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Even more anxious than teachers at schools without students for next year are the parents of students without schools.

We received a letter to Chancellor Joel Klein from Catherine Fleischmann, an Upper West Side mother whose eighth-grader still doesn’t know where she’ll attend high school. Fleischmann’s daughter is one of more than 6,500 eighth-graders who didn’t get into any of the schools they applied to. Unhappy with the second-round school options, Fleischmann filed an appeal earlier this month and will find out the outcome by mid-July.

“I can’t begin to tell you what a nightmare this has been for us,” Fleischmann told me. Here’s her letter to Klein:

Dear Chancellor Klein,

I am writing to seek your help.

My sweet, hardworking, dedicated daughter is an 8^th-grade honor student at Delta middle school, an academically accelerated middle school. She has had almost perfect attendance since kindergarten. Unfortunately, she was not matched to one of her first choice high schools, even though there were still openings in those schools. Her second-choice tier of schools consists of schools at which she will neither be safe nor academically challenged.

My daughter did not hear of this devastating news by way of a letter sent to our home but rather from her guidance counselor at school. An absurdity in and of itself! When she was told of this terrible situation, she was so distraught that she spent hours roaming the streets hysterically crying because she had no high school to attend. (more…)

In a year when legal wrangling complicated the high school admissions process, the city managed to place more than half of eighth-graders in their first-choice school, city officials said today.

Still, more than 6,500 eighth-graders didn’t get into any high school at all, according to the Department of Education’s annual press release touting admissions results. The city released the results today, nearly a month later than usual and more than two weeks after the department mailed out admissions decisions that had been delayed by a lawsuit over school closures.

The 80,412 students who submitted high school applications included 8,382 students who applied to one of the 14 high schools the city tried to close this year. Originally, the department planned to assign those students to another high school listed on their application. But after the city lost a lawsuit stopping the school closures, the department generated new matches for the students, giving 1,397 of them a choice between attending a school the city has deemed failing and another school the student ranked lower. (The other 7,000 students ranked the schools slated for closure so low on their applications that they were placed elsewhere.) Students have until the end of next week to choose, according to a letter sent to principals last week by Leonard Trerotola, the department’s high school enrollment director.

An additional 174 students who were matched with schools originally slated to close will be able to submit an application in the supplementary round, typically reserved for students who were not accepted to any school. (more…)

Today’s State Supreme Court decision in the lawsuit over 19 school closures appears to be good news for most of the 66,000 eighth graders who have been waiting for months to find out where they’ll go to high school.

But for the 8,500 students who applied to one of the 14 high schools the city tried to close this year, there’s little guidance in the 14-page ruling.

The ruling adds even more confusion to an already complicated high school matching process. It doesn’t explicitly tell the city to release high school placement letters, originally set to go home Wednesday, to students who didn’t apply to any of the schools whose closures were contested. But it also says that the court doesn’t intend to prevent most eighth-graders from finding out their placements. (more…)

Image courtesy of the Center for New York City Affairs

The city’s complicated high school application process makes low-income and non-English-speaking students more likely to wind up in low-performing schools, some advocates and researchers say. (more…)

Ever since a Daily News column highlighted declining numbers of black and Hispanic students at an elite Manhattan high school, students there have been trying to figure out how to bolster diversity. Tonight, they are holding a forum to confront the topic head on — but their school won’t be participating.

Beacon High School has accepted fewer minority and low-income students every year since it adopted a selective admissions procedures in 2005, even as the total number of students has been rising, according to the May 15 column by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News.

The column reignited an ongoing conversation at Beacon about the school’s changing demographics, a Beacon senior, Cory Meara-Bainbridge, told me. After it appeared, a group of about 15 students banded together to plan a forum to begin a tough conversation about how the school’s unique admissions procedures might influence who applies and gets into the elite Upper West Side high school. Beacon requires not only high grades, strong test scores, and a portfolio of work, but also an in-person interview for admission. Current students sit on the interview committees.

So far, students say, the school’s administration has declined to participate in the discussion. (more…)

Charter school principal Eddie Calderon-Melendez, right, speaking to parents and students at his schools' admission lottery. (GothamSchools, Flickr)

The conventional wisdom about charter schools is that they allow families a way out of their zoned schools. But for soon-to-be high school students, charter schools actually provide the nearest alternative to a zoned option, according to one school operator.

The high school admissions program run by the Department of Education is citywide, meaning that students can apply to any school in the city. But the state law governing charter schools treats high schools just like schools serving younger students: They are required to give priority in admissions to students living in their school district.

