Title VI Complaint
NOVEMBER 16, 2020
TEENS TAKE CHARGE FILES FEDERAL CIVIL RIGHTS COMPLAINT AGAINST NYC DOE, CLAIMING CITY’S SYSTEM OF ADMISSION SCREENS IN PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS IS RACIALLY DISCRIMINATORY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, November 16, 2020
Sophie Mode
press@teenstakecharge.com
NEW YORK—Teens Take Charge, a coalition of New York City high school students, filed a complaint today with the Office for Civil Rights, alleging that the New York City Department of Education’s use of admissions screens for public high schools violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
More than 20 percent of New York City’s public middle and high school schools use admission screens, which allow schools to set their own selection criteria including attendance, punctuality, grades, and state test score. Screens have a profoundly segregative effect on the system at large and help to make New York City’s public schools the most segregated in the country.
The complaint cites data from the 2020 high school admissions cycle to demonstrate that screens disproportionately exclude Black and Latinx students from the city’s best-resourced schools. For example, at two sought-after screened District 2 high schools (Baruch College Campus High School and Eleanor Roosevelt High School) Black and Hispanic public school students accounted for less than 10 percent of 2020 offers despite making up about 40 percent of applicants at each school. A screened District 3 high school (Frank McCourt High School) admitted 15 percent of white students who applied. That is one and a half times the rate of admission for Asian students (10 percent), triple that of Hispanic students (5 percent) and five times that of Black students (3 percent).
Title VI prohibits recipients of federal funds from excluding students from their programs on the basis of race, color, or national origin. The complaint filed today alleges that the use of admissions screens by New York City public high schools unjustifiably segregates students by race, disadvantaging students of color.
Today’s legal action comes on the heels of years of student advocacy to end the use of admissions screens — advocacy that has been met by city and school officials with empty promises, missed timelines, and unheeded recommendations, even from their own school diversity task force. A year ago this week Teens Take Charge held its first of seven “Strikes for Integration” at public high school campuses across the city. The strikes collectively mobilized more than 2,000 high school students who protested during the school day to demand an end to segregated schooling.
Prior to the pandemic, students were gearing up for a citywide student boycott inspired by the half a million New York City school students who staged a one-day boycott in protest of school segregation in 1964, months before the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Read the full complaint here: https://teenstakecharge.com/unscreen
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“As students, we always knew screens were discriminatory,” said Brandon St. Luce, student at Edward R. Murrow High School and Teens Take Charge leader. “Earlier this fall, we got the proof. The DOE's own numbers show that admissions screens lead to rampant racial discrimination, in clear violation of students' rights under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
“At Teens Take Charge, we have been fighting to remove these discriminatory admissions screens for years and have not seen action from the people that are supposed to represent us. Our leaders won’t deliver justice, so we are forced to demand it through our courts,” said La’Toya Beecham, junior at H.E.R.O High and leader at Teens Take Charge. “Screens not only filter out countless minority students like me, but they also show that we are only represented as numbers and statistics,” Beecham explained. “Isn’t my education worth more than that?”
“Admission screens are a measure of your privilege and not your worth or your effort. Screens harm every student, including those who are accepted into screened schools and those who never even apply. They need to be dismantled now,” says Toby Paperno, founding member of Screened Students Against Screens and senior at The Beacon School.
State Senator Robert Jackson expressed his support for the complaint. “With this lawsuit, Teens Take Charge are firing a warning shot across the bow of racially discriminatory admissions screens that perpetuate segregation in NYC public schools. I’m proud to support them in their fight for equity.”
State Senator Julia Salazar said, “Thanks to the persistent efforts of Teens Take Charge, we now know precisely how racial and economic segregation has been maintained in our city’s public schools. Access to high quality education should not depend on zip code or privilege, it must be available to all of our young people. It is long past time for admissions screens with a demonstrated discriminatory impact on Black, Brown, and working class students to be eliminated. I stand in full support of this new legal battle for equity.”
“Teens Take Charge has been at the forefront in the fight to get beyond mere rhetoric when it comes to desegregation in our schools,” said City Council Member Mark Levine. “They understand we need concrete policy change. We have relied too heavily for too long on academic screening in our high schools, which de facto has the impact of excluding African American and Latino students. We need more innovative admissions criteria, to ensure greater integration while also ensuring every child gets an excellent education. The time for change is now.”
"Our young people should not have to file a federal lawsuit for the DOE to do what’s right,” said Dianne Morales, 2021 Mayoral candidate and former Executive Director of Phipps Neighborhoods. “Decades of data demonstrates what the community has long said: the screenings perpetuate and maintain segregation. The DOE should be fighting to change this instead of fighting to preserve the racist status quo.”
Paullette Healy, member of the Citywide Council for Special Education and Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools, said that the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice uprisings have highlighted the injustice of admissions screens. “The stress of cut-throat admissions screens was inequitable and abusive before. There is no justification to subject our children to them now, when we all recognize they have experienced unprecedented collective and individual trauma.”
