In a new Spotlight post at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, we summarize our recent work examining peer continuity from middle to high school in NYC. You can read my co-author Nick Mark’s summary tweet thread here.
NYC has over 700 high school programs in more than 450 schools, and a centralized application system in which students rank their most-preferred programs. To date we know relatively little about how peer groups change in the transition from middle to high school in a choice system like NYC’s. We find a remarkably low amount of peer continuity from middle to high school, and large differences in continuity by race and socioeconomic background. For example, 27% of Black 8th graders enter high school as the only student from their middle school, compared with only 7% of White 8th graders.
In our paper forthcoming in Educational Researcher we show that the lack of peer continuity in NYC can be linked to students’ own choices, not a lack of “getting what they want”. There remain a lot of open questions about whether and how peer continuity matters for students’ academic and social well-being.