MIT is weighing in on high school admissions

By Joyce Szuflita

OOOOWW! MIT. How fancy!

Over the years, first we were so thankful for the crumbs: the clumsy Applicant : Seat ratio to guess at our chances at popular schools that were 30:1.
Then parents forced the DoE to reveal the random number, but they didn’t build context.
NOW MIT to the rescue with a very large but (to my limited mind) not terribly complicated combination of data to tell each student if a specific school is a long shot, medium shot, or pretty good shot. (Also no guarantees in the fine print.)

They are taking the number of seats at each program, and their admissions priorities, and an applicants screened group or Ed Opt group, and their random number and whether they are Gen Ed or SWD and feeding it into Big Blue to tell us if a school is a safety or a reach.

“MySchools now projects for each applicant if they have a low, medium, or high chance of getting an offer to high school programs. This gives families more information about the estimated chance of getting an offer to each program of interest, making it easier for them to build a balanced application.”

I should be grateful, and I will be if it helps parents make a good, balanced list.

ranking more than 12 schools on your high school application

By Joyce Szuflita

The DoE has just announced that you can rank more than 12 programs on your application. A successful application isn’t necessarily about volume. If ‘more’ means lots more schools on your list that are crazy long shots, you haven’t improved your chances of getting into one of them. The thing is that it also doesn’t disadvantage you.

It is reported that only 38% of families rank 12 choices on their high school applications. I doubt that allowing folks to rank more will encourage the 62% to look more deeply.

It is my guess that the people who will list more schools will be students who are auditioning for several talents. They may be able to easily fill all 12 traditional spots with audition programs in a couple of talents. This unlimited list allows them to try for all the audition programs they want AND add some regular non audition programs to their list.

It may also encourage families to add schools that might have been considered “wasted spots” on their previously limited list. There will be beloved schools (maybe popular 6-12th grade programs or schools that give a geographic priority that you are not in) that seem like such crazy long shots it wouldn’t be worth including on a limited list. Now, why not?!

Perhaps the benefit to listing some wildly out of range schools will be that if you get placed at a school that is lower on your app, you will automatically be placed on a wait list for those crazy popular schools. The thing is that if those schools have geographic priorities and/or if they are screened, you will still be placed on the wait list in the appropriate priority and Tier.

The cruel challenge provided by the DoE is - how on earth to get a decent understanding of more than 12 schools in 8 weeks with holidays in between. Thanks a lot?!

High Schools make "over offers"

If you are looking at the “numbers” on MY SCHOOLS and the totals don’t add up, it is because the City knows generally how many people decide to take other offers. More students are placed at a school than official seats available. When the inevitable happens and kids choose to go to Specialized HS or charter or private there are not big empty gaps. This is why the wait lists may not more a lot (or at all) at many popular schools.

Here is a sample from the Directory:

Millennium has 117 general ed seats and 33 SWD seats. Total 150 seats in the Freshmen class. They made offers to 190 students last year. Even though that is more than seats available, no one will be turned away. It is very likely that a bunch of those students will decide to go elsewhere. If Millennium is very popular this year, then its classrooms will be more full than normal, and people won’t move off the waitlist.

These numbers are particularly helpful when looking at 6-12th grade programs, because they will tell you how many people, who were not returning 8th graders, were offered seats.

Good luck

By Joyce Szuflita
According to the DoE high school placements will be coming out through MY SCHOOLS on Thursday March 9. If your child took the SHSAT, the results of the test, and LaGuardia auditions as well as your main application results will be listed there. You will receive an email when your results are available. They often stagger the results because MY SCHOOLS would crash if everyone went on at the same time.

Here is the thing. Life is uncertain. You can prepare and calculate and hope. It is hard not to fall in love with one place or another, but you can’t engineer your placement. Your mission is to prepare your child (and yourself, cause you have worked hard for this!) There is no doubt that you will be disappointed for any number of reasons, possibly just because there has been so much effort and angst.

This is what I hope students will consider when they get their placement:

This school is all potential.
It will be what I make of it.
I don’t know those kids, but my new best friend for life is somewhere in that crowd.
My first love is probably in there too.
There will be a teacher that I will never forget in that building.
There will be some uncontrollable laughter.
There will be something that seemed nearly impossible that I will conquer.
I will likely be sorry to leave at the end of it all.

You can focus on what you desire, but you don’t always get it, and you might even be sorry if you did, because you would have missed the wonderful thing that appeared when you least expected it. Go out and find it.

What online website should I use to learn about public schools?

By Joyce Szuflita
Inside Schools. Period. We are so lucky to have them. They are a NYC institution. They “get” us. They are nuanced, they are thoughtful, they are looking past the numbers, which can lie (or at least mislead).

Please STOP reading the grades and rankings on Great Schools. Although, feel free to read the blog. And also, please no more Niche or their ilk (they are all you have for Independent Schools, I’m afraid, but not any more accurate or insightful than for public school ratings with even less data). When families ask me, “what is the difference between a ‘9’ and a ‘6’?” I know they are using Great Schools. The answer is, “‘3’.” And yet, these are reputable websites that are doing their best to grade and/or rank schools with data that is crunched by big data people, but when we are talking about real professionals and families in communities that big data doesn’t understand, there are serious blind spots.

I don’t normally have occasion to look at the array of Great Schools grades laid out on the local map, but this week I chanced across one and I spit milk out of my nose. It bore little to no resemblance to the schools that I know. It was wildly cockeyed in both directions. If you are looking to move to the suburbs, you don’t have anything else to go by, and as inaccurate as it is, that is all you have…but in Brooklyn where you have the deep study of the New School for NY City Affairs and the professionalism and insight of education journalists who have studied every school in the City for over two decades - why would you go anywhere else? Because it doesn’t distill school quality to one number or letter? Because it doesn’t put them all in a line? Different people want different things. Different children need different things. Two different institutions can both be “good” AND different. When you try and cram the world into a line, you get a crazy line that is as unfair as it is inaccurate.

I know that I am telling you to turn away from information in a time when there is so little out there for you. That info is not always completely weird and off center. All I am asking is that you don’t make it your first or biggest resource. You should use your own eyeballs (through a virtual tour or open house, please God) in combination with the data and culture interpreted through Inside Schools, with a possible ‘grain of salt’ cross reference with Great Schools. Remember, there are a wide range of thoughtful schools that could serve your child. School (when it is in session) is 6 hours within 24, and 180 days within 365. Your child’s successful outcome may have as much to do with your good nutrition, making sure they get enough sleep at night, your reading to them every night, your modeling good habits, your thoughtful expectations and enrichment, your using big words, your turning your phone off and making eye contact with them, your expressing your own passions and hard work and respect for others, as weighing the difference between a “9” and a “6”.

Good luck, and remember that Inside Schools is an underfunded not-for-profit. In these last hours of the year, please send them a check, as I will.

your placement is not the reward for good work

By Joyce Szuflita
It is hard to really embrace this thought, and even harder to convince your child about it, but there is no other path.
Hard work should ‘pay off’, but there are plenty of times when it doesn’t. There are lots of people who don’t deserve things that get them. Life isn’t fair. If you are expecting a pat on the head and a key to the city for going the extra mile, you will often be disappointed.

The only true thing is that hard work- the satisfaction, knowledge and character that comes from it, is its own reward. The prize is the knowledge that you accomplished something meaningful, that is actively making you a more informed, more skilled, better person. It is almost impossible not to wish for the glittering prize (the admiration, the acknowledgement, the envy), but in the end, it often disappoints.

If you hold out the carrot of a plum placement as reward for a job well done, there is plenty of reason for kids to stop trying at the first disappointment.