Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Political leadership in NYC: Mayor Eric Adams on antisemitism
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Hamas, Gaza and American universities: more letters, and two speeches
First, letters from the President of the Hebrew University to his counterparts at Harvard and Stanford:
The leadership of the Hebrew University in a strongly-worded, unequivocal response letter to the presidents of Harvard and Stanford universities, following their weak condemnation of Hamas: “You have failed us, not only as Israelis, who are subject to the imminent threat of being subject to genocide, but also as leaders of an academic institution, who expect their colleagues to present higher moral standards and more courage.”
In a strongly-worded, unequivocal response letter jointly signed by Prof. Asher Cohen, President of the Hebrew University, Prof. Tamir Sheafer, Rector of the Hebrew University, and Prof. Barak Medina, was dispatched to the Presidents of Harvard and Stanford Universities. This letter comes in the wake of what the Hebrew University officials perceive as shockingly feeble condemnations from these revered institutions in response to Hamas’ recent barbaric assault on Israel and the grievous loss of life among the southern residents.
In their letter addressed to the Presidents of Harvard and Stanford, the senior officials of the Hebrew University made it unequivocally clear that there is no room for “balance” or justification when it comes to such a heinous assault by Hamas on Israel. They expressed their deep disappointment in the messages emanating from these universities under their leadership, deeming them to fall far short of the minimum standards expected of moral leadership, courage, and a commitment to truth.
The response letter proceeds to recount the distressing sequence of events that transpired in the southern region of the country, beginning on October 7, 2023, highlighting the war crimes and atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians. It concludes with the stern statement, “you have failed us, not only as Israelis, who are subject to the imminent threat of being subject to genocide, but also as leaders of an academic institution, who expect their colleagues to present higher moral standards, and more courage.”
To read the full letters: https://en.huji.ac.il/news/letters-presidents-harvard-university-and-stanford-university
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And here's a statement from some Yale faculty condemning Hamas but worrying about what comes next in Gaza:
Statement of Concerned Yale Faculty Regarding Crimes Against Humanity in Israel-Palestine
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Earlier:
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Thursday, September 7, 2023
Navigating NYC school choice: advice for families
Each year a new cohort of families has to navigate school choice in New York City. The city offers lots of resources for gathering information. One advantage of employing methods that make it safe to reveal true preference orders is that at least one aspect of the process is straightforward. (Of course, constructing a list of 12 schools out of the many available isn't easy.)
The NY Times offers a guide, which is full of information on how to go about gathering information with which to form preferences over schools:
Applying to N.Y.C. Public Schools Can Feel Daunting. Here’s What to Know. What matters when choosing a school? How should you compare options? And what’s the best strategy for getting your first choice? By Troy Closson, Sept. 5, 2023,
"What’s the best strategy when applying?
"You should rank schools and programs in order of your true preference. There is no better approach. Students are considered for a lower choice only if a higher ranked school does not have space.
"Admissions experts suggest creating a complete list of 12 schools with a balance of programs, priorities and demand per seat, which you can find on MySchools. Apply by the deadline; there is also no benefit to applying earlier"
HT: Parag Pathak
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Another resource:
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' American Economic Review, 99, 5, Dec. 2009, pp1954-1978.
Sunday, January 1, 2023
New York State's Living Donor Support Act (LDSA, S. 1594) was signed by Governor Hochul on Dec. 29
Frank McCormick forwards this email:
From: Elaine Perlman
Sent: Thursday, December 29,
2022 5:44 PM
Subject: Governor Hochul Has Signed
the Living Donor Support Act!
"Hello!
I am delighted to inform you all that the New York State's Living Donor Support Act (LDSA, S. 1594) was signed by Governor Hochul today.
New York is becoming the best state for organ donation!
Waitlist Zero's Executive Director Josh Morrison wrote the legislation. State Senator Rivera from The Bronx and Assembly Member Gottfried from Manhattan sponsored the bill.
This spring, a team from the NKDO, NKF, DOVE, LiveOn New York, and Waitlist Zero lobbied for the bill's passage in Albany. Soon after, the LDSA was unanimously passed by both houses.
This new law creates the opportunity for New York's living donors to avoid going into debt to donate. Living donors will be reimbursed for their lost wages and out-of-pocket expenses. New York will be the first state in the country to offer this opportunity for donation to be cost neutral for donors.
Currently the Federal Government only reimburses when both the recipient and donor make less than 350% of the poverty line (around $47,000). The LDSA will reimburse the lost wages of donors who make up to $125,000 as well as the costs of donation (travel, childcare, etc).
In addition, the LDSA will ensure that all potential recipients will be educated about transplantation.
There are currently 8,569 people on New York's transplant wait lists, 7,234 of whom are awaiting a kidney. With the LDSA, we anticipate that far more New Yorkers will benefit from a living organ donation.
Here is the press release.
On Tuesday, January 3rd from 4-5pm ET, we will have a virtual celebration and toast the passage of the LDSA! Here is our zoom link.
Please share this good news far & wide!
Best,
Elaine
Director, Waitlist Zero "
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Because the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) is a payer of last resort, the NY law will replace NLDAC for NY donors who do meet the means test, and so it will also allow the NLDAC budget to go further.
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Update: Frank McCormick writes to alert me that, like the authorization for NLDAC, the NY State law (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S1594) "requires that the Program shall be payer of last resort..." I hope that this doesn't turn into a competition to be the payer of last resort in a way that might cause some NY donors to fall between the cracks, and not be reimbursed either by NLDAC or the State of New York.
