The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we
review literature on the role of high schools in performance
in STEM fields and, in Section 3, we discuss the NYC
school system in more detail, including definitions of STEM
high schools, the high school choice system, and the
examinations that New York City students take (Regents
exams). In Section 4, we describe our data and, in Section 5,
we explain our models and methods. We discuss our
results in Section 6 and in Section 7, we conclude with
observations about policy at the high school level as it
concerns STEM performance.