Inequitably Distributing New York City’s

Late-Enrolling High School Students

Over the Counter,

Under the Radar

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ABOUT THE ANNENBERG INSTITUTE FOR SCHOOL REFORM

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) is a national policy-research and reform-support organization,affiliated with Brown University, that focuses on improving conditions and outcomes for all students in urban publicschools, especially those attended by traditionally underserved children. AISR’s vision is the transformation of tra-ditional school systems into “smart education systems” that develop and integrate high-quality learning opportunitiesin all areas of students’ lives – at school, at home, and in the community. AISR conducts research; works with avariety of partners committed to educational improvement to build capacity in school districts and communities;and shares its work through print and Web publications.

Rather than providing a specific reform design or model to be implemented, AISR’s approach is to offer an array oftools and strategies to help districts and communities strengthen their local capacity to provide and sustain high-quality education for all students.

http://annenberginstitute.org

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to offer their special thanks to Yoav Gonen from the New York Post for providing us withover-the-counter rates for New York City students, and to New York City’s Independent Budget Office for providingus with student enrollment data. Great appreciation is also extended to Stephen Phillips (superintendent of the Alter-native High School Division, 1987–1997) and to Larry Edwards (New York City school system’s director of guidanceand pupil personnel services, 1990s) for sharing their experiences with and thoughts on over-the-counter studentplacements in New York City.

Prepared byToi Sin ArvidssonNorm Fruchter Christina Mokhtar

EditingO’rya Hyde-Keller and Elaine Kehoe

Graphic DesignHaewon Kim

© 2013 Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform

This report is available at no chargeat http://annenberginstitute.org/publication/OTC-Report.

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University proudly celebrates its 20th anniversary and reaf-firms its commitment to urban public education reform andour mission to ensure equitable, high-quality learningopportunities for all children and communities.

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Over the Counter, Under the Radar

Inequitably Distributing New York City’sLate-Enrolling High Schools Students

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

Every year, some 36,000 studentswho enroll in New York City

high schools without participating inthe high school choice process arelabeled as “over-the-counter” orOTC students and are assigned aschool by the New York CityDepartment of Education (DOE).These young people are among theschool system’s highest-needs stu-dents – new immigrants, specialneeds students, previously incarcer-ated teens, poor or transient orhomeless youth, students over agefor grade, and students with historiesof behavioral incidents in their previ-ous schools. Recognizing the gap inresearch on this substantial popula-tion of students, as well as the needto increase public concern about theconcentration of high-needs studentsin struggling schools, this report ana-lyzes unique data on the assignmentof OTC students to New York Cityhigh schools from 2008 to 2011 todetermine whether those studentsare disproportionately assigned toparticular high schools.

Our findings show that citywide:

1. OTC students are disproportion-ately assigned to high schools withhigher percentages of low-per-forming students, English lan-guage learners (ELLs), anddropouts. The higher a highschool’s eighth-grade test scoresfor the incoming freshman classare, the lower their OTC assign-ment rate is.

2. OTC students are disproportion-ately assigned to struggling highschools. In 2011, large strugglinghigh schools had an average OTCassignment of 20 percent of theirstudent populations, comparedwith 12 percent at better-perform-ing large high schools. JohnAdams High School in the Bronx,for example, was assigned 961OTC students in 2011, out of atotal student body of 3,201 stu-dents.

3. OTC students are disproportion-ately assigned to high schools thatare subsequently targeted for clo-sure or that are undergoing theclosure process. While goingthrough the closure process in

2011, for example, ChristopherColumbus High School’s studentbody comprised 37 percent OTCstudents, compared with 14 per-cent for similar size schools andthe 16 percent system average forOTC students.

4. Some high schools are consistentlyassigned very small numbers ofOTC students, whereas others areassigned very large numbers ofsuch students. High-performingMidwood High School, for exam-ple, had an OTC assignment rateof 3 percent in 2011 (comparedwith the system average of 16 per-cent), whereas low-performingJamaica High School had an OTCrate of 31 percent.

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These findings demonstrate thatOTC students are concentrated inthe highest-needs schools that areoften unequipped to serve them. Thisinequitable assignment may exacer-bate a school’s challenges and acceler-ate a downward spiral toward closure.

To remedy these disparities and bringequity to the assignment of these veryhigh-needs students, we offer the fol-lowing recommendations:

1) The DOE should commission astudy of the demographics andacademic performance of OTCstudents to identify high schools inwhich such students achieve signif-icantly higher academic perform-ance than systemwide averages andidentify the exemplary practices ofthese “beat the odds” schools. TheDOE should ensure that all highschools implement those exem-plary practices to improve the aca-demic performance of all OTCstudents.

2) The overall percentage of OTCstudents in the school system overthe 2008–2011 school years was 17percent. Therefore:• All New York City high schoolsshould be assigned OTC stu-dents at an annual rate ofbetween 12 and 20 percent oftheir total student populations.The DOE should develop thespecific criteria governing thedecision rules for OTC assign-ments below and above 17 per-cent.

• Schools targeted for closing orgoing through the closure shouldnot be assigned any OTC stu-dents.

• Struggling high schools (identi-fied by the state as persistentlylowest achieving) should not beassigned any OTC students untiltheir performances improve suf-ficiently to be removed from thestate’s list.

Implementing these recommenda-tions would significantly reduce thedisparities and inequities that havecharacterized OTC assignment poli-cies. These recommendations wouldalso encourage all high schools toreconfigure their instructionalresources and support programs tomeet the needs of a predictable rateof incoming OTC students, therebycontributing to the improvement oftheir performance throughout thecity system.

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Introduction

In recent years, the New York Cityschool system’s student assignment

policies have been faulted for con-centrating high-needs students instruggling high schools that are illequipped to serve them. Perhaps themost opaque component of the sys-tem’s assignment policy is the place-ment of students who do notparticipate in the high school choiceprocess and who show up sometimeduring the school year without anassigned school. More than 36,000 ofthese late-enrolling students areannually assigned to New York Citypublic high schools1 and are labeledby the school system as “over-the-counter,” or OTC, students.2 Theselate-enrolling students are placed inhigh schools through processes thathave frustrated advocates and policy-makers trying to reduce inequities instudent assignment to schools.