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Pay Transparency in New York City as the new law begins to take effect
Here's a report from Glassdoor Economic Research:
A First Glimpse into the Impact of Pay Transparency in New York City by Daniel Zhao
"On November 1, New York City’s pay transparency law went into effect, requiring job listings to include salary ranges. While the move represents an opportunity for job seekers to get greater pay transparency, high-profile errors as the new law went into effect have raised concerns about the efficacy of the law. With similar laws going into effect on January 1, 2023 in California and Washington State, we examined Glassdoor data to give an early view into how employers are grappling with pay transparency in New York City.
"Key Findings
"Pay ranges are being published on the majority of active job listings. 60 percent of job listings in New York City have employer-provided salaries as of November 12, and there are hints of a spillover effect to neighboring states.
"Ranges have widened significantly, but remain relatively narrow. The median width of salary ranges has widened from $10,000 in October to as wide as $20,000 so far in November. Less than 3 percent of daily active job listings in November have a salary range wider than $100,000.
"Professional services like Financial Services, Information Technology and Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology are the slowest to add pay ranges to their pay ranges. This may mean enforcing pay transparency will matter more in these higher-salary industries than in lower-wage industries."
Thursday, October 20, 2022
School choice consulting in New York City
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any stressful process in which affluent people participate must be in need of a consulting industry.
New York City's school choice processes are no exception:
The School-Admissions Whisperer Joyce Szuflita can assuage Brooklyn’s most anxious parents. By Caitlin Moscatello
"For the better part of two decades, Szuflita has demystified the process of public-school admissions for some of Brooklyn’s most overwhelmed, optimization-prone parents. ... Prekindergarten and elementary admission are largely based on where you live. But the game gets significantly more byzantine come middle school and more complex yet for high school, with its tier of “screened” institutions that have traditionally required students to test in, audition, or undergo other high-stress assessments. The process of getting into certain schools — and don’t kid yourself, everybody wants in — has long been a brutal one. Until it got slightly easier. And then brutal again. Or maybe some middle level of brutal? This is why parents need Szuflita.
...
"On September 29, schools chancellor David C. Banks abruptly announced that some of the city’s most prestigious middle and high schools would move away from an open lottery system and increase their use of merit-based admissions. The approach prioritizes students with an A average — children Banks calls “hardworking,” a loaded description in a city with one of the greatest wealth disparities in the country — and reverses the previous mayor’s strategy, which aimed to usher more lower-income students into New York’s top schools.
...
“The pendulum is swinging back a little bit,” Szuflita says of the Banks announcement, insisting that the changes are not as sweeping as they might seem. “The algorithm is still exactly the same.” Contrary to how some have read the news, the old lottery is still partially in use. The random number (a hexadecimal, actually) that each student is assigned works as a tiebreaker to get into screened high schools and can sometimes be a major factor when families submit their ranked choices of preferred schools.
"Clients often panic about their lottery numbers and want to change the ranking of their list, which Szuflita doesn’t recommend for anyone except those with exceptionally high or low numbers. Trying to outsmart the process, she says, is pure “magical thinking.” She’s constantly telling parents to trust the fairness of the city’s sorting algorithm, whose authors literally won the Nobel Prize, and rank in true preference order. (Or, as she tends to put it in emails: “RANK IN TRUE PREFERENCE ORDER!!!!!!!”) Despite this, clients sometimes persist, asking, How do we work the algorithm to our advantage? How do we strategize ranking our list? “That’s when I yell at people in the nicest way,” she says, because they don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re cutting into her time. “Like, ‘No, shut up. Shut up and listen to me. You’re not going to get everything you need to know.’” But most of her consults take two hours, she says, and don’t involve a lot of back-and-forth. “They tell me about their children and then what follows is usually a rapid-fire, two-hour information dump from me. There is not a lot of airing of concerns, because I already anticipate their concerns.” The download is intensely specific, tailored to each family and covering individual schools, principals, teachers, and facility upgrades few people are aware of. She verifies rumors (or sets the record straight) and knows things you can’t find on the internet."
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Related recent post:
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Return to previous school assignment policies (in some respects) under New York City's new mayor
In NYC, the pendulum is still swinging between inclusive admissions as measured by demographics and determined by lottery, and meritocratic admissions as measured by tests and grades.
The NYT has the story:
In a Reversal, New York City Tightens Admissions to Some Top Schools. The city loosened selection criteria during the pandemic, policies some parents protested as unfair and others hoped would reduce racial disparities. By Troy Closson
"New York City’s selective middle schools can once again use grades to choose which students to admit, the school chancellor, David C. Banks, announced on Thursday, rolling back a pandemic-era moratorium that had opened the doors of some of the city’s most elite schools to more low-income students.
...
"New York City has used selective admissions for public schools more than any school district in the country. About a third of the city’s 900 or so middle and high schools had some kind of admissions requirement before the pandemic disrupted many measures to sort students by academic performance.
...
"Selective high schools will also be able to prioritize top-performing students.
"The sweeping move will end the random lottery for middle schools, a major shift after the previous administration ended the use of grades and test scores two years ago. At the city’s competitive high schools, where changes widened the pool of eligible applicants, priority for seats will be limited to top students whose grades are an A average.
...
"The announcement came as New York City’s education officials are confronting multiple crises in the wake of the pandemic, complicating a dilemma that has bedeviled previous administrations: how to create more equitable schools, while trying to prevent middle-class families from abandoning the system.
"State standardized test scores released Wednesday showed that many students fell behind, particularly in math, and that many Hispanic, Black and low-income students continue to lag far behind their white, Asian and higher-income peers. At the same time, the district is bleeding students: Roughly 120,000 families have left traditional public schools over the past five years. Some have left the system, and others have gone to charter schools."
