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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. On a somewhat lighter note, though we know the stakes are very high in your family, this was a big week for eighth graders set on attending a New York City public high school. If you're the parent of a kid in that category, this was a big week for you too, we know. You know that I'm talking about high school admission offers. For those of you not following or personally affected, yesterday, New York City public high schools sent out their offers to students bound for ninth grade. There was much anticipation leading up to that day, described by Chalkbeat as one of the final steps in a notoriously complex admissions process, Chalkbeat, the education news site.
For the last few minutes of the show, were opening our lines to parents of kids in that category. I assume the kids themselves are in school, but what school did your kid get into? How are they feeling about it? How are you feeling about the process? 212-433-WNYC. Certainly, you can express your glee or disappointment at the outcome, but we definitely want to know how you're feeling about the process of high school applications in the New York City school system. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. If you are an eighth-grade student and you happen to be off today for some reason, you are of course invited to call in too. We'll do a debrief here.
In addition to hearing about the schools from which your kid received offers, we also want to know about your experience navigating what many consider a very tricky system. Eighth graders who elect into this process are expected to narrow hundreds of choices because we do have a citywide choice in New York City, though it doesn't mean you get into any school that you want to go to, but there's a citywide application process that goes way beyond the Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and those kinds of specialized high schools. Chalkbeat puts the number at more than 400 high schools with 700 programs that people can apply to. You narrow those down to about a dozen top choices.
It's a small percentage of the schools that are available that you can apply to, but it's still a lot of choices to list, a lot of research to do to come up with about a dozen choices of schools that you put on paper that your kid is willing to go to if that's the best admission offer they get. Parents and students, how did you or your kid even begin to narrow so many programs down to a handful of top choices? What would you change about how this process works and how would you make it easier? 212-433-WNYC. Let me expand this to anybody who's gone through this in recent years.
Maybe you had an eighth grader last year and they're now going to finish up their freshman year in high school. How's it working out and do you think the process led you to a good match or in the last few years? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Interesting that our phones are not hopping on this, but we know you're out there, parents of eighth graders. This is a demographic we get calls from on a pretty regular basis. Parents of this year's eighth graders or parents of recent years' eighth graders, you get a shot now at the high school admission process. How you think it worked for you, how you think it works for the city, how it can be improved. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. We'll take your calls right after this.
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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and now the calls are coming in. What was it, parents? Why weren't you streaming in right away as soon as I gave out the phone number? Do you not want the principal to hear you of your kids' new high school? Do you not want David Banks, the chancellor who told me he listened sometimes to hear you complain? 212-433-WNYC for parents of eighth graders or some eighth graders yourselves, or parents of recent eighth graders on the high school admission process in New York City. 212-433-9692. Amy in Brooklyn, you're up first. Hi, Amy. You're on WNYC.
Amy: Oh, hi, Brian. I can't believe it. I love your show. Yes, I have an eighth grader who was fortunate to get his first choice high school, and I was pretty confident that he would get one of his higher choices because we knew he had a good lottery number. I think one of the challenges is that you really need to look school by school for open houses. There's no centralized system of sharing the information.
Schools would post their information whenever they felt like it, and some just had the one open house and it just makes it very difficult to visit schools and plan around it. I did this process during COVID with my older son, and it was in a way better because all the open houses were online and it was easier to handle.
Brian Lehrer: Amy, thank you for starting us off. Deborah in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Deborah.
Deborah: Hi. I'm the mother of twin eighth-grade boys and just completed the process. I actually worked at the DOE when all of these processes were put in place. I know that they were put in place for the purpose of equity and really opening up the system to kids across the city, which was terrific. I think to Amy's point, it is a bit of The Hunger Games at this point, [chuckles] where you have to literally sit by your laptop so that the moment that an open house happens, you have to get on and within two minutes the open house closes. If you didn't get to sign up, you'll never get to see the school. That really did favor those of us who could actually sit at our laptops and wait for the moment that it dropped.
If you went to the fair for the high schools, which is again a really great idea to have them, there was no maps for those. Really navigating the system is really difficult, and for parents who do not have the fortune of being in a school that has a strong guidance counselor or that has an in-school program to really educate families, it really does make it pretty inequitable and requires a level of sophistication that if you're just trying to keep your head above water in the city, I think it makes it pretty difficult for families. To Amy's point, I think centralizing it and making it so that it's easier for people to enter would behoove everyone, because once you're in it's pretty difficult, I think, to transfer out.
Brian Lehrer: Deborah, thank you very much. Alton in Astoria. You're on WNYC. Hi, Alton.
Alton: Hi, Brian. Long-time listener. Love your show. Thanks for everything you do. Our daughter got into Brooklyn Tech. We're very happy and proud. A few things that I wanted to add for future parents. First, the process itself, we have to rely very heavily on external sites which have very good statistics on ranking these schools. If the DOE, they may not have the resources to do all the statistics, but probably provide some links to these sites that may be helpful to other parents.
One thing I did notice, a few classmates from my daughter's class as well, she goes to Louis Armstrong in Queens. They also got into specialized schools, but none of them got into any of the schools from the remaining 12 choices that you get standard from DOE. What's interesting is that when you look into what the final score is on some of these schools, for example, they'll have an essay or an interview or something to that sort, there's very minimal feedback there.
You see some of these grades that a 60 or a 70, for example, on an essay that your child worked very hard to get right and more credit to everyone else who got higher grades. If there was a way to maybe just have some more rigorous feedback there to understand where these grades were coming from, I realize some of this stuff is subjective, that may be helpful to future parents as well crossing this path.
Brian Lehrer: Really interesting, Alton. Thank you very much. Very helpful, I think. Courtney in Ridgewood, Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Courtney.
Courtney: Hi. Yes, I have an eighth-grader starting high school in the fall. He was lucky enough to get his first choice, but it was a very intense process and I felt like [chuckles]-- I went to a grad school and undergrad and it was almost as intense as applying for higher education, [chuckles] just having to jump through all these hoops and every school had totally different criteria in which to apply. I don't know, just the idea of having somebody so young have to make such an intense decision about their life [chuckles] felt pretty crazy. It was a long process.
Brian Lehrer: How would you fix it?
Courtney: What?
Brian Lehrer: How would you fix it?
Courtney: That's a good question, I feel like they're definitely ways that the process can be streamlined like if there were-- We sat through so many meetings with the school guidance counselor and had to go on every school's website, and if there's just a more uniformed application process. I know [inaudible 00:10:29].
Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's what we've heard from several other callers here. Courtney, thank you very much. We're out of time but hopefully, Chancellor Banks, if you are listening today you got some good suggestions to how to make this less just like mega-stressful for so many parents just to go to high school not even to colleges, Courtney was just saying. That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen edits our national politics podcast.
Our intern this term is Ethlyn Daniel-Scherz. Megan Ryan is head of live radio. We had Shayna Singh-Stock at the audio controls for today. Don't forget to turn your clocks ahead on Saturday night, kids. It's not like your clocks turn themselves ahead or actually, they do now, most of them do anyway. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, have a great weekend. Stay tuned for all of it.
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