The New York City Department ofEducation (DOE) defines OTCplacement as, “the method ofenrolling students who need a schoolassignment because they were notpart of any admissions process for

entry grades and/or were notenrolled in a New York City schoolat the time school started. Most ofthose students fall into one of fourcategories:• New to the New York City schoolsystem;

• Left the NYC school system andhave returned;

• Are seeking transfers (based onthe guidelines outlined in Chan-cellor’s Regulation A-101);

• Did not participate in the HighSchool Admissions Process forsome other reason.”3

OTC designees are among theschool system’s highest needs stu-dents – new immigrants, specialneeds students, teens who have beenincarcerated or have come from cor-rectional facilities or juvenile deten-tion, students living in poverty orfrom transient families, homelessyouth, students over age for grade orwith skill levels significantly belowgrade, as well as students with histo-ries of behavioral incidents in their

Over the Counter, Under the Radar

Inequitably Distributing New York City’sLate-Enrolling High Schools Students

1 Some additional 185,000 late-enrolling studentsare assigned to New York City public schools inpre-K through eighth grade. This report focuseson students who are late enrollees in New YorkCity public high schools. These students areassigned by borough-based enrollment officesof the New York City Department of Education insystemic placement processes.

2 It’s not clear when or why this pejorative label,with its references to both direct stock tradingand nonprescription drugs, was coined, but ithas become standard system usage. “Late-enrolling students” might provide a more accu-rate and neutral descriptor.

3 See: NYC DOE, “Educational Impact Statement.Proposed Phase-out of Manhattan Theatre Lab High School” (NYC DOE: 2011), http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/442F7C27-FD97-4B1A-91EA-28D53BC9B394/116600/EIS03M283ManhattanTheatreLabPOvFINAL2.pdf. The DOE also defines over-the-counter stu-dents as all students who are not list noticedthrough an admissions process to a school: “If a student was admitted twice to the sameschool during a school year, they are onlycounted as one admit at that school. The totalOTC admits for a school includes all new admittransactions from 7/2 to 7/1, so students may becounted as new admits at more than one schoolif they were an OTC admit and then transferredschools” (definition provided by the DOE inresponse to a freedom of information law (FOIL)request for OTC data).

previous schools.4 Because manyOTC students show up at theirassigned schools without previousacademic records, and because theyoften arrive after the school year hasbegun, these late-enrolling studentsoften pose considerable instructionaland operational challenges. Schoolsmay have to rearrange class sched-ules, reassess how they deploy theirteaching and counseling staffs, andimprovise instructional andsocial/emotional support programsfor newly arrived OTC students.

The assignment, or more preciselythe distribution, of OTC students tohigh schools has raised issues ofappropriateness of assignment forindividual students and of equity ofassignment at the system level sincethe high school choice process began.Moreover, how the school systemassigns OTC students to particularhigh schools and how equitable thoseassignments are have thus far beendebated in the absence of data.Researchers have amassed consider-able anecdotal evidence, for example,that some high schools are assignedunusually high proportions of OTCstudents, but no data have heretoforebeen available to substantiate theirclaims.5

The unavailability of data about theplacement of OTC students ismatched by the paucity of researchabout what happens to OTC stu-dents after their high school assign-ment. We found no studies of howthe OTC assignment/placementprocess operates. Nor could we iden-tify studies of the results of thatplacement process in terms of thesystemic or school-level performanceof OTC students – their rates ofgraduation, dropout, credit achieve-ment, Regents passes, or collegereadiness. We found no research thatidentifies particular high schools inwhich OTC students perform signif-icantly above citywide OTC studentoutcomes. To our knowledge, thisstudy represents the first effort notonly to examine the issue of theequity of OTC student distributionbut also to raise the question of whythe academic performance of OTCstudents, who currently make up 17percent of the city’s high schools’annual enrollment, has not thus farbeen examined.

This report analyzes data on theassignment of OTC students to NewYork City high schools from 2008 to2011 to determine whether OTCstudents are placed in disproportion-ate numbers to particular categoriesof high schools. Our analyses explorethe following questions:• Are OTC students assigned inhigher proportions to highschools serving high-needs stu-dents?

• Are OTC students disproportion-ately assigned to high schoolsidentified by the city and/or thestate as struggling or persistentlylow achieving?

• Are OTC students disproportion-ately assigned to high schools sub-sequently targeted for closure orgoing through the closureprocess?

• Are some high schools consis-tently assigned very small or verylarge numbers of OTC students?

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4 We were unable to find studies specifying the academic or demographic characteristicsof OTC students. However, in a recent report by the Research Alliance for New York CitySchools and the New York University Institutefor Education and Social Policy, the authorsreport that many of the city’s low-achieving students are likely to be found among the stu-dents who “arrive late to the district [the NYCsystem] or otherwise do not participate in thehigh school admissions process during their 8thgrade year. Latecomers visit a borough enroll-ment office in order to be assigned to a schoolwith available seats.” This passage clearlyrefers to OTC students. See: Lori Nathanson,Sean Corcoran, and Christine Baker-Smith, High School Choice in New York City: A Reporton the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students (New York: ResearchAlliance for New York City Schools), p. 8, http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/ggg5/HSChoiceReport-April2013.pdf.

5 See New York City Working Group on SchoolTransformation, The Way Forward: From Sanc-tions to Supports (Providence, RI: AnnenbergInstitute for School Reform at Brown University,2012), p. 6; Christine Rowland, “ChristopherColumbus High School: A Context for Account-ability,” Gotham Schools, 2009 (December 11),h t tp : / /go thamschoo ls .org /2009 /12 /11 /christopher-columbus-high-school-a-context-for-accountability/.