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And here's the Washington Post:
New York City, embracing merit, rolls back diversity plan for schools By Laura Meckler
"New York City schools announced Thursday they would allow middle schools to consider academics in admitting students to some of the city’s most sought-after programs, unraveling pandemic-era rules aimed at injecting racial and economic diversity into a segregated system.
"High schools would also rely more heavily on merit and less on the luck of a lottery under the new plan, reversing the previous administration’s direction as a new mayor takes command of the nation’s largest school system.
...
"In San Francisco, admissions into the elite Lowell High School were converted from merit-based into a lottery system. As in New York, though, the change was reversed — in this case, after several school board members were recalled, in part over this issue.
"In Northern Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology also shifted from an admissions test to a “holistic review” that considers several factors, a move that is being challenged in court and has faced resistance from the Republican governor and his administration.
...
"In New York, the debate is particularly fiery because students are required to apply to middle and high school, and before the pandemic, about a third of the city’s 900 middle and high schools included requirements for admission — such as grades, test scores, attendance and behavior records.
...
"That system was largely converted into a lottery under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
"For high school, applicants were put into tiers based on their grades. But the top tier included about 60 percent of all students, who had the first crack at the top schools. Competitive schools drew acceptances randomly from this group.
...
"Now, under the new system announced Thursday, it will be harder to get into the top tier, though once in that group, it will still be a lottery. To get into the top tier, students must be in the top 15 percent of their school or of the city overall, and they must have at least a 90 percent on grades.
"Test scores, which had been used for years but also criticized as biased, will not be considered. Banks said exam scores are a flawed measure but grades are “still a very solid indicator of how you are showing up as a student,” even for students who face hardships at home."
Friday, August 5, 2022
Busing for schools in Boston and NYC, by Angrist, Gray-Lobe, Idoux & Pathak
One of the spinoffs of the design of school choice systems in Boston, NYC and elsewhere is that it has opened up the empirical study of school effectiveness, by allowing economists to use some randomness in the assignments while controlling for family preferences to distinguish school effects from student selection. It has turned out that it's hard to change test scores through school assignments, and neighborhoods remain important. But integration responds to voluntary choice, although the paper below doesn't find effects on college attendance after controlling for the selection of travel by students.
Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York by Joshua Angrist, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Clemence M. Idoux & Parag A. Pathak, NBER WORKING PAPER 30308 DOI 10.3386/w30308 July 2022
Abstract: "School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home, perhaps enhancing integration. Urban school transportation is increasingly costly, however, and has unclear integration and education consequences. We estimate the causal effects of non-neighborhood school enrollment and school travel on integration, achievement, and college enrollment using an identification strategy that exploits partly-random assignment in the Boston and New York school matches. Instrumental variables estimates suggest distance and travel boost integration for those who choose to travel, but have little or no effect on test scores and college attendance. We argue that small effects on educational outcomes reflect modest effects of distance and travel on school quality as measured by value-added."
"School transportation expenditures today are driven in part by the fact that many large urban school districts allow families to choose schools district-wide, lengthening school commutes for some. District-wide choice is a feature of school assignment in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis,Newark, New Orleans, Tulsa, and Washington, DC, to name a few. In choice districts, seats at over-subscribed schools are typically allocated by algorithms that reflect family preferences in the form of a rank-order list and a limited set of school priorities. ... Choice in large urban districts is appealing because choice systems potentially decouple school assignment from underlying residential segregation. Moreover, where school quality is unevenly distributed over neighborhoods, district-wide choice affords all students a shot at schoolsviewed as high-quality.
"This paper asks whether school travel in the modern choice paradigm is working as hoped, boosting integration and learning, especially for minority students. Our investigation focuses on Boston and New York, two cities of special interest because of their high transportation costs and because they’ve long been battlegrounds in the fight over school integration. We estimate the effects of non-neighborhood school enrollment for students for whom school travel is facilitated by school choice. In both cities, students who opt for non-neighborhood schooling have higher test scores and are more likely to go to college than those who travel less. But these estimates may reflect selection bias arising from the fact that more motivated or better-off families are more likely to travel.
"We solve the problem of selection bias using the conditional random assignment to schools embedded in Boston and New York’s school matching algorithms. A given student may be offered a seat at a school in his or neighborhood, or a seat farther away. Conditional on an applicant’s preferences and school priorities, modern choice algorithms randomize seat assignment, thereby manipulating distance and travel independently of potential outcomes.
...
" A parsimonious explanation for our findings, therefore, is that travel facilitates integration but does not translate into large enough changes in value-added to change education outcomes much."
Friday, June 24, 2022
New York City school choice: increased use of lotteries in the news
The recent emphasis on lotteries in NYC school choice is discussed in the NY Times:
N.Y.C. Tried to Fix High School Admissions. Some Parents Are Furious. In an attempt to democratize schools, the city is focusing less on grades, attendance and test scores. Instead, it relies heavily on a lottery. By Ginia Bellafante
"Some back story: Apart from what are known as the specialized high schools — hypercompetitive institutions like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science that, controversially, admit students on the basis of a single standardized test — the city gives eighth graders the option of applying to 160 screened high schools and programs that have their own criteria.
"Whether a student qualifies for one of these selective schools has typically depended on an opaque combination of grades, test scores (different from the ones used for the specialized high schools), essays, art portfolios and other work. The next step has students rank their preferences in descending order on a scale of one to 12, after which they are thrown into a lottery. A prizewinning algorithm developed to match medical students to residency programs then determines where a student is placed.
"Among high-achieving families in Manhattan, brownstone Brooklyn and many parts of Queens, the goal is not a spot in just any of the 160 schools but admission to eight or nine that are especially competitive, prestigious and largely dominated by white and Asian families. What has caused such ire in the current admissions cycle is that many parents discovered that their children — students with grade-point averages in the high 90s, for instance — were admitted to none of their ranked choices. Instead they would be funneled to schools they knew little about.
