A Far-Reaching Ripple Effect: The Impact of Middle Schools on New York City Specialized High Schools Admissions

Abstract

Education is meant to give students of all backgrounds a foundation from which they can build their futures off of. However, the New York City public school system is far from equal for all groups. The unequal distribution of resources can affect a student’s outcomes from as early as the fifth grade when families are choosing which middle school to send their child to. From there, the skills they gain and the advice they receive influences their results in the complex specialized high school admissions. The meritocratic system may seem fair at a glance but there are glaringly unequal outcomes when the results are decomposed by certain metrics. One such component is “feeder” middle schools, which send a disproportionately high number of students to specialized high schools each year. This thesis uses the most recent data available to study the key factors to middle school effects on New York City specialized high school admissions. Using a logit regression model, I do not find statistically significant results for the effect of household income and parent education level on the likelihood of feeder schools existing in a given ZIP code. Further analysis yields statistically significant outcomes: household income, race composition, and citizenship status show significant correlation with predicted values for feeder schools when controlling for borough differences.