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A Short History of OTCPlacements

The state legislature’s decentral-ization of the city school system

in 1969 placed all high schools under the control of the centraladministration, rather than under the community school districts thatthe legislation created to govern thesystem’s elementary and middleschools. High schools were organ-ized by borough and administered byborough superintendents. StephenPhillips, superintendent of the Alter-native High School Division from1987 to 1997, recalled that during his tenure, OTC students were sentalmost exclusively to their zonedhigh schools.6 The system’s HighSchool Admissions Office classifiedlate arrivals or students who had notparticipated in the admissionsprocess as OTCs and sent them totheir zoned high schools. “If the highschools didn’t know students werecoming, those students were classi-fied as OTCs. I remember horrorstories of 200 to 300 OTC studentsstagnating in the auditoriums ofzoned high schools for all of Septem-ber and often not programmed intotheir classes until late in October,”Phillips recalled.7

Middle schools and junior highschools were required to send a listto each high school identifying allnew students expected to enroll eachSeptember. Any students not listedwho showed up at their zoned high

schools were classified as OTC.Phillips indicated that, in practice,middle schools and junior highs wereoften careless about their notifica-tions and failed to include, for exam-ple, students the schools perceived ashaving aged out. So, when middleschools and junior highs failed tosend the names and records of suchstudents, the students showed up attheir zoned schools as OTC stu-dents. “Before decent computeriza-tion,” Phillips observed, “therewasn’t much the high schools coulddo. Often it took weeks, if notmonths, before high schools discov-ered that those OTC students should

never have been promoted in thefirst place – far too late to send themback.”

Phillips explained that many OTCplacements occurred midyear. Edu-cational-option high schools andprograms, as well as vocational/tech-nical high schools, were allowed todismiss whatever students they hadaccepted who didn’t do well by theend of their first term. Through thispolicy, thousands of students werereassigned to their zoned schools inFebruary. Thus an educational-option or a vocational high schoolmight have an initial class of 600

English Language Arts reading exam will auto-matically be matched to the ed. opt. program ifthey listed it as their first choice. (3) LimitedUnscreened: Programs that give priority to stu-dents who demonstrate interest in the school byattending a school’s information session or openhouse events or visiting the school’s exhibit atany one of the high school fairs. (4) Screened:Programs in which students are ranked by aschool based on the student’s final seventh-grade report card grades and state reading andmath scores. Attendance and punctuality arealso considered. There may also be other itemsthat schools use to screen applicants, such as an interview, essay, or additional diagnostic testscore. (5) Test: Schools or programs to whichstudent admission is based on the results of theSpecialized High Schools Admissions Test(SHSAT). (6) Unscreened: Programs in whichstudents who apply are selected randomly. (7)Zoned: Programs that give priority to studentswho apply and live in the geographic zoned areaof the high school. There are zoned high schoolsin Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, and theBronx. Manhattan does not have zoned highschools. (Source: NYC DOE. Admission Process.http://schools.nyc.gov/ChoicesEnrollment/High/Admissions/default.htm.)

7 Stephen Phillips, interview with author, April 21,2013.

6 Zoned high schools were once neighborhoodcomprehensive high schools that all studentsliving in the school’s residence area couldattend by right. A large number of zoned highschools evolved into such poor academic per-formers that they were informally dubbed“dumping ground” schools. So many zonedschools were closed or restructured that theconcept of a neighborhood zoned high schoolcurrently has little reality. Through the highschool admissions process, all students arerequired to make a series of choices of highschools rather than rely by default on beingassigned to their zoned high school (if one stillexists). The high school admissions processdefines several categories of high schools orprograms based on their admission processes:(1) Audition: Programs that require that studentsdemonstrate proficiency in the specific per-forming arts/visual arts area for that program.(2) Educational Option (Ed. Opt.): Programsdesigned to attract a wide range of academicperformers. Students applying to an educa-tional-option program are categorized into oneof three groups based upon the results of theirseventh-grade state reading test scores: Top16% – High; Middle 68% – Middle; Bottom 16% – Low. From the applicant pool, half the studentsare chosen by the school administration, andhalf are selected randomly. However, studentswho score in the top 2% on the seventh-grade

ninth-graders but might enroll only400 in tenth grade because the other200 were sent to their zoned schoolsas OTCs. Phillips recalled that bor-ough high school superintendentsalso protected some of their schoolsfrom OTC placements. Thus asuperintendent attempting toredesign a failing high school mightlimit the number of OTC assign-ments. “Those cases happened, as Irecall, in virtually every borough,though most frequently in Brook-lyn,” he said. Through suchprocesses, educational-option, voca-tional, and other high schools oftenimproved their academic perform-ance at the expense of zoned highschools. Many zoned schools’ aca-demic outcomes so severely deterio-rated that they were oftenstereotyped as “dumping ground”schools.

The systemic creation of high schoolchoice began with the developmentof educational-option high schoolsand programs in the 1960s and1970s. Choice processes acceleratedwith the creation of small highschools in the 1990s and expandedenormously under the Bloombergadministration. As high school

8 Larry Edwards, interview with author, May 9,2013.

9 Phillips, op. cit.

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choice became almost universal, thepressure to provide enough goodchoices to students and their fami-lies, combined with the need toensure equity in the choice process,proved an increasingly difficult bal-ance. Larry Edwards, the school sys-tem’s director of guidance and pupilpersonnel services during the 1990s,whose jurisdiction included theOffice of High School Admissions,indicated that the high school choiceprocess “was geared for articulatedkids – kids coming to high schoolfrom eighth and ninth grade. Aschoice and choice pressures intensi-fied, the problem of how to dealequitably with OTC kids alsoincreased because the volume ofOTCs changed from hundreds tothousands. There was no high schoolwhere we didn’t place some OTCkids. Every school took some, butoften not in equitable proportions.”8

When school redesign and closureprocesses began to diminish thenumber of low-performing zonedhigh schools in the late 1990s, theremaining zoned schools facedincreasing challenges. Phillipsrecalled that Julia Richman HighSchool routinely took in large num-bers of OTC students: “When JuliaRichman was redesigned, all thosestudents were deflected to otherManhattan zoned high schools –Washington Irving, Brandeis, ParkWest, Martin Luther King. Iassumed that superintendents couldcap a school based on an acceptablerationale, as long as they agreed toabsorb any deflected students intotheir other zoned schools.”9

Viewed historically, the placement ofOTC students suggests a familiarpattern. OTC students tended to beassigned to predominantly low-per-forming, often zoned high schools,while higher-performing, moreselective schools were often “pro-tected” by being assigned limitednumbers of OTC students. Critics ofpast high school administrations havecharged that the creation and main-tenance of “dumping ground”schools was aided and abetted by thedisproportionate assignment of OTCstudents to them.