...
"The state exams, usually a determining factor in high school placements, had been abandoned during the pandemic. So, too, were attendance records. Students with grades in the mid-80s were now bundled with those who had much higher averages, meaning that an eighth-grader with an academically stellar record but a poor lottery number could easily lose out to a merely very good student with a great lottery assignation."
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Previous related posts:
Monday, April 18, 2022
Friday, April 29, 2022
More on NYC school choice lotteries
Following my recent post on random numbers in the NYC school choice system(s) for high school and middle school, Amélie Marian writes to me from Rutgers, where she is a professor of computer science and a close observer of school choice.
She writes:
"I just read your blog post about the NYC school lottery system glitch and I found the comparison to plumbing extremely adequate to describe what has been happening with the NYC school admission system these past few years.
...
"One of the most major recent change is that most admissions are now decided solely by lottery numbers; most schools don't rank students anymore***. The random number, originally designed as a tie-breaker, is now the main deciding factor. With this in mind, I, along with parent advocacy groups, pushed the DOE to provide students with their lottery numbers so that families could adjust their expectations and strategize their lists to avoid being unmatched; in one Manhattan district last year, 18% of students did not receive an offer to a school on their list. I have been working on explaining the system to parents, and on crowdsourcing data to help parents estimate their student's odds of admissions at various schools:
*
Part 2 on their impacts on strategy: https://medium.com/p/42dd9a98b115
"*** MS admissions is purely lottery-based but geographically limited by district. HS admissions is city-wide. Some HS are allowed to screen students, but the screening is very coarse; this year 63% of students qualify in the top screening group, within the group admissions are decided by lottery numbers.
Monday, April 18, 2022
NYC plugs a school choice leak (of random numbers)
Some time ago, Esther Duflo likened market design to plumbing. I think she had in mind construction plumbing, making sure the pipes are all tight. But there's also maintenance (and home repair) plumbing, which involves plugging new leaks. Parag Pathak alerts me to such an issue in New York City's school choice system.
The NY Post has the story:
Parents uncover major glitch in NYC school lottery system By Susan Edelman
"A Manhattan mom discovered an embarrassing glitch in the city Department of Education lottery system used to match students with middle and high schools.
"When NYC students filled out their online applications for 2022-23, each kid automatically received a long string of random numbers from 0 to 9 mixed with lower-case letters from a to f.
"The random numbers are used to determine the order in which students are matched to programs.
"Lottery numbers starting with 0 are most likely to land students in a school at the top of their list – 8th graders can rank up to 12 preferred high schools.
...
"But as one 8th-grader’s mom figured out, if students canceled and re-started their applications – as the DOE permitted – they received a different lottery number each time. The loophole allowed users to potentially game the system by simply re-applying until a favorable lottery number popped up.
"Parent leaders alerted the DOE’s Chief Enrollment Officer, Sarah Kleinhandler, who was unaware of the snafu and promised to look into it. She did.
...
"The DOE said it was able to identify 163 students who received new lottery numbers – less than 1 percent of applicants. They included 121 students out of 71,000 high-school applicants, and 42 students out of 58,000 middle school applicants, a spokesman said.
"Students who received new lottery numbers after restarting their applications will get their first lottery numbers back, a spokeswoman told The Post."
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Speaking of home repairs, here's an earlier post about some self inflicted problems:
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Thursday, April 29, 2021
NYC to stop prosecuting prostitutes (but will continue to prosecute their customers)
NYC will stop prosecuting prostitution, but will continue to prosecute the customers of prostitutes, and pimps.
The NY Times has the story:
Manhattan to Stop Prosecuting Prostitution, Part of Nationwide Shift. By Jonah E. Bromwich
"The Manhattan district attorney’s office announced Wednesday that it would no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage, putting the weight of one of the most high-profile law enforcement offices in the United States behind the growing movement to change the criminal justice system’s approach to sex work.
"The district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., asked a judge on Wednesday morning to dismiss 914 open cases involving prostitution and unlicensed massage, along with 5,080 cases in which the charge was loitering for the purposes of prostitution.
"The law that made the latter charge a crime, which had become known as the “walking while trans” law, was repealed by New York State in February.
...
"Criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer, and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers,” Mr. Vance said in a statement.
"The office will continue to prosecute other crimes related to prostitution, including patronizing sex workers, promoting prostitution and sex trafficking, and said that its policy would not stop it from bringing other charges that stem from prostitution-related arrests.
"That means, in effect, that the office will continue to prosecute pimps and sex traffickers, as well as people who pay for sex, continuing to fight those who exploit or otherwise profit from prostitution without punishing the people who for decades have borne the brunt of law enforcement’s attention."
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Selective NYC high schools aren't as hard to get into as is sometimes reported: Sam Abrams in the Columbia Journalism Review
In the Columbia Journalism Review, Sam Abrams explains how data from NYC's deferred acceptance algorithm for assigning students to schools is often misunderstood in the press, when it comes to reporting on how selective the schools are.
Getting Education Data Right: The Case of High School Admissions By Samuel E. Abrams
"The trouble with the story about high school admissions begins with official data. The admissions numbers in the annual high school directories published by New York City’s Department of Education are indeed alarming. Eight consecutive schools in the 2019 directory, for example, exhibited daunting odds: Bard High School Early College, 30 applicants per seat; Baruch College Campus High School, 44; Beacon High School, 19; Business of Sports School (BOSS), 13; Central Park East High School, 37; Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, 14; City College Academy of the Arts, 22; and The Clinton School, 21. These odds translate into acceptance rates ranging from 2.3 percent, in the case of Baruch, to 7.7 percent, in the case of BOSS.
