Fernelys Sanchez was admitted to Lehman High School in the Bronx but wanted to play baseball for George Washington’s winning team, the Times reports. So he moved into his father’s apartment in Washington Heights. Then he tried — for more than a year before he succeeded — to win a transfer.

But a policy shift over the last several years means that the city’s system of school choice largely closes off once students are in high school.

“For whatever reason, it has become increasingly difficult, almost impossible, to get a transfer to another regular high school,” Pamela Wheaton of Insideschools told me two years ago. City officials say it’s not educationally sound for students to change high schools unless they absolutely have to.

The city gives three reasons students can transfer from one high school to another: a long commute, a safety risk, or a health issue. Sanchez’s family said he tried all of them:

The bureaucratic swordplay over the boy lasted for 14 months. Fernelys said the trek to Lehman was wearing him out. “The district said the computer showed that the trip was 1 hour 26 minutes, and they would not approve a transfer unless it was 90 minutes,” said Melvin Perez, a family friend who interpreted for Fernelys’s mother.

Fernelys began cutting classes, and his grades fell. In February 2009, he reported that he had been jumped and forced to hand over his iPod, but his request to transfer for safety reasons was denied on the grounds that Lehman officials believed “it was all a lie, a setup, that he just wanted to leave,” Mr. Perez said.

Finally, the teenager went to doctors, who said — in effect — that he was stressed out by going to Lehman, and, a few weeks into sophomore year, he was granted a medical transfer to George Washington. He made the team.

Now that all transfers are handled centrally, “guidance transfers,” which counselors were once able to award to students who could make the case that they’d be better off at another school, essentially do not exist, Wheaton said.

But there’s actually a fourth way that students can switch schools: by reapplying for 10th grade, which must happen about two months into their first year at a school. It’s not clear from the article whether Sanchez attempted that route, which could have gotten him to George Washington sooner.

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.

To get into high school, New York City students must navigate a labyrinthine application process that can stump even the savviest parent. The Center for New York City Affairs illustrated the process with a flow chart in its recent report about small schools.

The report found that a disproportionate number of the city’s neediest students continue to wind up in large, lower-performing high schools, even as the number of small schools has increased. Their concentration has in turn caused the large schools to struggle even more, the report concluded.

The city’s primary source of information intended to help families maneuver though the process is its annual directory of all 500-odd high schools. This year’s 640-page directory is being distributed to seventh graders before the end of the week, with one major change: Now, schools’ progress report grades and quality review ratings are included. Before last year, each school’s page included its 4-year graduation rate and its math and English Regents exam passing rates. Last year’s directory included no performance data at all.

The new data is more robust than what the directory included before, according to a department spokesman, Andrew Jacob. That’s because the progress report grades take into account graduation rates and Regents pass rates as well as other performance data, Jacob said. The reports have been criticized for being difficult to understand and not statistically sound, although their critics have said the high school metrics are more reliable.

Flimsy high school information can lead to bad choices, especially for 13-year-olds who are navigating the application process largely on their own, according to panelists speaking last week at discussion about the small schools report.

One problem is that when schools advertise, they don’t always share the complete or most accurate picture, said New York University professor Pedro Noguera.

Another problem, he said, is that middle school guidance counselors often do not have the resources they need to help students make good decisions.

Steven Duch, the principal of Hillcrest High School in Queens, agreed, saying the sheer number of high schools, combined with guidance counselors’ workloads, means the counselors have little more information than students can find in the directory. “They don’t know what the high schools look like,” he said. “They haven’t visited, they dont have information at their fingertips. They probably dont have the data.”

(One place where counselors could find a lot of this information is on Insideschools.org, the Web site that provides school reviews written by trained reporters along with comments from parents, teachers, and students. But Insideschools is set to close up shop next week unless it secures substantial new funding. I used to work at Insideschools.)

High school choice has been a mixed bag for the city’s neediest students, panelists said. “You have to have the resources to access the choice,” said Noguera.

“On the other hand, no choice meant Thomas Jefferson for all of the kids in East New York,” responded Clara Hemphill, the panel’s moderator and the lead author of the report. She was referring to the large high school in Brooklyn that the city closed in 2007 because of its poor performance.

Geoffrey Canada (via Flickr)

Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada has been a big supporter of Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg’s education initiatives. So I was surprised yesterday to hear Canada criticize the kind of focused attention on test scores that has characterized their leadership.

The education world’s focus on basic academic results could put valuable programs at risk as the economy sours, Canada warned yesterday during a conference hosted by TC’s Campaign for Educational Equity.

He said he worries that the recession will hit poor communities such as Harlem the hardest, as government and private funders slash budgets for education and other services.

Canada said that distress could be compounded by the education world’s fixation with math and reading performance because other subjects could get short shrift when funds are scarce.

“Unfortunately, so much of the discussion is around academic outcomes that people are going to make some false choices,” Canada said. “We are going to create a hole that we are not going to be able to dig ourselves out of.”

Another panelist tried to calm Canada’s fears, saying that programs that are considered successful won’t be at risk. “They’re still going to fund results,” the panelist said.

But funding results is exactly the problem, Canada replied. The emphasis in recent years has turned so squarely onto results — usually in the form of test scores — that programs that don’t demonstrate a clear academic benefit are in jeopardy, even when they are valuable, he said.

Canada said funders often ask him questions like, “You’ve got that chess program — how are the kids’ grades?” He said he thinks, “That’s what we pay the chess instructor for. When I send my kid to play soccer I don’t expect his reading scores to go up!”

And funders often ask for evidence of success that is difficult or impossible to generate, Canada said — evidence that he pointed out isn’t required in other fields.

“We’re giving huge amounts of money to people who admit that not only have they failed … but they almost destroyed the whole economic system of the world,” Canada said, his voice rising as he referred to the Wall Street bailout that is costing taxpayers more than $700 billion. “Then somebody asks me if kids should take violin and do I have evidence?!”

Canada said a healthy dose of deficit spending could guard against underachieving American students further down the road. “If they give us $50 billion we will build something great in this nation that will last way longer than this administration,” he said.

“It’s clear we’re going to be under a lot of budget pressure,” Canada said. “Cities are thinking, do I clean my streets or keep my schools open. You shouldn’t be making a decision like that in America.”