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Every fall, Scott Conti, principal of New Design High School in Lower Manhattan, faces the same challenge: absorbing a new cohort of students, many of whom didn't pass the state's math and reading exams in eighth grade.

Last year, of more than 100 incoming ninth-graders, only six who had taken the eighth-grade math test had passed. Only 15 had passed English.

Less than a mile away, there's another school where the majority of ninth-graders passed the same exams - often with flying colors. And that school, New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math or NEST+m, is not alone: Dozens of city high schools have large concentrations ofstudents who sailed through middle school.

The difference: New Design has little control over the students it admits, while NEST+m picks students based on test results and previous academic success.

"When the school opened, I don't think we quite got how the admission policy would define us," Conti said.

Indeed, high school admissions rules have placed New Design - and its students - in a system of staggering academic segregation. A small percentage of schools drain off the top students, leaving the majority of schools with very few students entering on grade-level.

A Chalkbeat analysis found that over half the students who took and passed the eighth-grade state math exam in 2015 wound up clustered in less than 8 percent of city high schools. The same was true for those who passed the English exam.

Meanwhile, nearly 165 of the city's roughly 440 high schools had five or fewer ninth-graders who took and passed the state math test in 2015. (Some students take algebra in eighth grade, so do not have to take the eighth-grade test.)

When it comes to English, the trend is similar, though less severe: There are 79 schools where five or fewer of last year's ninth-graders had passed the eighth-grade test.

The city is engaged in a robust conversation about racial segregation in elementary school, which is driven largely by housing patterns. Yet high schools - which are open to students from every corner of the city - have maintained a parallel system of privilege by using academic "screens" instead of geography.

"Academic screens are a mechanism for sorting the students who have had educational privilege into places where they continue to get educational privilege," said Megan Moskop, high school admissions coordinator at M.S. 324 in Washington Heights "And the students who don't have that privilege continue not to have it."

***

The city has long maintained some schools for very high achievers, including Stuyvesant High School, which started admitting students based on a test in the early 1900s. But between 2002 and 2009, there was a dramatic growth in the options available exclusively to high-scoring students.

In 2002, the year Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office embracing a platform of school choice, only 15.8 percent of school programs screened students for academic success, according to numbers provided by Sean Corcoran of NYU Steinhardt. By 2009, that share had increased to 28.4 percent. (Some schools house multiple programs with different admissions methods.)

The era marked an "under-the-radar explosion of screened schools," said David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

At the same time the city whittled down the number of high schools designed to enroll students with different ability levels. In 2002, 55.4 percent of city high school programs were what's called "educational option," meaning they are set up to serve specific portions of high-achieving, low-achieving and average students. ( In practice, few do.) By 2009, that share had dropped to 27.7 percent, according to Corcoran's numbers.

The perils of screening have long been known. A team of researchers warned the city back in 1986 about some of the problems that remain in place today.

In 1986, then-New York City schools chancellor Nathan Quinones convened a group of researchers to examine high school admissions. The group, tasked with increasing access for students and maintaining school quality, warned explicitly against screened programs.

"As a general principle there should be no screened programs," the report reads.

The report also argues against interviews, tests developed by schools, placement based on residence, and admissions credit for those who attend open houses. The goal was to avoid "invalid and/or biased admissions criteria." Yet all of those admissions practices are commonplace in the high school admissions system today.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration has recognized these problems and started chipping away at them. The city is not interested in approving new screened programs, city officials said, and has reduced the number of seats in screened schools by 500 since 2015, a roughly 2.5 percent decrease in the percentage of screened seats. Officials also increased the number of educational option seats by 14 percent since 2015.

Additionally, many of de Blasio's education initiatives have focused on strengthening high school curriculum and ensuring all students have access to advanced coursework.

"The work of fostering academic diversity goes hand-in-hand with our Equity and Excellence for All agenda to strengthen all our schools," said education department spokesman Will Mantell.

Still, roughly a third of school programs today are either academically "screened" or require an audition. Floyd Hammack, a retired New York University researcher who worked on the 1986 report, said he sees echoes of the situation his team was trying to address.

For him, today's high school landscape is like a bad flashback. "All this does, ultimately, is make people think that the system is a game that they've got to figure out how to play."

***

The depth of academic screening in the city is eye-popping. Proficient students are concentrated in screened schools - which admit students based on tests, auditions, or prior academic performance - and at large comprehensive high schools, many of which set aside seats for high-achievers.

But there are fewer large high schools than in the past. Most of today's schools are smaller, and may have few, if any, ninth-graders reading and performing math on grade-level.

City officials did not dispute Chalkbeat's findings, but noted that about 18,000 eighth-graders took algebra in 2015 and since some of them skip the math exam, that muddies the statistics. (Those students are missing from the data as eighth-grade test takers, but it stands to reason they are also more likely to be enrolled in selective schools, meaning the general conclusions would likely hold.)