"But these students are not applicants in the conventional sense. They are students who rank a school by order of preference as one of up to 12 with which they would like to match. This process—introduced in 2004 and derived from the National Resident Matching Program for doctors introduced in 1952—employs an algorithm allowing only one match. Accordingly, if every eighth-grader in New York City exercised his or her right to list 12 schools, each school, on average, could in turn accept only one of 12 students, or 8.3 percent of applicants.
...
"I began encountering this reporting problem in 2005, when the Times published an article on then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to create several new high schools to address the surplus demand for seats in exam and screened schools. The Times reported that Beacon had 6,000 applicants for 250 seats the previous year, meaning an acceptance rate of 4.2 percent.
"As a teacher at Beacon at the time, I knew the admissions process from the inside and emailed a correction to the paper: 6,000 students ranked Beacon as one of up to 12 schools in which they were interested; about 1,800 students submitted the requisite portfolio of their best work and visited the school for the mandated interview; and approximately 500 offers were made to fill 250 seats. This meant an acceptance rate of about 28 percent if all 1,800 applicants ranked Beacon first, which is highly improbable, given that approximately 50 percent of applicants to Beacon today who fulfill application requirements rank the school first. But that correction went nowhere, and I resigned myself to explaining the numbers to anxious parents fretting that their children had no chance of getting into Beacon given what they had read in the Times.
...
"Following the 2017 article about 10 of the city’s high schools being more selective than Yale, I wrote a letter to the Times. As that letter went unacknowledged and as the newspaper did not run another letter to elucidate the process, I published a critique on the Web site of a research center I run at Teachers College, Columbia University. That critique led to an article published by Chalkbeat and another by Phi Delta Kappan, which interviewed Alvin Roth, a professor at Stanford who shared the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for work decades earlier on market design and who, with two other economists, Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak, developed the algorithm used by the DOE. Roth explained that the Times had indeed greatly exaggerated the number of applicants because the algorithm pulled students from the applicant pool once they were matched. “If I applied to you as my seventh choice, and I got accepted by my first choice, I wasn’t rejected by you,” Roth said. “You never saw me.”
"With a matching algorithm, the closest one can truly get to an acceptance rate is a match rate through adding the number of students who matched with a particular school to the number of students who matched with a school they ranked lower than that school and then dividing the number of matches by that sum.
...
"What is nevertheless certain is that the algorithm developed by Roth with Abdulkadiroglu and Pathak has significantly streamlined the enrollment process in New York. The three economists developed the algorithm, they wrote in a 2005 article published in the American Economic Review, to “relieve the congestion of the previous offer/acceptance/wait-list process” that conferred “some students multiple offers” and “multiple students … no offers.:
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
New York State's new surrogacy law takes effect
NBC has the story:
No Longer an Outlier: New York Ends Commercial Surrogacy Ban. New York's longstanding ban on commercial surrogate pregnancy is about to end nine years after a bill to rescind it was first introduced. By David Crary
"Instead of being a national outlier, New York will become a leader, according to experts on surrogacy . They say the new law, passed in April and taking effect on Monday, has a surrogates’ bill of rights providing the nation’s strongest protections for women serving as surrogates.
"Among the provisions: the right to independent legal representation, a guarantee of comprehensive medical coverage, and the right to make their own health care decisions, including whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy.
“We went to California because it had the best laws,” Hoylman said. “Now New York has the best law. We think it’s a model for other states.”
"The new law allows gestational surrogacy on a commercial basis, involving a surrogate who is not genetically related to the embryo. An egg is removed from the intended mother, fertilized with sperm and then transferred to a surrogate — in contrast to so-called traditional surrogacy that involves an egg from the surrogate. The gestational option is welcomed by many LGBTQ people who want to be parents, as well as by couples struggling with infertility.
"With the change in New York, surrogacy advocates say only Louisiana and Michigan have laws explicitly prohibiting paid gestational surrogacy. Nebraska has no explicit ban, but a statute there says paid surrogacy contracts are unenforceable.
...
"Gestational surrogacy routinely costs between $100,000 and $150,000. Hoylman declined to estimate the total costs incurred by him and Sigal but said, “It was worth every penny.”
"Among the standard costs are fees for lawyers and the surrogacy agency, the cost of in vitro fertilization, plus compensation and health insurance for the surrogate. Compensation rates vary widely — generally $25,000 to $50,000.
"The first bill seeking to repeal the New York ban was introduced by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin in 2012, the year Hoylman was elected to the Senate. It floundered for years in the face of staunch opposition by the Roman Catholic Church and some feminists, who argued that paid surrogacy led to the exploitation of women.
“Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others,” renowned feminist Gloria Steinem wrote to lawmakers in 2019.
"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who earlier in his tenure pushed hard to legalize same-sex marriage, argued in response that the surrogacy ban was “based in fear, not love” and was especially harmful to same-sex couples."
HT: Nick Arnosti.
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Here's a related story from the NY Times:
Meet the Women Who Become Surrogates. New York State will now allow gestational surrogates to carry babies for other parents. Here’s why they do it. By David Dodge
"In 1995, Lisa Wippler, having recently retired from the Marines, moved with her husband and two young sons to Oceanside, Calif., and was contemplating her next chapter in life. The answer came while lying in bed one night, reading an article about infertility.
...
"Last year, Ms. Wippler — by this point a three-time surrogate herself — was part of a delegation of surrogacy advocates who traveled to Albany, where she had the opportunity to share her story with lawmakers considering whether to legalize the practice in New York State.
...