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Many high schools struggling toserve high-needs students haveprotested the large numbers of OTCstudents assigned to them, arguingthat such assignments, without thenecessary supports, exacerbate theirchallenges. More recently, given theschool-closure policy initiated by theBloomberg administration, strug-gling schools targeted for closing, aswell as numerous critics of the clos-ing policy, have charged that assign-ing disproportionate numbers ofhigh-needs students, including OTCstudents, to struggling schools setsthose schools up for failure and clo-sure.11

A recent set of communicationsbetween the city’s DOE and the stateeducation department reflects thistension. In the summer of 2012,John King, commissioner of theNew York State Education Depart-ment, and Dennis Walcott, chancel-lor of the New York City DOE,exchanged letters in which Kingindicated concerns about the dispro-portionate numbers of high-needsstudents the DOE assigns to theNew York City system’s strugglingschools. As King stated, “DOE,through the mixture of the type ofseats it allocates to schools, the wayin which it assigns Over the Counter(OTC) students, and the way inwhich it allocates funds to turn-around schools, has the capacity todelimit the degree to which aschool’s entering class is dispropor-tionately comprised of high-needsstudents.” King’s letter indicated hisworry “about the over-concentrationof high-needs students in particularbuildings without adequate supportsto ensure success.”12

OTC Placements underMayoral Control

Currently, under the Bloombergadministration, an enrollment

office in each of the five boroughsassigns OTC students to highschools. Students (often accompa-nied by family members) are sent tothese borough offices for high schoolplacement from whatever schoolsthey initially present themselves.According to the DOE, “when a stu-dent arrives [at a borough enroll-ment office] for an over-the-counterplacement, his/her high schoolassignment is determined by his/herinterest, home address and whichschools have available seats, and,where applicable, transfer guide-lines.”10

The criteria used to assign OTC stu-dents to particular high schools havenever been publicly defined. As theDOE’s definition indicates, the avail-ability of seats in any high schoolplays a key role in determining howmany OTC students a high school isassigned. High schools with fewavailable seats for OTC studentstend to be more selective, higher-performing schools that are oversub-scribed in the high school choiceprocess. The key problem the schoolsystem faces in seeking to placeOTC students is that the high schoolchoice process produces a situationin which the bulk of available seatsare in underperforming or strugglinghigh schools, which are less capableof meeting the needs of OTC stu-dents than the higher-performingschools that have relatively few seatsavailable.

10 NYC DOE, “Educational Impact Statement. Proposed Phase-out of Manhattan Theatre Lab High School (03M283),” December 22, 2011.http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/442F7C27-FD97-4B1A-91EA-28D53BC9B394/116600/EIS03M283ManhattanTheatreLabPOvFINAL2.pdf.

11 See New York City Working Group on SchoolTransformation, The Way Forward: From Sanc-tions to Supports (Providence, RI: AnnenbergInstitute for School Reform at Brown University, 2012). http://annenberginstitute.org/publication/way-forward-sanctions-supports.

12 See Rachel Cromidas, “State Attaches SeveralStrings to City’s Bid for ‘Turnaround’ Aid,”Gotham Gazette, June 22, 2012, for Commis-sioner King’s concerns. In its response to Commissioner King, the New York City DOEacknowledged that its “choice-based systemmay have been leading to an over-concentra-tion” of high-needs students and indicated that,in 2011, it initiated a series of corrections to itsstudent assignment policies to reduce the con-centrations of high-needs students by adding“additional seats … to every high school’s OTCprojection.” As a result, the DOE’s letter indi-cated that “the number of OTC placements atpersistently low achieving (PLA) high schoolswas reduced.” But our analysis of the DOE’sOTC data found that though the numbers of OTCstudents the DOE assigned to those PLAschools in 2011 were indeed reduced, the per-centage of OTC students in those schoolsremained high (and sometimes higher than in2010) because overall enrollment in thoseschools decreased, presumably because otherstudents left. See also Phillissa Cramer, “City-state Schism Over Challenge of Needy Stu-dents Grows Wider,” Gotham Gazette, March6, 2013, for the DOE’s responses to Commis-sioner King.

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King’s concern echoed a persistentcriticism of the Bloomberg-erareforms – that the DOE intensifiesthe challenges for struggling schoolsby assigning disproportionate num-bers of high-needs students to thoseschools without providing the sup-ports and assistance those schoolsneed, and that such assignment poli-cies undermine struggling schools’

Data and Methods

The Annenberg Institute forSchool Reform at Brown Uni-

versity (AISR) has long been inter-ested in the issue of the assignmentof OTC students to particular highschools. In 2012, Yoav Gonen fromthe New York Post provided us withdata on all the New York City publicschools to which OTC students wereassigned for the 2008–2011 schoolyears. He acquired these datathrough a Freedom of InformationLaw (FOIL) request to the NewYork City Department of Education.The original data included an aver-age of 45,000 OTC studentsassigned to the system’s high schoolsin the 2008–2011 school years.14

New York City’s IndependentBudget Office provided us with theJune 30th enrollment data for the2008–2011 school years.15

From a total high school data set of336 schools with ninth throughtwelfth grades, we excluded 62 highschools, including:• specialized schools, which by statelegislation can only admit stu-dents according to their examresults;

• transfer high schools, largely sec-ond-chance high schools, whichadmit students who originallyenrolled in or dropped out ofother high schools; and

• Young Adult Borough Centers,evening programs for high schoolstudents who are academicallybehind or have adult responsibili-ties that make succeeding in tradi-tional high schools exceedinglydifficult.

instructional capacity, reduce staffconfidence and morale, lower stu-dent achievement indicators, andincrease suspensions and other meas-ures of behavioral disorder, all ofwhich contribute to the data theDOE uses to target those schools forclosing.

In its response to King’s letter, theDOE disclosed that “over the past 18months, NYC has been workingwith the New York State EducationDepartment to address its concernsabout situations where our choice-based system may have been leadingto an over-concentration of studentswith disabilities, English LanguageLearners, and/or students that areperforming below proficiency in cer-tain schools.”13 This statement is theDOE’s first acknowledgment that its student assignment policies mayhave disproportionately concentratedhigh-needs students in “certain”schools.