The city also said looking at the schools that enroll the most passers can be misleading, since those schools also enroll a disproportionate share of the city's total students. Roughly a third of last year's ninth-graders were in the schools Chalkbeat identified as home to more than half the city's total English and math passers.

Still, the vast majority of students are not in those top schools.

The city's intense academic stratification has consequences for student learning, explained Halley Potter, a researcher at the Century Foundation, a think tank focused on reducing inequality. Students in poor-performing schools often contend with ill-prepared teachers, lower expectations, and more behavioral issues, Potter said.

"When you sum up all of those studies, you see a really clear pattern that low-level tracks have harmful effects for students," Potter said.

On the flip side, a number of studies, though not all, have indicated that mixing academic levels does not harm high-achievers. Potter pointed to a review of 15 studies conducted between 1972 and 2006 that showed that sorting students by ability level had virtually no effect, positive or negative, on average or high-ability students.

Alexander White, principal of Gotham Professional Arts Academy, had fewer than five incoming ninth-graders last year who passed their math or English exams the year before. He said he understands exactly why it's so important to have a diverse mix of students. Imagine a class conversation about whether to keep the electoral college, White said. Having even a few high-performing students to guide the conversation could make all the difference, he said.

"Peer-to-peer education is like the secret ingredient in raising student achievement," White said.

The stratification also means that many students are effectively shut out of top-tier schools. Just ask Gloria Carrasquillo, the guidance counselor at J.H.S. 151 Lou Gehrig, a school in the Bronx.

Each year, parents of eighth-grade students come into her office hoping to get their children into schools that send a high percentage of graduates to college. But Carrasquillo often has to break the news that there are few of those schools available to them, usually because their children don't have the grades to qualify for screened schools.

"They don't have the opportunity because they are blocked," Carrasquillo said. "They are not admitted, so they cannot prove they can do better."

Clara Hemphill, editor of the school-review website Insideschools, sees several problems with the current system.

Students in schools with mainly low-achieving peers may find there is no advanced coursework available to them, Hemphill said. Thirty-nine percent of the city's high schools do not offer a standard college-prep curriculum in math and science, and more than half do not offer a single Advanced Placement course in math, according to a 2015 study by the New School's Center for New York City Affairs.

The system also locks individual students into schools based on their seventh-grade grades and test scores, since that year is factored into high school admissions. That means there's no second chance for a student to blossom academically in high school.

"I would hate to have my future determined by how I did in seventh grade," Hemphill said.

***

While the city is trying to expand course offerings, including by allowing students on certain shared campuses to merge for Advanced Placement classes, other problems are more deeply entrenched.

At the top of the list: School screening has a long history of segregating students by race and income. Higher-income, Asian and white students are more likely to pass standardized exams than their low-income black and Hispanic peers.

While 25 percent of all city eighth-graders passed the state math exam in 2016, for instance, only 13.2 percent of black students and 15.9 percent of Hispanic students did. In English, 40.5 percent of all city eighth-graders passed the test, but only 29.2 percent of black students and 30.7 of Hispanic students passed.

The city's most elite schools - the specialized high schools where admission is based on a single test - have come under fire for having few students of color. Only 4 percent of specialized school offers went to black students this year and just over 6 percent went to Hispanic students, though roughly 70 percent of the city's student body is black and Hispanic.

But other screened schools reflect similar inequities, said Matt Gonzales, school diversity project director for New York Appleseed and an advocate for school integration. Any type of screen, whether it is a test, audition, or a look at previous academic history, will end up disadvantaging low-income students and students of color, he said.

Gonzales said high schools should be part of the citywide conversation about diversity, and that he hopes when the city unveils a large-scale plan to promote desegregation - which officials said they plan to do by June - it will include some measures geared toward integrating high schools. One of those measures, he said, could be further reducing the number of screened schools.

Screens "are designed to privilege and preference white and middle-class students," Gonzales said. "If we're just thinking about it plainly, screens are a function of exclusion for black and brown and low-income kids."

Conti, the principal of New Design High School, knows firsthand that clustering higher- and lower-achieving students makes it harder for schools like his to succeed. He loves working with his students, but gets no extra support with the near-Herculean task of helping so many students entering the school below grade-level graduate on time.

Conti knows there are no easy answers. "It's horribly complex," he said. "It's a knot right now that's going to be very hard to untie."

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Great divide: How extreme academic segregation isolates students in New York City's high schools

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Every fall, Scott Conti, principal of New Design High School in Lower Manhattan, faces the same challenge: absorbing a new cohort of students, many of whom didn't pass the state's math and reading exams in eighth grade. Last year, of more than 100 incoming ninth-graders, only six who had taken the eighth-grade math test had passed.

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SchoolSearch is designed to enable parents and the public to more efficiently find and learn about schools. It incorporates an interactive user interface and expands the search capabilities to include searching by school name, address, district, and neighborhood.