"In her advocacy work, Ms. Wippler said, she has been befuddled to hear the arguments put forward by opponents — some of whom contend the surrogacy industry preys on poor and vulnerable women.
“I’m a retired Marine,” she said. “I can guarantee you no one coerced me.”
...
"A surrogate’s compensation varies by a number of factors, including geographic location and whether she is a first time or experienced carrier. At the Los Angeles-based agency where Ms. Wippler now works as the director of surrogate admission, the range falls between $30,000 and $60,000, which is typical across the industry in the United States, she said."
**************
Earlier post:
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Confusion in NYC high school wait lists
Here's a current story from Chalkbeat that suggests that the details are still opaque, but that families are learning that the waitlist position they were given isn't reliable:
‘How can you move back on a waiting list?’: NYC’s high school admissions tweaks spark confusion
By Alex Zimmerman May 8, 2020
"students vying for the city’s most coveted schools are discovering that their position on high school waitlists can worsen over time, a situation that has come as a surprise to some families — adding anxiety to an admissions process that is already famous for its complexity.
...
"Every student who fills out an application and does not get into their top choice is automatically waitlisted. If you get your third choice school, for example, you’ll be on the waitlist for your No. 1 and 2 choices. Nearly 44,000 students did not get into their first choice high school this year, automatically placing them on at least one waitlist.
"The second way is that students can add themselves to any waitlist once the initial matching process is over, even for schools a student didn’t initially apply to.
"In general, students who initially applied to a school but didn’t get in and are automatically added to its waitlist should be ranked ahead of students who add themselves later on, officials said. But there are exceptions.
"The first major exception is if a student is in a higher priority group than someone who is already on the waitlist. Some schools, for instance, give preference to students who live in certain neighborhoods, which can override a student’s position on the waitlist even if they were added first. (Officials said this is the most common reason a student would see their position worsen.)
"Olga Ramos, the admissions director at Bard High School Early College Queens, pointed to a second reason families can move backward — something that surprised her at first.
"If a student got into their first choice school, and listed Bard as their second choice, they could still add themselves to Bard’s waitlist and be considered as if they had been automatically added — potentially bypassing students who were already on the list."
*********
Here's an earlier story in Chalkbeat by Mr. Zimmerman, indicating that the system was still pretty opaque as the school choice process got ready to announce admissions in March:
NYC high school offers are coming this week with a big change: waitlists. Here’s what you should know. By Alex Zimmerman Mar 18, 2020
Here's what was known then...
"What are these waitlists, anyway?
Here's a story from the time of the initial announcement:
Goodbye round two applications, hello waitlists: NYC announces changes to high school admissions
By Christina Veiga and Alex Zimmerman Aug 15, 2019
"Starting next year, the city will allow students to sit on waiting lists for schools they wanted to attend, but didn’t get into. The city is also eliminating the second round of admissions, which it now uses to for students who aren’t matched to a school they applied to during the typical process.
...
"“It’s like going to a store and getting the ticket, you know what number you are, and you know how many folks are ahead of you, and you’ll be able to watch the process go,” said Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack. “You’ll also be able to talk with an administrator in a school who can give you a sense of how much waitlists move each year and that varies a bit by school.”
*****
I'm still confused about a different issue that I haven't yet seen addressed. In the original school choice system using the deferred acceptance algorithm, there was a second round in which students unmatched in the first round were asked for additional preferences over schools, so that they could be matched. How were those unmatched students assigned to schools this year?
Here's my August post:
Friday, August 16, 2019
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Surrogacy finally becomes legal in New York
The New York Daily News had this account:
Good news for couples who want children and need a surrogate as N.Y. legalizes the process
By DENIS SLATTERY
"New York legalized paid gestational surrogacy Thursday as lawmakers approved a sweeping budget package containing the measure.
"Gay and infertile couples in the Empire State can now enter into a contract and pay a woman to carry a baby to term through in-vitro fertilization.
"Gov. Cuomo made the measure a priority over the past year and a half as New York remained one of only three states that explicitly banned the practice.
"Pushback from an unlikely combination of religious organizations and women’s groups concerned about the potential exploitation of surrogates, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, preceded the bill’s failure to gain enough support in the Assembly during the last legislative session.Assemblywoman Amy Paulin (D-Scrasdale), who first introduced a bill to lift the ban back in 2012, applauded the inclusion in the budget.
“Today, we bring New York law in line with the needs of modern families, while simultaneously enacting the strongest protections in the nation for surrogates," she said.
...
"The measure also streamlines the “second-parent adoption” process by requiring only a single visit to court to recognize legal parenthood while the child is in utero. Once all of the requirements set forth in the law are met, the intended parents can seek an “Order of Parentage” from a court, which becomes effective immediately upon birth."
***********
Here's an earlier post, about the complicated coalitions involved in last year's failure to pass the bill
Friday, June 21, 2019 Surrogacy in NY...remains complicated
***********Here's a link to and snippets of the new statute itself:
TITLE OF BILL: An act to amend the family court act, in relation to
establishing the child-parent security act; and to repeal section 73 and
article 8 of the domestic relations law, relating to legitimacy of chil-
dren born by artificial insemination and surrogate parenting contracts
PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL:
To legally establish a child's relationship to his or her parents where
the child was conceived through third party reproduction including those
children born through gestational surrogacy arrangements.
...