“Teens Take Charge and their student-led movement are true leaders in the struggle to dismantle deep-seated racial segregation in New York City public schools,” said Rachel Kleinman, Senior Counsel and Director of Professional Development at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. “Their latest effort to eliminate discriminatory screens for public high schools is a critical step toward achieving educational equity for New York City public school students.”
“Schools of choice offer important opportunities,” said Gary Orfield, Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “They should not use admissions tests and other screens directly linked to earlier privileges and should have a plan to reflect more of the city's diversity. This does not mean that they cannot have very demanding coursework, only that the schools should be integrated and students from less privileged backgrounds should be given a chance to succeed there.”
“New York has the most segregated schools in the country, and the primary driver of segregation in NYC's middle and high schools is the practice of screening students for admission,” said Kristin Kearns-Jordan, CEO of The Urban Assembly. “Selective admission builds on and magnifies the inequities created by the residential segregation of our elementary schools. Public schools should serve all students and be held responsible for each student's achievement — period.”
“The Coalition of Asian American Children and Families (CACF) stands in support of Teens Take Charge’s legal action to replace discriminatory screens that enable segregation with inclusive admissions policies in New York City public schools,” said Anita Gundanna and Vanessa Leung, Co-Executive Directors of CACF. “As the nation’s only pan-Asian children and families’ advocacy organization, CACF fights for equity for the most marginalized students, including Asian Pacific American students who are unequivocally harmed by the existing admissions system and whose experiences are erased due to the lack of accurate data disaggregation on our community. We continue to work toward dispelling the damaging model minority myth, which not only prevents our needs from being recognized and understood, but also allows our community to be used as a wedge to pit communities of color against each other. We are confident that adopting inclusive admissions policies will bring our schools one step closer to integration, which has been proven to positively impact all students academically, socially, and emotionally.”
“Sadly, the NYC school system is known for being one of the most segregated systems in the world,” said Johanna Garcia, education activist and former president of CEC 6. “The admissions screening process is largely tied to proxies for wealth, class, and race. It is a process that rewards winning a competition at all costs without regard to the deep disinvestments in our school communities. Teens Take Charge are exactly the youth we need running this world. These youth have the courage to draw attention to these injustices and the need for a process centered around equity. Bravo!”
“Organizing For Equity, NY (OFENY) supports Teens Take Charge in their mission to bring justice to the students of New York City by ending the inequitable admissions screening practices that continue to promote racial segregation in our educational system,” said OFENY leadership team member Yeimmy Torres. “Enough is enough. We support Teens Take Charge in their inspiring work towards dismantling the red lining of our education and opening the doors for all students across the five boroughs to receive the education that they deserve.”
“Public schools should be welcoming, accessible and high-quality for everyone,” said Toni Smith-Thompson, Senior Organizer at New York Civil Liberties Union. “Unfortunately, NYC’s system of discriminatory, metric-based admissions screens result in the exclusion of students of color from top NYC middle and high schools. This system perpetuates the cycle of segregation by concentrating wealth and privilege into select schools while denying the majority of students access and opportunity. This is unacceptable, and unconstitutional, in a public school system.”
The complaint makes the following demands of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR):
OCR make a finding that:
(a) The NYCDOE’s pervasive and interconnecting system of screens, utilized for admission to New York City’s public high schools is in violation of Title VI and its implementing regulations; and
(b) so long as the NYCDOE does not devise and implement less discriminatory alternatives for admissions into public high schools, they will remain in violation of Title VI and its implementing regulations.
OCR require that New York City public schools remain prohibited from considering attendance records, punctuality records, program-specific tasks, GPA, standardized test scores, or any other form of discriminatory criteria as a threshold admissions screen.
OCR require that NYCDOE adopt inclusive admissions policies at all K-12 public schools. For example, NYCDOE could make universal its popular “educational option” model that establishes minimum academic diversity thresholds for the public high school matching process, whereby 16 percent of students offered admission perform below-average on state standardized tests, 68 percent of students receive average scores on state standardized tests, and 16 percent of students score above average on state standardized tests. Although standardized test scores often reflect and can compound racial inequality, structuring public high school admissions on a bell curve would mitigate the worst effects of using standardized test scores in public school admissions, while providing a positive first step towards racially integrating New York City’s public high schools.
OCR require that NYCDOE provide all students with equal access to the high-quality resources and opportunities that students at the top public high schools currently receive, including but not limited to AP and Honors courses, guidance and career counselors, extracurricular activities, technological resources, and a wide range of elective courses.
To ensure continued compliance by NYCDOE with the requirements of Title VI, OCR require that, no greater than sixty days following the release of public school admissions offers, NYCDOE release data for each middle and high school program, describing the demographic characteristics of students who applied and students who were admitted, including race, ethnicity, free-and-reduced-price lunch eligibility, Individual Education Plan and English Language Learner status, as well as the average position students in each demographic category ranked each program.