The Department of Education has quietly changed its school enrollment policies in response to concerns from state officials that too many challenging students are being assigned to low-performing schools, DOE documents show.
The move follows years of complaints that students who enroll after the annual admissions process — and who typically have greater academic challenges — overburden schools that already have high numbers of challenging kids.
Education officials have repeatedly dismissed those claims.
Yet schools that serve greater proportions of overage, special education and non-English speaking students have been the most likely to be shuttered for poor performance by the city, according to Independent Budget Office reports.
Three years before it was approved for closure last year, Columbus HS in The Bronx had 543 students — or 35 percent of its register — admitted late summer or after the school year started.
“I continue to have concerns about enrollment,” State Education Commissioner John King said today at an education event in The Bronx.
“I worry about the over-concentration of high needs students in particular buildings without adequate supports to ensure their success,” he added. “We want to just make sure that that’s something that New York City takes into account when making enrollment decisions and when setting enrollment policies.”
Education officials have said over the years that late-enrolling students were more likely to be placed at large, struggling middle or high schools because those schools tend to have empty seats after the school year starts.
But teachers’ union officials said the city has complete control over how students are assigned to schools, and a former top DOE official acknowledged the agency could have reserved space for mid-year arrivals at high-performing schools — but didn’t.
“If there’s a decision to reserve seats for kids who entered late, the flip side is to deny those seats to kids who apply earlier,” said Eric Nadelstern, now a Columbia Teachers College professor and director of its Principals’ Academy. “The bottom line on all of this is that until we have more higher-performing schools, and there’s a scarcity of seats in schools that serve kids most effectively — there will be problems such as this.”
This past year, the DOE for the first time attempted to greatly expand the number of schools where it assigned late-enrolling students, according to a letter schools chancellor Dennis Walcott wrote to state officials last month.
DOE documents show the effort led 1,421 high-need students to be newly-assigned to schools in 2011 that were considered persistently low-performing — a drop of 27 percent compared to 2010.
“NYCDOE is committed to working with [the state] to develop an action plan to further monitor and refine our enrollment practices to address your concerns about high concentrations of particular populations in high schools citywide,” wrote Walcott.
The enrollment changes have yet to be publicly announced.