"JUSTIFICATION:
New York law has failed to keep pace with medical advances in assisted
reproduction, causing uncertainty about who the legal parents of a child
are upon birth. In many cases, the parentage of children created through
donated sperm, eggs and embryos is unsettled or open to attack at the
time of the child's birth and thereafter. Confusion or uncertainty
regarding the parental rights of donors and intended parents (both
genetic and non-genetic) who participate in the conception of the child
through assisted reproduction is detrimental to the child and secure
family relations. Where children are born to a gestational carrier the
parentage of the intended parents may not be recognized under current
law. This is not only detrimental to the child; it also causes confusion
in many critical situations. For example, a hospital does not know who
must give consent when a newborn requires medical procedures.
"The Child Parent Security Act will provide clear and decisive legal
procedures to ensure that children born through third party reproduction
have secure and legally recognized parental relationships with their
intended parents.The law will make it clear that donors do not have
parental rights or obligations and that those rights and obligations
reside with the Intended Parents.
"Importantly, this legislation lifts the ban on surrogacy contracts to
permit enforceable gestational carrier agreements and sets forth the
criteria for such agreements. When all of the requirements set forth in
the law are met, the intended parents can seek an "Order of Parentage"
from a court, prior to the birth of the child, which becomes effective
immediately upon birth. The requirements are designed to ensure that all
parties enter into the agreement on an equal footing and with full know-
ledge of their duties and obligations. For example, all parties must be
represented by independent legal counsel, and the agreement may not
limit the right of the carrier to make her own healthcare decisions.
"Because of existing New York laws, couples facing infertility and same-
sex couples are forced to go out of state in order to have a child with
the assistance of a gestational carrier. This is overly burdensome to
the parents, who have often struggled for many years to have a child.
Having an out-of-state gestational carrier may make it difficult, if not
impossible, for the parents to fully participate in the pregnancy by
attending doctor's appointments, etc. It also requires the participants
to use out-of-state clinics and medical professionals despite the fact
that New York is home to world-class medical facilities and fertility
professionals.
"New York appellate courts have repeatedly called upon the Legislature to
act to provide much needed clarity to the essential question of who is a
parent. The need to answer that call is more important today than ever
as increasing numbers of children are being conceived and born through
third party reproduction. The Child-Parent Security Act clarifies the
issue of who is a parent and establishes clear legal procedures which
ensure that each child's relationship to his or her parent(s) is legally
recognized from birth. As the New York Court of Appeals held in Brooke
S.B. v Elizabeth A.C.0 biology and adoption are not the only touchstones
to determine parentage. The Child Parent Security Act provides a frame-
work for determining the parentage of the large number of children
unprotected under existing New York state law.
...
PART 5
34 PAYMENT TO DONORS AND GESTATIONAL CARRIERS
35 Section 581-501. Reimbursement.
36 581-502. Compensation.
37 § 581-501. Reimbursement. (a) A donor who has entered into a valid
38 agreement to be a donor, may receive reimbursement from an intended
39 parent for economic losses incurred in connection with the donation
40 which result from the retrieval or storage of gametes or embryos.
41 (b) Premiums paid for insurance against economic losses directly
42 resulting from the retrieval or storage of gametes or embryos for
43 donation may be reimbursed.
44 § 581-502. Compensation. (a) Compensation may be paid to a donor or
45 gestational carrier based on services rendered, expenses and or medical
46 risks that have been or will be incurred, time, and inconvenience. Under
47 no circumstances may compensation be paid to purchase gametes or embryos
48 or to pay for the relinquishment of a parental interest in a child.
49 (b) The compensation, if any, paid to a donor or gestational carrier
50 must be reasonable and negotiated in good faith between the parties, and
51 said payments to a gestational carrier shall not exceed the duration of
52 the pregnancy and recuperative period of up to eight weeks after the
53 birth of the child.
54 (c) Compensation may not be conditioned upon the purported quality or
55 genome-related traits of the gametes or embryos.
A. 6959--A 12
1 (d) Compensation may not be conditioned on actual genotypic or pheno-
2 typic characteristics of the donor or of the child.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Teaching online: Singapore, NYC react to Zoombombing of online classes
Here's the Singapore story from the Guardian:
Singapore bans teachers using Zoom after hackers post obscene images on screens
‘Very serious incidents’ have forced suspension from online schools as conferencing app faces renewed questions over security
"Singapore has suspended the use of video-conferencing tool Zoom by teachers after “very serious incidents” in the first week of a coronavirus lockdown that has seen schools move to home-based learning.
"One incident involved obscene images appearing on screens and male strangers making lewd comments during the streaming of a geography lesson with teenage girls, media reports said."
**********
Here's the NYC story from CNN:
New York City schools won't be using Zoom anymore because of security concerns
By Nicole Chavez and Sarah Jorgensen
"Schools in New York City are moving away from using the video conference app Zoom after a review of security concerns.
...
"The department does not have a central contract with Zoom, Filson said, and students and staff will be transitioning to Microsoft Teams, which has "the same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place."
"Earlier this week, federal officials began warning of a new potential privacy and security concern called "Zoombombing."
...
"Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom, apologized to the video conferencing app's users for the privacy issues earlier this week, saying his team will stop adding new features for the next 90 days and instead focus solely on addressing privacy issues.
...
"Yuan said over 90,000 schools across 20 countries have been using the platform for online teaching since the company offered its services free of charge to schools because of the Covid-19 pandemic."
Friday, April 10, 2020
Clearinghouses are hard to organize in a hurry: volunteer medical workers in NYC
The NY Times has the story:
Volunteers Rushed to Help New York Hospitals. They Found a Bottleneck.
When New York called for volunteers to help fight the coronavirus, 90,000 people responded. The hard part? Getting them into hospitals.
"Ms. Strickland, a former pediatric intensive care unit nurse in High Point, N.C., spent hours trying to submit her volunteer application online, and then emailed city and state representatives. She never heard back.
