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Educational attainment increasingly determines the opportunities open to young people. Although a few young people in metropolitan New York manage to find skilled blue collar jobs, often through family connections, most need a college degree to qualify for a position that offers a decent wage, benefits, and the possibility of advancement. One recent survey found that more than half the region’s businesses required more than a high school diploma for entry level positions. Higher levels of education also lead to greater earnings. According to the 2000 Census, regional workers with only a high school education had median annual earnings of only $14,000 in 1999, the year we began interviewing. Those with some college earned $10,700 more, but those with a BA earned $45,000. In short, getting a college degree is the most direct route to achieving a middle class standard of living. Our second generation and native born respondents faced a complex and differentiated system of primary and secondary schools and colleges. The 2000 Census indicates that just over a million students aged 6 through 18 enrolled in New York City public schools at the time of our study. They attended 1,350 schools staffed by 90,000 teachers. (The number of schools has grown since 2000, when the New York City Department of Education created charter schools and broke up many large, old high schools into smaller programs housed within the same buildings .) Another 245,000 New York City students enrolled in private primary and secondary schools. The Archdiocese of New York, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx as well as Westchester, operates 182 schools, 116 in low-income areas; the Brooklyn Archdiocese, which covers Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, has a similar number. Many families The School System as Sorting Mechanism I: What does it take to be successful? R: School. College. Because with a high school diploma, you can get a job, but you can’t get what you want and it’s a battle out there. In order to compete you have to have the material. west indian woman, age 25 5 133 are attracted to these parochial schools because of the schools’ better educational quality and discipline, not because of their own religious affiliation . Many parochial school teachers do not belong to a religious order, and about a quarter of the attending students are not Catholic. In the ten county region outside the city that served as our sampling area, 590,000 more young people are enrolled in public schools and 101,000 in private schools. Inevitably, these schools vary greatly in how well they prepare their students for the next level in the educational system. Since most of our second generation respondents grew up in New York City, we must consider its 872 elementary and middle schools. Unless parents can pay for private education—and even Catholic schools, generally less expensive than other private schools, cost about $5,000 a year—or “game the system” to get their children into better schools, their children attend neighborhood elementary and middle schools. Like the city’s high schools, the neighborhood schools have highly varied track records. In some, many pupils do not learn enough to perform at grade level when they reach high school. Primary school performance is closely associated with the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhoods the primary schools serve. In 2001, the share of elementary and middle school students performing at grade level in New York City ranged from only 26 percent in the South Bronx to 76 percent in the Bayside –Little Neck area of Queens (Mei, Bell-Ellwanger, and Miller 2002). After attending elementary and middle school, students in New York City or the inner city areas of Newark or Paterson must find a high school. Students in New York City may take the specialized high school test to enter one of nine selective high schools, some of which are harder to get into than Ivy League universities. (Some 26,000 students take this test, most seeking one of the 2,300 freshman class seats at Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and Stuyvesant high schools.) The programs at these schools attract high achievers with well-informed parents, and virtually all graduates of these high schools go to college, many to the nation’s best institutions. Few students who attend weak primary schools or whose parents are not attuned to getting them into these schools receive the preparation that helps many test-takers to score high enough to gain entry...

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