opportunities to engage with challenging concepts and activities and that all schools would benefit from having students with a wider variety of experiences and backgrounds sharing classrooms.
As we have expressed in the past, we support the expansion of academically integrated middle and high schools that make challenging learning opportunities available to a wider range of students, rather than the expansion of screening processes that divide students before they arrive in our middle and high school buildings. To achieve this, we need a top to bottom retooling of the DOE’s approach to high school and middle school enrollment, particularly the current overuse of admissions screens in which the test scores and grades of children ages 12 and under carry such weight and can be gamed and manipulated.
Over the past three years of the pandemic, schools and students across the city have faced unprecedented challenges, with academic and social emotional impacts that cut across all our communities. The pandemic required a pause on state tests and, therefore, an adjustment to previous screening processes at many of our middle and high schools that had relied on those test scores and on factors such as student attendance to make admissions decisions. These shifts have had the effect of broadening access to academic opportunities for our city’s students in a way we believe is heading in the right direction –away from isolating students in separate schools based on their grades and test scores at young ages, which research has shown to have negative effects on their academic progress.
As I wrote in an op-ed article in March 2019, the “concentration of high-needs students is a product of current screening procedures and the city's complicated high school assignment process. It directly contradicts the findings that when high-need students are concentrated in high schools, it becomes much more difficult for all students to succeed and graduate.” And, at the same time, grouping together “similar” students who received “A” grades works against creating the most challenging and rigorous learning environments in these instances.
At numerous schools and districts that shifted away from the overuse of screens before and during the pandemic, students are thriving. In District 15, covering Park Slope and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, the elimination in 2019 of all middle school screens and the launch of Diversity in Admissions policies that set aside seats for students from underrepresented groups has resulted in both better access to a wider range of schools for students across the district and in the elimination of the stress of competing for seats in a short list of coveted schools for families across the district, all while enrollment has remained steady. When given the chance to bring back middle school screens this fall, superintendents from other districts looked at these results and those of schools in their own communities, and they made similar decisions to mostly maintain the more accessible admissions models for their own local schools, and the number of middle schools citywide that used screens for admission dropped from 196 to 59.
At the high school level, we have multiple examples of schools where students’ academic progress has thrived in academically diverse settings. Harvest Collegiate HS in Manhattan and the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn have worked to ensure that they admit students from across the academic spectrum even as more advanced students have applied, and they continue to offer access to their project-based learning model for all young people.
The Lab School for Collaborative Studies in Manhattan, which we recently visited, is another school that has used Diversity in Admissions policies to offer opportunities for challenging academic work to a broader range of students in the past several years. During our visit, we saw students with special education needs working side by side with their peers on art and science projects and holding thoughtful discussions about recent literature. All of these schools have maintained high graduation rates and are in high demand even as they have maintained and expanded the academic diversity of the students they admit.
Crucially, the UFT is committed to providing all students, including those who would benefit from access to coursework above their grade level for some subjects, rich academic high school and middle school environments. To support this goal, the union supports the expansion of the use of the district’s current “ed-option” formula for high school admissions – one that ensures schools will admit students from across the achievement spectrum while being able to offer higher-level courses to students who would benefit from those opportunities – and a continued move away from both middle school and high school screens. The city would also do well to expand Discovery programs that are committed to ensuring academic diversity in schools, which has been one way previously excluded groups, such as those in the Asian community, have had greater representation in schools with more historically competitive enrollments.
The UFT also supports more access to academically challenging work inside a higher proportion of our high schools and middle schools. At the high school level, larger high schools can often better provide this breadth of offerings and are better suited to serve a range of academic standings and interests. We particularly need to create more large comprehensive high school options for students in Queens, which lacks an appropriate number of seats in classrooms and schools that offer a high level of academic challenge to all students. Throughout this process, it is essential to have conversations with all citizen groups in New York City to ensure no particular groups are excluded in creating the best schools, which necessarily reflect the city in which they sit.
We do a disservice to our students and their parents when we reinforce the narrative that only the eight specialized high schools and other screened middle and high schools are acceptable choices in the city for students who are seeking advanced coursework and success in college and careers. There are successful schools that are hidden jewels, where educators, students and communities work together to empower students academically and socially, and there are many more middle and high school students throughout the city who are capable of succeeding in rigorous academic settings than those enrolled in our screened schools. And I have heard from students and teachers at our screened schools that the increased emphasis in recent years on standardized test scores as the primary measure of academic success has resulted in classroom environments that are limited in their ability to prepare students to use their skills and knowledge in career and college contexts.
In my own two decades of experience as a classroom teacher, I have met multiple students who were brilliant and engaged participants in classroom conversations and whose presence and perspective benefited their peers, but whose test scores and grades did not necessarily reflect their full capacity. We know from their own accounts that many of our city’s current leaders didn’t have the highest grades or test scores as students but had the opportunity in school and beyond to develop the skills that led them to their current roles. My classroom and all schools benefit when we do not artificially separate our young people based on limited measures, but instead encourage all our students to see themselves as successful learners in and contributors to our school communities. All students, including those who do well on standardized tests, are negatively impacted when those assessments become a replacement for real learning experiences and the opportunity to explore the full range of their capacity.
The current system of admissions screening concentrates opportunities for advanced work in a subset of schools and contradicts our school system’s duty to offer all students the opportunity to reach their full potential throughout their time in our classrooms. We believe every school community benefits from eliminating arbitrary measures of talent and intelligence and from being exposed to the voices of a wider range of its fellow New Yorkers, and we look forward to collaborating with the Council to find a better way to serve all our students’ needs.
End Notes
1. “Academic segregation hurts public schools,” Janella Hinds, UFT vice president, The Chief, March 19, 2019, Op-Ed
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/nyregion/high-school-admissions-nyc.html