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IntegrateNYC has joined with students across the country to form IntegrateUS. Over the Month of Mobilization from April 9 to May 11, we are working together to unite students in the name of integration. Follow us on social media @StillNotEqual to become part of the movement, sign the constitution and donate.

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We visit New York City public schools to give you the inside story you can't find anywhere else.

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Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation

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Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation: Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation by Matthew F. Delmont

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Education: Student-Made Film Against Standardized Testing

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Education: Student-Made Film Against Standardized Testing

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Hey everyone! Ankur here, I just wanted to let you all know that after months of work the documentary is now DONE and ready to be seen. Once again, I just wanted to thank everybody for their help and support this could not have happened without you.

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Education: How Detroit's Failing School System Affects Students

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Education: How Detroit's Failing School System Affects Students

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Attention shifted away from Detroit after it emerged from bankruptcy. For five high school students, life has moved on, sometimes in unexpected ways, as the city struggles to get back on its feet.

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Education: The Return of School Segregation and the Fight for Integration

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Education: The Return of School Segregation and the Fight for Integration

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In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate schools for black students and white students should be dismantled with "all deliberate speed." However, in recent decades, schools have re-segregated to the levels they were just after Brown. In this video, Atlantic education editor Alia Wong speaks to the U.S. Secretary of Education John King, Jr. about his new plan to integrate schools. King's policy changes will expand a system known as "school choice" that permits students to go to schools outside their neighborhoods and theoretically allows parents to voluntarily integrateschools. But, D.C. parent Natalie Hopkinson argues that schools will continue to re-segregate if the federal government does not intervene more forcefully. "As long as we rely on [parental] choice, we will continue to have the same result," she says. "White parents will not send their kids to schools unless they are already white."

About This Series

Voices and ideas about politics by The Atlantic

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In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate schools for black students and white students should be dismantled with "all deliberate speed." However, in recent decades, schools have re-segregated to the levels they were just after Brown. In this video, Atlantic education editor Alia Wong speaks to the U.S.

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Education: The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Public Schools

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Education: The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Public Schools

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Detroit Public Schools are in crisis. Dropout rates are twice the national average, schools are routinely failing health inspections, and the district is more than three and a half billion dollars in debt. In this short video, Atlantic associate editor Alia Wong traces the history of Detroit Public Schools-from a model for urban education at the turn of the century to a failing, debt-ridden system today. How did the school district decline so dramatically?

This video is based on the report,A School District in Crisis: Detroit's Public Schools 1842-2015.

About This Series

Original short documentaries produced by The Atlantic

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Daniel Lombroso, Alia Wong, and Michael Bloom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Detroit Public Schools are in crisis. Dropout rates are twice the national average, schools are routinely failing health inspections, and the district is more than three and a half billion dollars in debt. In this short video, Atlantic associate editor Alia Wong traces the history of Detroit Public Schools-from a model for urban education at the turn of the century to a failing, debt-ridden system today.

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, busing became a dirty word to parents of many school age children around the country, especially in the South. And no place attracted more attention than Charlotte, North Carolina, whose long fight over mandatory busing landed it in a closely-watched test case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The landmark 1971 ruling mandated that federal courts could impose a host of remedies, including busing, to force school integration in Charlotte, and opened the floodgates for busing students in hundreds of school districts across the country over the next decade.

On the face of it, busing seemed a logical solution to implementing the long overdue school desegregation promised by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education more than 15 years earlier. But implementation turned out to be anything but easy.

Some whites feared racial integration; others wondered what might happen to their kids when they were bused far from home. But blacks also were uncomfortable with the prospect. For many, their fight had always been more about long-denied education resources - money, teachers, books and facilities - than a desire to sit next to white children in schools way across town.

All of these fears played out in Charlotte as the nation watched. The nightly news and the newspapers led with stories of "race riots" where white and non-white students, mostly blacks back then, had suddenly been thrust together. There were bomb threats and vandalism at schools on opening day. The parents of many kids, mostly white students, chose to keep their children home.

Then something curious happened. Over time, by fits and starts, mandatory busing began to succeed in Charlotte. Young whites and young blacks worked things out, both in the classroom and out on the playing fields. Charlotte became a national darling in the drive to integrate, and a symbol of what was possible when people gave forced busing a chance.

But that's not where the story of busing ends. Retro Report took a look back at Charlotte's busing struggle, along with the nation's struggle at large, digging through research and interviewing some of those whose lives were shaped by this historic effort to make good on the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. What we found is both reassuring and disturbing at turns, and proof that the struggle for school equality is far from over.

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, busing became a dirty word to parents of many school age children around the country, especially in the South. And no place attracted more attention than Charlotte, North Carolina, whose long fight over mandatory busing landed it in a closely-watched test case before the U.S.