13 Cromidas, op. cit., and Cramer, op. cit.

14 Because the DOE’s OTC count is not a single-incidence calculation, unlike enrollment data,an OTC student who changes schools duringthe same school year may be counted morethan once. Such multiple counting affects a lim-ited number of OTC students. Because our datainclude only raw counts of students assignedto each high school across the city system, wecould not analyze individual students’ back-grounds, demographic characteristics, aca-demic outcomes, or other pertinent variables.

15 The lists provided by Gonen included 1,573schools. We eliminated 50 schools closed in2010, 2 special education schools, 47 transferschools, 23 Young Adult Borough Centers, 4pre-Ks, 180 elementary/middle schools, 594 ele-mentary schools, 265 middle schools, 80 mid-dle/high schools, 9 specialized schools, 38 highschools that didn’t have full grades 9–12 con-figurations, 4 high schools being phased outthat contained only the twelfth grade in 2010, 2K–12 schools, and 1 GED school. After theseeliminations, our data set contained 274 grade9–12 high schools.

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We ended up with 274 high schoolswith an average of 36,000 studentsassigned. We divided the remaining274 high schools in our data set intothree groups based on school size –large (more than 1,500 students),medium (500 to 1500 students), andsmall (fewer than 500 students) highschools.16 We calculated an OTCassignment rate for these 274 highschools by dividing their annualnumber of OTC students assignedby their June 30th enrollment for the2008–2011 school years.17 We corre-lated high school OTC assignmentswith high school student demo-graphics: race/ethnicity, poverty,English language learner (ELL), andspecial education status. We thencorrelated the rates of OTC-assignedstudents across the 274 high schoolswith those schools’ DOE progressreport grades, eighth-grade profi-ciency scores, and graduation,dropout, and college readiness rates.We created a category of strugglinghigh schools, using city and state cri-teria, and computed their OTCassignment rates. We also analyzedthe OTC assignment rates for thehigh schools most recently targetedfor closing or undergoing the closingor phasing-out process.

16 There is no consensus method for definingsmall, medium-sized, and large high schools in New York City. Our school-size demarcationsare roughly similar to those used by The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School in their 2009 report, The NewMarket Place: How Small-School Reforms and School Choice Have Reshaped New York City’s High Schools. See: http://www.newschool.edu/milano/nycaffairs/documents/TheNewMarketplace_Report.pdf. This reportdefines small schools as having up to 600 students, medium-sized schools as having 601–1,400 students, and large schools as hav-ing 1,400-plus students. We chose to separatehigh schools by size in order not to overgener-alize the effects we found.

17 We deleted from our data set any schools withOTC rates above 90 percent – five schools in2008 and one school in 2009 – because weassumed that their very high OTC rates wereinexplicable outliers or caused by data errors.After these deletions, the maximum OTC ratefor any school in our remaining data set was 74percent.

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02.3 2.5 2.8 3.0 3.3

FIGURE 1

OTC Placements in Large High Schools (more than 1,500 students) by Eighth-GradeELA/Math Proficiency Scores (2011)

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8th Grade Proficiency Scores

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Findings

OTC students are disproportion-ately assigned to schools withhigher percentages of low-performing students, ELLs, anddropouts. Given the high level of academicneed of most OTC students, sendingthem to struggling high schoolsseems unlikely to help those studentsor improve the schools to which theyare assigned, as Commissioner King’sstatement implies. Yet our analysisfound that high schools with larger

Figure 1, which shows the strongcorrelation between eighth-gradeproficiency scores and OTC place-ments in large high schools, illus-trates the overarching pattern forboth middle-sized and small highschools.19 Across the city system,higher percentages of OTC studentstend to be assigned to high schoolswith high percentages of low-scor-ing, high-needs students, though thistrend is less pronounced for smalland medium-sized high schools serv-ing high-needs students than forlarge high schools.

concentrations of high-needs stu-dents were assigned higher propor-tions of OTC students.

High schools whose incomingeighth-grade students had lowerELA/math proficiency scores18 wereassigned higher percentages of OTCstudents than other high schools.Additionally, large high schools withhigh percentages of ELL studentswere assigned higher percentages ofOTC students, and large andmedium-sized high schools with highdropout rates were also assignedhigher percentages of OTC students.

SOURCES: NYC DOE, FOIL Request on OTC Students; NYC DOE, Progress Reports (2011), IBO,June 30th enrollment figures.

© Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

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OTC students are disproportion-ately assigned to strugglingschools.A 2008 analysis by the ParthenonGroup, a consulting organizationhired by the DOE to analyze pat-terns of student success and failureacross the high school system, foundthat enrolling large percentages oflow-performing students in a schoolreduced the graduation rate for allstudents in that school.20 Our find-ings suggest that the DOE may exac-erbate this pattern by assigningsignificantly higher percentages ofOTC students to struggling highschools than to the rest of the sys-tem’s high schools.

Our analysis defined struggling highschools as those identified by thestate as persistently low achieving, orPLA, for the 2009, 2010, and 2011school years.21 We identified thirty-nine such high schools and com-pared their average rates of OTCstudent assignment with the averageOTC assignment rates for the rest ofthe system’s high schools. Each yearfrom 2009 to 2011, these thirty-ninestruggling schools had significantlyhigher rates of OTC assignmentthan the aggregate of the rest of thecity’s high schools. Large andmedium-sized struggling highschools had, on average, a more than50 percent higher rate of OTC stu-dent assignment than the rest of thehigh schools.

18 Eighth-grade proficiency scores are defined on page four of the New York City DOE’s Educator Guide to the New York City HighSchool Progress Reports: http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/EEE6AEBC-9576-4AED-A176-CE24FA43245B/0/EducatorGuide_HS_1104092.pdf.

19 Although large high schools had the strongestrelationship, medium-sized and small highschools also had strong correlations (r = above.5) and were statistically significant: smallschools, r = -.640**; medium-sized schools, r =-.595**; large schools, r = -.763**.

20 The Parthenon Group, “NYC Secondary ReformSelected Analysis,” presentation to New YorkCity Department of Education, 2005.

21 2009 was the first year the New York State Education Department (NYSED) used PLA des-ignations. Prior to 2009, NYSED used SURR(Schools Under Registration Review) designa-tions, which were based on different criteria.The PLA schools used in this analysis weredrawn from the NYSED website.

In 2011, for example, large strug-gling high schools had an averageOTC population of almost 20 per-cent, whereas the rest of the schoolsystem’s large high schools had anaverage OTC student population ofonly 12 percent. Medium-sizedstruggling high schools in 2011 hadan average OTC population of 20percent, whereas the rest of the sys-tem’s medium-sized high schools hadan average OTC population of only11 percent.

As Table 1 demonstrates, both largeand medium-sized struggling highschools were assigned significantlyhigher percentages of OTC studentsthan the rest of the system’s highschools. The differences for small

TABLE 1

OTC rates (%) for struggling schools and for the rest of the system’shigh schools of similar size

SchoolSize Year Struggling Schools Non-struggling Schools

Small Schools 2008* 20 16

2009 21 18

2010 21 19

2011 22 19

Medium-sized

Schools

2008* 19 9

2009* 20 11

2010* 20 12

2011* 20 11

Large Schools 2008* 18 12

2009* 21 13

2010* 21 13

2011* 20 12

SOURCES: NYC DOE, FOIL Request on OTC Students; IBO, June 30thenrollment figures; NYSED, News Room Releases on PLA schools.

NOTE: Asterisk denotes statistically significant difference in OTC ratesbetween struggling and non-struggling schools.

© Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

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high schools, though mostly not sta-tistically significant, showed a similartrend.22

These findings indicate that OTCstudents are disproportionatelyassigned to struggling high schools,especially to large and medium-sizedhigh schools. The numbers of OTCstudents disproportionately assignedare sometimes strikingly large. TheFordham Leadership Academy forBusiness and Technology, for exam-ple, a small school in the Bronx, wasassigned 110 OTC students in 2011out of a total population of 424 stu-dents. The Unity Center for UrbanTechnologies, a small Manhattanschool, was assigned 78 OTC stu-dents in 2011 out of a total popula-tion of 234 students. ChristopherColumbus High School in theBronx, a medium-sized school, was

assigned 393 OTC students in 2011out of a population of 1,060 students.And a large high school, John Adamsin the Bronx, was assigned 961 OTCstudents in 2011 out of a total popu-lation of 3,301 students. Assignmentsof such massive numbers of OTCstudents can quickly destabilizeschools’ instructional efforts and dis-mantle long-established, supportiveacademic cultures.

OTC students are disproportion-ately assigned to high schools that are subsequently targeted forclosure or that are in the process of being phased out through theclosure process.

Eight high schools were among thetwenty-six elementary, middle, andhigh schools that the DOE targetedfor closure, and that scheduled theirphase-out processes to begin in Janu-

ary 2013. From 2009 on, most ofthose high schools were assignedOTC students at higher rates thanthe citywide average for schools ofsimilar size. Six of those eight highschools had OTC student assign-ment rates in 2011 that were higherthan the citywide average OTC ratefor schools of similar size.Sheepshead Bay High School, forexample, had a 25 percent OTC stu-dent assignment rate, whereas thesystem’s average OTC assignmentrate for schools of similar size wasonly 15 percent, giving SheepsheadBay a rate almost 70 percent higherthan the citywide average.

Table 2 suggests a trend of annualincrease in the percentage of OTCstudents assigned to strugglingschools in the years before thoseschools were targeted for closure.

TABLE 2

OTC rates (%) for schools whose closures were announced in January 2013

SOURCES: NYC DOE, FOIL Request on OTC Students; IBO, June 30th enrollment figures.

NOTE: OTC assignment rates in bold font are higher than the citywide average for schools of similar size.

© Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

SchoolSize Schools 2008 2009 2010 2011

Small Schools

City average 16 18 19 19

Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications 34 32

Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship High School 13 21 23 24

Freedom Academy High School 10 8 16 24

Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School 15 21 22 22

Law, Government and Community Service High School 12 21 19 22

Large Schools City average 14 15 16 15

Sheepshead Bay High School 18 23 26 25

High School of Graphic Communication Arts 13 14 14 13

Herbert H. Lehman High School 13 16 15 13

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Whatever the validity of the meas-ures the DOE uses to decide whichschools to close, increasing the per-centage of OTC students assigned tothose struggling schools before thedecision to close them exacerbatestheir challenges and lowers the per-formance indicators on which theyare judged – and found wanting. It isdifficult, from these data, to see howthe DOE can rebut CommissionerKing’s concern that the city’s OTCassignment policy is contributing to“the over-concentration of high-needs students in particular buildingswithout adequate supports.”

The city school system closes highschools by phasing them out across afour-year time span. During eachyear of the phase-out process, teach-ers and support staff leave as theclosing school’s student populationdeclines. As recent studies haveshown,23 phasing-out schoolsbecome increasingly less able to meettheir students’ needs as their staffsdiminish. Thus it is counterintuitiveto send significant percentages ofOTC students to high schools thatare phasing out, because those stu-dents desperately need the resourcesand supports that only a fully staffedhigh school can provide. Yet as Table3 indicates, the DOE continues toassign OTC students to high schoolsin the process of phasing out.

As Table 3 shows, the DOE assignedhigh rates of OTC students to thir-teen closing schools in 2011, the ini-tial year of their phase-out process.In seven of these thirteen phasing-out schools, the OTC assignmentrate was more than 25 percent.Because the last OTC data wereceived were from 2011, we cannotdocument whether this pattern ofassigning large rates of OTC stu-dents to phasing-out schools contin-ued in 2012 and beyond.

SchoolSize Schools 2011

Small Schools

City average 19

School for Community Research and Learning 32

Global Enterprise High School 29

Metropolitan Corporate Academy High School 26

Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship for Young Men 24

Academy of Environmental Science SecondaryHigh School 23

Monroe Academy for Business/Law 23

Performance Conservatory High School 17

Midium Schools

City average 14

Christopher Columbus High School 37

Jamaica High School 31

John F. Kennedy High School 29

Beach Channel High School 28

Paul Robeson High School 24

Large

Schools City average 15

Norman Thomas High School 17

TABLE 3

OTC rates (%) for schools undergoing closure whose phase-outs began in 2011

SOURCES: NYC DOE, FOIL Request on OTC Students; IBO, June 30thenrollment figures.

© Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

22 The finding that small high schools tend to takeon high proportions of OTC students may seemcounterintuitive. But the current large numbersof small high schools (N = 170) may well pro-duce a relatively high number of OTC place-ments for the small-school sector as a whole,even though many individual small schools mayhave only a small number of seats available forOTC students.

23 See New York Urban Youth Collaborative, NoCloser to College: NYC High School StudentsCall for Real Transformation, Not School Clos-ings (New York: Urban Youth Collaborative,2011).

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Some high schools are consistentlyassigned very small numbers ofOTC students, whereas other highschools are consistently assignedvery large numbers of such students.

Practitioners and advocates havelong charged that the school systemprotects certain schools from OTC

assignment while disadvantagingother schools by disproportionatelyassigning them large numbers ofOTC students. We identifiedtwenty-five schools that made up thelowest 20th percentile of the city-wide OTC distribution (see Table 4),meaning that these twenty-five

schools were assigned relatively lownumbers of OTC students each yearfrom 2008 through 2011. In 2011,these schools with very low OTCassignment rates significantlyexceeded the performance of the restof the system’s high schools on theindicators of college readiness scores,

SchoolsScreenedAdmissions Other Admissions

2008OTC (%)

2009OTC (%)

2010OTC (%)

2011OTC (%)

City average 14 16 16 16

El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice Ed. Opt. 7 7 8 9

Art and Design High School Audition 3 7 8 9

Robert F. Kennedy Community High School Audition 5 9 9 8

New Design High School Audition 8 8 10 8

Millennium High School YES 7 6 7 8

Aviation Career and Technical Education High School YES 4 8 5 8

Manhattan/Hunter Science High School YES 4 6 9 8

Transit Tech Career and Technical Education High School YES Ed. Opt. and Limited Unscreened 7 8 9 7

Eleanor Roosevelt High School YES 4 4 6 7

High School of Economics and Finance Ed. Opt. 6 9 7 7

High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology Ed. Opt. 8 5 6 7

High School of Computers and Technology Limited Unscreened 8 9 7 6

High School for Health Professions and Human Services YES Ed. Opt. 4 4 5 6

Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School Audition 3 7 7 6

Edward R. Murrow High School Ed. Opt. Screened for Language & Audition 4 5 4 5

N.Y.C. Lab School for Collaborative Studies YES 5 5 7 5

Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences YES 1 5 4 5

Food and Finance High School Limited Unscreened 6 6 8 5

Townsend Harris High School YES 1 4 4 4

The High School of Fashion Industries Audition 3 6 4 4

A. Philip Randolph Campus High School YES Ed. Opt. 6 4 4 4

Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School YES Ed. Opt. 5 4 5 4

Midwood High School YES Unscreened 2 5 4 3

Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics YES 6 5 4 3

Baruch College Campus High School YES 2 2 1 0

SOURCES: NYC DOE, FOIL Request on OTC Students; IBO, June 30th enrollment figures.

© Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

TABLE 4

Schools within the lowest 20th percentile for OTC rates

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graduation, and dropoutrates. More than half ofthese twenty-five schoolsreceived A grades on theirprogress reports in 2011. Inaddition to very low rates ofOTC students, the percent-ages of special education students, students eligiblefor free and reduced-pricelunch, and ELL students inthese 25 schools were signif-icantly lower than the aver-age of the rest of the highschools, and their students’eighth-grade proficiencyscores were all significantlyhigher.

At the high end of the OTCdistribution, we foundtwenty-eight high schoolsthat consistently fell withinthe highest 20th percentileof OTC rates each year from2008 through 2011 (seeTable 5). These schools’average OTC rate was 29

Schools ScreenedOther

Admissions2008

OTC (%)2009

OTC (%)2010

OTC (%)2011

OTC (%)

City average 14 16 16 16

High School of World Cultures Screened forLanguage 59 36 57 45

Holcombe L. Rucker School of Commu-nity Research

LimitedUnscreened 33 35 40 41

High School for Youth and CommunityDevelopment at Erasmus

LimitedUnscrened 27 30 24 39

High School for Civil Rights LimitedUnscreedned 31 31 37 38

Christopher Columbus High School Zoned 39 40 32 37

Gateway School for EnvironmentalResearch and Technology

LimitedUnscreedned 22 33 35 37

DreamYard Preparatory School LimitedUnscreened 26 30 26 36

New World High School Screened forLanguage 26 40 46 34

Brooklyn Generation School LimitedUnscreened 53 52 28 33

Academy of Hospitality and Tourism LimitedUnscreened 35 33 25 33

Performing Arts and Technology High School

LimitedUnscreened 25 24 25 32

School for Community Research and Learning

LimitedUnscreened 36 30 26 32

Jamaica High School YES Ed. Opt. andUnscreened 23 31 37 31

Newcomers High School Screened forLanguage 35 39 49 31

Kingsbridge International High School Screened forLanguage 45 40 39 31

Queens Preparatory Academy LimitedUnscreened 21 29 39 30

John Adams High School Zoned andEd. Opt. 25 27 29 29

John F. Kennedy High School LimitedUnscreened 25 24 26 29

Beach Channel High School YES Unscreened 22 23 27 28

High School for Service and Learning at Erasmus

LimitedUnscreened 32 32 34 27

Pablo Neruda Academy for Architecture and World Studies

LimitedUnscreened 27 29 28 27

August Martin High SchoolEd. Opt. andLimited

Unscreened24 30 24 26

Expeditionary Learning School for Com-munity Leaders

LimitedUnscreened 64 50 41 26

Fordham Leadership Academy forBusiness and Technology Ed. Opt. 30 27 27 26

Urban Assembly Academy for His-tory and Citizenship for Young Men

LimitedUnscreened 34 29 26 24

Newtown High School YESEd. Opt.,

Audition and Zoned

24 24 26 24

Academy of Environmental ScienceSecondary High School Ed. Opt. 24 27 28 23

William Cullen Bryant High School YES Zoned 25 25 23 22

TABLE 5

Schools within the highest 20th percentile for OTC rates School

SOURCES: NYC DOE, FOIL Request on OTC Students; IBO, June 30th enrollment figures.

NOTE: Schools in bold font represent schools targeted for closure or schools that are on the state list ofpersistently low achieving (PLA) schools.

© Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

25

24 In Screened programs, students areranked based on their final reportcard grades from the prior schoolyear, as well as their state readingand math test scores. Attendanceand punctuality are also considered.We classify a school screened if thatis their sole admission method, or ifit is one of their admission methods.For the purpose of this analysis, wedo not consider a school “screened”if it’s “screened for language”(geared towards ELL students).

25 Zoned programs give priority to stu-dents who apply and live in the geo-graphic area of the zoned highschool. There are zoned high schoolsin the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island,and Queens; Manhattan does nothave any zoned high schools.

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percent, significantly higher than thecity average of 16 percent. Moreover,compared with the rest of theschools in the system, these twenty-eight high schools had significantlylower average eighth-grade profi-ciency scores, college readiness indi-cators, and graduation rates, as wellas significantly higher dropout rates.Twelve of these twenty-eight schoolswith very high student OTC assign-ment rates were either targeted forclosure or on the list of persistentlylow achieving (PLA) schools.

The twenty-five high schools withthe lowest rates of OTC assignmentseem well positioned to meet theneeds of OTC students, as thoseschools mostly achieve high aca-demic outcomes. But on average,these twenty-five high schools wereassigned a less than 10 percent rate(and in several instances much less)of OTC students. Conversely, thetwenty-eight high schools with thehighest rates of OTC assignmentwere among the system’s most aca-demically struggling schools. Yettheir OTC rates ranged from 22 per-cent to above 40 percent in 2011,with many having more than a thirdof their student bodies composed ofOTC students. This disparity indi-cates that the DOE’s assignment ofOTC students does not considerwhich high schools might best meettheir academic needs.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Our findings indicate that OTCstudents are disproportionately

assigned to high schools serving apreponderance of students with loweighth-grade ELA/math proficiencyscores, a high percentage of ELLstudents, and a high percentage ofdropouts. We found that signifi-cantly higher percentages of OTCstudents are assigned to struggling orpersistently low-achieving highschools. Significantly higher per-centages of OTC students were alsoassigned to high schools targeted forclosure in the years before their clo-sures were announced, and higherpercentages of OTC students wereassigned to schools undergoing thephase-out process. Finally, our studyidentified a substantial group ofhigh-performing high schools thatare assigned very low percentages ofOTC students and a similar-sizedgroup of struggling high schoolsassigned very high percentages ofOTC students.

This report suggests that, at leastsince decentralization, the schoolsystem has inequitably implementedOTC student assignments and hasnot developed placement policiesbased on OTC students’ academicneeds. Our analyses of the data onthe DOE’s distribution of OTC stu-dents from 2008 to 2011 suggeststhat the Bloomberg administrationhas continued this inequitable pat-tern of distributing OTC students.Worse, through the interrelationshipof its OTC assignment and school

closing policies, the current adminis-tration may have intensified the pat-terns of inequitable OTCdistribution that have ill served OTCstudents and exacerbated the prob-lems in the struggling schools towhich they are predominantlyassigned. Therefore we offer the fol-lowing recommendations:

1) The DOE should commission astudy – by the city’s IndependentBudget Office, the ResearchAlliance for New York City Schools,or another independent researchentity – of the academic perform-ance of several cohorts of OTC stu-dents after assignment to theirrespective high schools.

The study should determine thedemographics of OTC cohorts, aswell as OTC students’ rates of grad-uation, dropout, credit accumulation,Regents passes, and college readinessat both system and individual-schoollevels. Other key performance andoutcome variables, such as atten-dance, lateness, suspensions, andexpulsions, should also be deter-mined. These outcome resultsshould be compared with students’and schools’ demographic character-istics to identify and analyze anystrong relationships.

The findings of these studies shouldbe used to identify particular highschools whose OTC students achievesignificantly higher academic per-formance than systemwide averages.If such “beat the odds” schools can

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be identified, an additional researcheffort should identify the exemplarypractices that characterize theseeffective schools for OTC students.The DOE should ensure that allhigh schools, and especially thosehigh schools identified as producingpoor outcomes for OTC students,implement those exemplary practicesso that the academic performance ofall OTC students can be significantlyimproved.

2) Our data indicate that the sys-temic rate of OTC assignment forthe 2008–2011 school years was 17percent. Therefore, the DOE shouldset the following policies for theassignment of OTC students:

• All New York City high schoolsshould be assigned OTC studentsat an annual rate of between 12and 20 percent of their total stu-dent populations.26 The DOEshould develop the specific crite-ria governing the decision rulesfor OTC assignments below andabove 17 percent. Those criteriashould include consideration ofthe specific nature, culture, levelsof need, and academic perform-ance of each high school. No highschool should be assigned morethan 20 percent or less than 12percent of OTC students, relativeto its total school population, inany given year.27

• Schools targeted for closure orgoing through the closure processshould not be assigned any OTCstudents.

• Struggling schools, those highschools identified by the state aspersistently low achieving (PLA),should not be assigned any OTCstudents until their performancesimprove sufficiently to beremoved from the state’s PLA list.

Implementing these recommenda-tions would allow the DOE to tailorits OTC student placements to theacademic outcomes and instructionalneeds of individual high schoolswhile maintaining a rough equity ofOTC assignment rates across thehigh school system. Implementingthese recommendations would sig-nificantly reduce, if not eliminate,the disparities and inequities thathave characterized both past and cur-rent OTC assignment policies.Finally, implementing these recom-mendations would encourage allhigh schools to reconfigure theirinstructional resources and supportprograms to meet the needs of anannually predictable rate of incom-ing OTC students, thereby con-tributing to the improvement oftheir performance throughout thecity system.

26 The exclusion of PLA schools and schoolsundergoing closure, called for in these recom-mendations, might require a recalculation of thesystemwide OTC rate and a small upwardadjustment in the 12–20 percent OTC bandwidthrate for all high schools.

27 This past school year, the DOE initiated a policyof requiring many of the city’s selective highschools to accept a certain percentage of spe-cial needs students, whether or not they meetschools’ eligibility criteria. The policies we rec-ommend build on this recent initiative.

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