BOE To State: Give Our Magnets Back

School officials are tweaking the choice lottery to make it easier for all parents to understand, but Board of Ed members want to see a bigger change in the state’s school-segregation laws to make it easier for city parents to get their kids into desired schools.

Those viewpoints were presented at Monday night’s regular Board of Education meeting at Celentano School’s cafetorium, where board members heard about a glitch that prevented 400 incoming freshmen, who didn’t get into any of their preferred schools, from knowing where they sit on the waitlist.

Board members turned the conversation to why so many students are on the waitlist at all.

The board members ultimately voted to write a letter to state legislators asking them to reconsider a 2017 law that threatened to pull funding from the city’s inter-district magnet schools if they couldn’t attract enough white students to avoid racial isolation.

The New Algorithm

Under the old system, parents could play an advantage for living in the neighborhood zone or already having kids in a school, but only for their top-ranked school. That forced them to gamble whether to try for a long shot that they actually wanted or play it safe to hold down a seat.

But under the new system, parents can use their advantage on any of their kids’ top four choices. After three academics studying New Haven’s system found that parents often made strategic mistakes in how they used their priority, the change is supposed to simplify the process and encourage parents to rank schools honestly.

“A lot of people had misunderstandings about how the system worked,” said Christopher Neilson, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, who’s advising New Haven on the changes. ​“One of the things that makes it easier to use is when the system is easier to understand.”

The new algorithm uses a ​“deferred acceptance” algorithm. Also used in New York, the sorting mechanism is supposed to remove incentives for parents to game their way into schools that they don’t really want their kids to attend.

The main difference now, in the computer-based algorithm, is that students who nab a spot at their top-ranked school are admitted only tentatively. That’s because they might be bumped when a student who ranked the school second or lower uses their advantage.

Unlike in years past, where students hung on the waitlist until after school started, any student who gets into one of their top four choices will no longer be given a chance to move up to a higher-ranked school.

District officials said they explained those change in a video on the school lottery website.

“Rank in application no longer influences the priority a student gets at a school,” school officials said in an email. ​“This simplifies the process. The best strategy for parents is to list the school that they like, in the order that they like them.”

As the system rolls out next year, three assistant professors — Princeton’s Adam Kapor and University of Chicago’s Seth Zimmerman, along with Neilson — will make additional suggestions for how the district could do a better job explaining the revamped enrollment process with online tools, like chat bots, that can walk families through the process, introducing them to more schools and showing them how to maximize their odds of a school they like.

Overall, the old ​“immediate acceptance” algorithm (sometimes known as the ​“Boston” model) was supposed to get more kids into their reported first-choice school, but that might have been because of the way parents strategized. The new ​“deferred acceptance” algorithm is supposed to get more kids into at least one of their four choices.

After the first run this year, school officials said that they were able to place many more students than in years past. But they declined to say whether students were more likely to get into the four schools on their wish list or whether they were more likely to get into their top choice.

“We’re committed to ensuring that it’s not only equitable but transparent,” said Marquelle Middleton, the district’s new choice director.

The Old Conflict

School board members Monday night didn’t ask about that big change. Instead, they focused on a consistent complaint about the process that has been voiced for years, that too many desks in the coveted inter-district magnet schools go to suburban students every year.

After Sheff v. O’Neill, the landmark case that ordered desegregation of Hartford area schools in 1996, the state started funding more inter-district magnet schools, which receive more state funds per pupil than their traditional counterparts.

As part of the state’s primary tool for racial desegregation, those schools receive additional funding in the hopes that they’ll be able to woo in white students from the suburbs to sit alongside black and brown kids from the city.

But even as the inner-ring suburbs diversify, making it harder to reach those benchmarks, the state has tightened its standards for cities like New Haven, matching the court-ordered benchmarks in Hartford. If cities can’t meet them, the state has threatened to pull funding.

This year, Middleton said that, of the open spots in each inter-district magnet school, 35 percent of the open spots would go to suburban students.

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the school board’s secretary, asked why the district couldn’t reduce the number of suburban students to the minimum 25 percent required by state law.

“I’ve gotten calls from many parents about this process. For anyone, it’s daunting, especially for people who live in the city, which I feel have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to getting children into schools,” she said. ​“I have a problem with the way we are doing this.”

Middleton said that’s been ​“past practice” for several years.

But the district has not yet released data from last year’s lottery under a three-month-old Freedom of Information Act request by the Independent to verify that claim.

“Just because it’s been done that way doesn’t mean that it’s right,” Jackson-McArthur pressed. ​“We have a lot of residents who are not getting their children into schools, and I don’t think that’s acceptable. Why can’t we move it up close to 75 percent [from New Haven]?”

That earned her rounds of applause from the audience, as one mom shouted, ​“Stand up for the kids!” And it launched a discussion about whether the school system should give up on trying to integrate its profoundly segregated schools altogether.

Ed Joyner, one of the board’s two elected members, said that the state’s desegregation drive began with a ​“false premise,” that students of color need to be ​“in a classroom with white children to learn more.”

“The civil rights movement is not over. It’s not fair to hard-working parents in this community who just want their kids in schools that most people want their kids in. We have our own citizens who are paying taxes, and they can’t get their children into their own schools they’re paying for,” Joyner said. ​“We changed the magnet-school policy so that cities are penalized for not attracting enough white folks. But four or five towns over, the reason why they went there is to be racially isolated. We need to organize in such a way that our children are not penalized because of some misguided notion of what it takes to be fully educated.”

Advocates of integrated schools argue that’s it’s not about whom you’re sitting next to; instead, they argue that the system, as a whole, won’t get the buy-in it needs to sustain itself if classrooms are serving only racial minorities, while white families can distance themselves from kids with different skin colors, learning disabilities, language barriers and empty stomachs.

Researchers have consistently found that students at integrated schools, no matter their skin color, perform better. Often, achievement gaps on standardized tests shrink, as they have in Hartford, where differences in third-grade reading scores at inter-district magnets were entirely erased. Desegregation’s effects can last for a generation, resulting in more college degrees, higher incomes, lower incarceration rates and better health outcomes.

Still, Joyner questioned at what point the district would stop chasing after parents who didn’t want to enroll.

“It would be nice if we could do this, but you can’t force people to come to you against their will,” he said. ​“No amount of money is going to do that.”

Board members added Monday night that they might actually be spending more money on suburban students than the state pays.

New Haven voluntarily tapped into the pool of money to open all but two high schools and many elementary schools up to neighboring towns. The flow of cash helped New Haven spend $1.7 billion, mostly from the state, to build or rebuild almost every school in town.

It also received extra state money each year — $7,085 per suburban pupil; $3,000 per local kid — to reserve at least a quarter of its seats in inter-district magnet schools for surrounding towns.

But aside from those funds, state lawmakers have tried to block magnet operators from charging tuition, as the district’s previous chief financial officer had proposed in 2016, and they send the primary state subsidy, the Education Cost Sharing formula, to the student’s home district, rather than where they attend school.

Currently, 14 magnet schools in the city are too ​“racially isolated,” meaning less than a quarter of the students in them are white, Asian, Native American or some mix of those races.

The state has threatened to sanction a handful of those schools with financial penalties. That’s what it threatened to do to Cortlandt V.R. Creed Health & Sports Science Inter-District Magnet School, with a $121,000 penalty this year, if the school had stayed open.

Darnell Goldson, the board’s president, said that a lawsuit shouldn’t be off the table — a cause that lawyers from the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation have repeatedly been trying to find plaintiffs for since last spring.

Officials said they don’t yet know how this year’s results will affect compliance with the Sheff standards.

Mayor Toni Harp encouraged Middleton to fill up all the desks in the magnet schools, even if that would eventually hurt the city’s compliance, because“we’re going to get zinged by the State Department of Education, no matter what,” she said. ​“At least let the kids have the education they want.”