Because many charter schools have more applicants than seats, charter high schools necessarily end up with mostly students from their district. For that reason, “we’re actually a throwback to the zoned school,” Eddie Calderon-Melendez, the principal of Williamsburg Charter High School, told me last week at the lottery for the three schools in his Believe Network. (more…)

Steven Taveras holds up a card indicating that he was the first student selected for Believe Southside Charter High School.

Last week, most eighth graders in the city found out which high school had accepted them. Tonight, hundreds of eighth graders in Brooklyn learned whether they would be lucky enough to have a charter high school choice for this fall as well.

I joined hundreds of the hopeful eighth graders for an admission lottery trifecta held in Greenpoint tonight, the first time charter schools could legally conduct their lotteries. The students had all applied for one or more of the schools in the brand-new Believe High Schools Network. The first school in that network, Williamsburg Charter High School, opened in 2004, and two more, Believe Northside and Believe Southside, are set to open this fall. Before the lottery, WCS founding principal Eddie Calderon-Melendez told me that over 700 students had submitted applications for the 500 available spots, some applying to two or even all three of the schools.

“I can feel how nervous you are,” said City Council member Diana Reyna, who ceremonially drew the first names in the lottery, to a chorus of agreement. “My heart is racing as much as yours.”

The first two names drawn were for students who weren’t present. But when Steven Taveras heard his name called to be the first student selected for Believe Southside, he leapt from his seat and bounded to the front of the auditorium, where he was immediately pulled into a round of handshakes and photographs.

A few minutes later, the IS 318 student was still beaming, but he said he wasn’t sure why he’d be giving up his seat at nearby Progress High School. “Mommy picked everything,” his mother, Maria Taveras, interjected. (more…)

As I predicted on Wednesday, most of the schools that didn’t fill up in the main round of the high school admissions process are either brand new or have reputations that are mixed at best.

But there are always hidden gems that still have spots open: either new schools led by educators with a strong track record or excellent programs inside middling high schools. In an article that it unfortunately must reprise every year, Insideschools runs down the options for the nearly 7,500 students who didn’t get a high school match this week. The site is also asking its users to recommend schools on the Department of Education’s three-page list of available spots.

I see a handful of schools on the list that look like they might be solid choices for students still looking for a high school spot. One, The Cinema School, is the selective school in the Bronx that will be run in partnership with the Ghetto Film School. I was also impressed by Brooklyn’s School for International Studies when I visited several years ago, and I’ve heard good things from students who have since attended. And the progressive Queens School of Inquiry, which is adding a ninth grade in the fall, was one of the more memorable schools I’ve visited; it was at QSI where I first encountered competitive speed-stacking.

Do you see other schools you’d recommend on the list (which you can read in full below the jump)? If so, for what kind of student? (more…)

Eighth graders at many middle schools this afternoon enacted one of the more emotional rituals of New York City public school life: Comparing their high school placement letters.

Back in December, each eighth grader submitted an application ranking up to 12 high schools, joined by a handful of high school freshmen hoping to change schools for tenth grade. Then the Department of Education’s computer system matched applicants to schools based on their qualifications and preferences. (Check out Insideschools for a more detailed description of the matching process.) Today, students found out what result the computer spat out for them.

The DOE announced today that 86 percent of the 86,169 applicants matched with one of their top five high school picks, and that 91 percent matched with a school somewhere on their list. About 6,000 students found out their high school options last month by scoring high enough on the specialized high school exam to win admission to one of those schools, or by winning admission to LaGuardia, the city’s elite performing arts school.

The DOE delivers match letters to middle schools, and the schools pass them on to their students. (more…)

Liz Willen, the Brooklyn mom and kick-ass education writer who has been chronicling her son’s high school admissions process at InsideSchools, has a vivid description today of the apparently wretched post-selection aftermath:

…but if you think parents are mystified and anxious this week, just check in on Facebook posts. If you don’t have your own Facebook to compare notes with other parents, ask your child to share — if they are willing. You will see status updates about tears and depression, along with posts expressing anger, happiness and disgust about having to wait until late March for a “match.” The Facebook friends are offering one another words of comfort, like “everything happens for a reason,” or “Not everyone likes Stuyvesant anyway.”

There are discussions of how the wrong kids get in, along with notes and advice comparing the different schools and lots of the standard: “You rock dude!” and “congrats, ur awesome!”

She raises a lot of questions, from how in the world the most selective schools (Beacon, Bard, Townsend Harris) pick their students to whether New York City’s ambitious, subway-savvy families would be happy with the Leave it to Beaver neighborhood high school alternative.

There’s also the question of whether selective high schools meet Chancellor Joel Klein’s equity goals. Seth Andrew, the charter school principal in Harlem, calls what the selective schools do “creaming.”