how to make a high school list
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By Joyce Szuflita
Families are starting to think about the public high school search right about now.
Families will be considering whether their kids will take the SHSAT and signing up for classes or booking tutors for the summer.
They may be attending webinars. I recommend mine, of course. I have dates up for May, June and July. Set a good example for your kids. Don’t procrastinate.
They may be reading online forums like Parents of NY Teens or Applying to HS in NYC.
They may be signing up for email subscriptions. I recommend High School 411 NYC use the code JOYCE10 for a little discount.
Spring of 7th grade is also the perfect time to start making a list of around 24 programs to investigate. You will whittle down to 12 by the deadline in 8th grade. You need to keep your mind open at this time of year. If a school is within and hour commute and has something that intrigues you, it is worth at least a passing glance early in the game. If you are too particular right now, your list will be a pathetic group of well known, tiny, wildly popular schools that will be impossible to gain entry to. This is why everyone hates this process and thinks we need more “good” schools (well, of course we always do need more). Do you think that the only colleges worth attending are Ivies? Then best of luck to you in the high school and college searches. You can stop reading now.
There are plenty of “good” schools out there. The popular schools are often filled with affluent people. This is why 42 out of 400 schools have adopted the Diversity in Admissions priority. How hard do you want to make this? How rigid do you want to be? If you set arbitrary parameters around demographics before you begin to search, you will miss out on opportunity and extraordinary communities. Sorry to be preachy, but this isn’t my first rodeo.
So, how to start sifting through the 400 schools that contain 700 programs?
You list the programs separately on your application of 12. Many schools only have one program, but some do have several and if there is a school that you love that has more than one, you should certainly list all of the ones you are interested in. You can find the programs in a school by searching on MY SCHOOLS and looking at the bottom to the “star” links.
MY SCHOOLS has a filtered search function, and I recommend that you use it to see what comes up. The problem is that it doesn’t filter for any academic criteria, so you will get a very wide list.
I am a bit more bullish on the Inside Schools filtered search. Follow the questions but at the end make sure to click the “narrow my search” button and click “our recommendations” to see what pops up. They are not infallible (no one is) and there are occasionally some diamonds in the rough that they have not designated as “staff picks” or “noteworthy” but those schools will come up in the chatter on the forums.
If you use Niche or Great Schools, all you will find are the usual suspects. Those high performers are almost always screened schools that have a history of screening for grades and tests, so duh, they have the highest stats. Are they the best schools? Well, they are the best at snagging the most strong students. Is that hot house environment the one where your student can achieve best? Maybe. Maybe not. Ed Opt schools, (that on purpose bring in a balanced group of academic kids) will never have the stats that a Screened school will have, but they still have 1/3 high performers. How many type A academics do you need in your school? Is a diverse group of learners and a wide range of classes make it a lesser option? I don’t believe so. I have identical twins (my own little science experiment). One went to Stuy. One went to Murrow (Ed Opt). They both took exactly the same AP’s. They got exactly the same scores. They both got into the same highly selective private colleges. Which high school was best?
Happy hunting!
