Tuesday, May 28, 2013

NYC Public School Parents: Complaint filed with Office of Civil Rights claims Bloomberg administration widens gap and violates rights of minority students in HS admissions process

NYC Public School Parents: Complaint filed with Office of Civil Rights claims Bloomberg administration widens gap and violates rights of minority students in HS admissions process:

Complaint filed with Office of Civil Rights claims Bloomberg administration widens gap and violates rights of minority students in HS admissions process

Wendy Lecker of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity/Education Law Center has an excellent piece in , about the complaint just filed with the  U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on behalf a group of NYC parents and advocacy groups.  The complaint shows that:
Schoolbook

 "the D.O.E.’s high school admissions policy consigns African-American and Latino students overwhelmingly to schools with the highest concentration of high-needs students, which significantly diminishes their chances for obtaining a high school diploma. Moreover, the city has known about this inequity for years and has done nothing to address it."

We already knew about the confidential 2008 Parthenon report which I gave to GothamSchools in 2011, showing that the percentage of overage entering ninth graders was highly predictive of whether a high school would struggle or not.  As this report plaintively asked , "Should we consider constraints on the [high school] admissions process that take into consideration the predicted graduation rate of the school? (e.g. “don’t allow any school to have a predicted rate less than 45%”)"

What I hadn't know was that there was