"Frustrated, she reached out directly to Mount Sinai Queens hospital in New York City. A manager told her to use a private recruiting agency, which the hospital had used for years to bring in temporary staff.
"Within two days, Ms. Strickland, 47, received her assignment. She started this week in the hospital’s emergency department, making about $3,800 a week for three 12-hour shifts instead of doing it for free, as she had initially wanted.
...
"As of Wednesday, more than 90,000 retired and active health care workers had signed up online to volunteer at the epicenter of the pandemic, including 25,000 from outside New York, the governor’s office said.
...
"New York City hospitals have only deployed 908 volunteers as of Wednesday, according to city health officials.
"The urgent need for medical personnel is colliding head-on with the immovable bureaucracy of hospital regulations
...
"State officials said the volunteer portal, which was built from scratch, was initially overwhelmed by the response, but has since connected about 10,000 volunteers to hospitals in New York State within two weeks.
...
"The challenge of screening so many medical workers has opened an opportunity for the dozens of established private agencies that place temporary nurses and doctors at hospitals nationwide
...
"The staffing agencies, an $18 billion industry, say that unlike the state, they already have the technology and infrastructure in place to quickly check credentials for health professionals. In normal times, hospitals hire them to fill short-term staffing needs, such as during a regular flu season.
“As great as it is that the state is trying to help, it’s a very complex process to staff a clinician,” said Alexi Nazem, chief executive of Nomad Health, a health recruiting agency based in New York. “There are dozens of documents to verify. Our company has spent years building those systems.”
...
"New York City’s public hospitals had used private recruiters to bring in about 3,600 new medical workers as of late last week and were seeking to hire 3,600 more, according to the mayor and a city spokesman.
"One of those recruiting agencies, NuWest Group, began contracting with the city less than two weeks ago. Since then, the agency has secured hundreds of nurses and respiratory therapists for city hospitals, with some positions paying more than $10,000 a week, a spokeswoman for the agency said.
"Agencies, who negotiate the rates with hospitals, say that without the high pay, there would not be enough qualified clinicians willing to take jobs at the front lines
...
"Hospital staff members say they are grateful for any reinforcements, but some residents and nurses have expressed frustration over the pay disparities."
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Aiming for diversity in Brooklyn schools
What happened when Brooklyn tried to integrate its middle schools By Laura Meckler
"New York City, with more than 1 million students, is far and away the nation’s largest school district — and one of its most segregated. Resistance to integration dates to the 1950s, when mothers in Queens staged an early demonstration against busing.
"Now, in fits and starts, the city is becoming a laboratory of experimentation, examining whether it’s possible to tackle the stratification that courses through urban districts.
"First, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) tried — and has so far failed — to overhaul the admissions process for eight elite specialized high schools, which admit few black or Hispanic students. He is now considering a recommendation for a citywide plan to eliminate most gifted and talented programs, which attract a disproportionate number of white and Asian students.
...
"Under the old system, criteria set by each school played a big role in deciding who went where. Certain middle schools required high test scores and excellent behavior ratings from elementary school, and affluent families gravitated to them. Over time, various schools won reputations for excellence, and with each passing year, their incoming classes grew whiter and wealthier.
...
"Under the new plan, family preference still matters, but 52 percent of sixth-grade seats at each school are reserved for children from poor families or for those learning English, reflecting the demographics of the district as a whole. The city’s goal is for each school to include 40 percent to 75 percent priority-group students by the program’s fourth year.
...
"This sort of plan is possible only because a significant number of middle-class and wealthy families live in the area covered by the integration plan, Kahlenberg said. If there are too many poor kids, he said, meaningful integration is not possible. By Kahlenberg’s calculations, integration is possible in nine of the city’s 32 school districts.
Others caution that it won’t work anywhere if affluent parents leave the public schools. When Mike Bloomberg was mayor, he worked to attract and keep these families by giving them considerable control over school placement. If you take that power away, these parents may choose private schools or to move, said Joel Klein, schools chancellor under Bloomberg.
“If you look at many urban school districts, you will find they are overwhelmingly minority because the middle class has already moved out,” Klein said."
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
NYC school choice: long lines for high school tours (and some confusion about first choices)
The NY Times has a story about long lines forming for tours of a desirable public high school:
Why White Parents Were at the Front of the Line for the School Tour
The high stakes of high school admissions in New York — and the lengths some go to get any small advantage. By Eliza Shapiro
"Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.
"On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.
"Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.
...
"Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place."
**********
The story goes on to talk about the matching system for high schools, which uses a deferred acceptance algorithm. Parag Pathak points out to me that one paragraph contains a sentence that is easy to interpret incorrectly:
"Beacon, unlike Stuyvesant, does not have an admissions test. But to win a spot, students must have high standardized test scores and grades, along with a strong portfolio of middle school work and admissions essays. Students are much less likely to be accepted if they do not list Beacon as their top choice." (emphasis added)
Parag writes about this line: "while factually correct, the statement creates a misleading impression: a student is only less likely to get Beacon if they didn't list it as their top choice in the case that they were assigned their first choice school instead. And most people who apply to Beacon list it first because it's their top choice. "
The manner in which the deferred acceptance algorithm (with students proposing) makes it safe for families to state their true preferences can be summarized this way: If you list Beacon as your second choice, and don't get your first choice, then your chance of admission to Beacon is the same as if you had listed it as your first choice.
Of course, even with that guarantee, a family's choice may not be simple if they would have liked to rank order 15 schools, and are only allowed to list 12. Then they have to consider whether, if they are rejected by their first choice, they are likely to be accepted by Beacon, or whether rejection from their first choice is a signal that they might not be competitive at Beacon either. (In which case, listing Beacon as first choice wouldn't have helped...)
See my recent post: