Special Admissions High Schools in New York City: Unequal Opportunites for Everyone

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Special Admissions High Schools in New York City: Unequal Opportunites for Everyone

As a teenager growing up in New York City a major part of your life is the high school that you attend. New York City is filled with high schools, public, private, and parochial. Within the public school system in addition to "regular" public schools there are also special admission and magnet schools. Although these schools are all technically part of the same system, there are very great differences and disparities between them.

As a student at a special admissions public school I was very aware of the problems that existed at my school, but also took for granted the advantages my school had over "regular" public schools. Our ceiling was falling down, we had no windows or ventilation, and we had teachers that didn't teach, but we also had a computer network, beautiful grand pianos, small classes, a Jazz Chorus that took a trip to Europe, AP courses, and a ridiculous number of graduates attending Ivy League universities. Some of the "regular" public schools might have had windows, but that was really the only advantage, after that we had them beat by quite a lot.

I grew up across the street from two high schools. One of them, Fiorello Laguardia High School, is a special admissions public school for students who are gifted in the performing or visual arts. The student population at Laguardia is relatively diverse with students of all races attending, although the majority of the students, as at all of the NYC special admissions high schools, is white and Asian. The other high school, Martin Luther King jr. High School is a "regular" public high school. The population is almost entirely African American and Hispanic with a very small minority of Asian students.

In Manhattan, as in many areas of New York City, where one attends high school has little to do with where one lives. Almost everyone takes some combination of busses and/or subways every morning and afternoon. Because of this, the problems cannot really be blamed on districts. The disparities between schools has much more to do with who attends the school than where the school is located and the income of the population of that area. Technically, according to Marty Schwartzfarb, an educator in the New York City Public school system, all of the high schools run by the New York City board of education are supposed to be receiving exactly the same amount of money per student.

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