Charting a course to integration
According to a 2014 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, New York City’s schools are the most segregated in the entire nation. To fix this problem, we need to set aside petty squabbles and work together. To date, progress has been excruciatingly slow. A highly publicized rezoning of two Upper West Side schools, Public School 191 and Public School 199, took 14 exhausting months of controversy, revisions and delay.
But while efforts to desegregate district schools have been highly contentious, more than a dozen diverse charter schools have opened up in recent years with little controversy or fanfare.
Concededly, charters came late to the integration party. Our excuse is that we’d been focusing on serving the most disadvantaged students. However, we’ve come to recognize that our students would benefit even more from learning amid diversity, and we have an obligation to help fix the problem of public-school segregation.
Thus, in 2011, Success Academy, which I run, made its first deliberate effort to address this issue by opening a school on the Upper West Side. Today, its student body is a model of diversity: 15% African-American, 35% white, 30% Hispanic, 10% Asian, 10% multiracial and 44% economically disadvantaged.
In 2011, the city had only five multiracial charter schools; today, it has 28, an increase of more than 400%. In this same period, the number of multiracial district schools has increased by just 4% and the total enrollment in such schools has actually decreased.
Charter schools are actually better positioned to integrate than district schools. First, while district schools typically have small attendance zones that reflect class and race divisions and are politically difficult to alter once set, charter schools admit students by lottery from entire community school districts.
Second, while district school systems often seek to achieve integration by forcing families to send their children to less preferred schools, charter schools do so by offering parents additional choices.
Some integration proponents are skeptical charters can contribute; they think integration can only be achieved through a centralized system. That just isn’t true. Voluntary integration can succeed.
Success Academy Upper West attracts students who are zoned for some of the city’s most desirable schools, including 73 applications in 2015 from families zoned for PS 199, the vaunted elementary school at the center of that recent integration battle.
Indeed, many families who send their children to our schools could afford private school tuition without breaking a sweat. Children whose parents are surgeons, law-firm partners and hedge-fund managers learn alongside the children of postal workers and moms who work double shifts.
Charter schools could do more to advance integration if the city didn’t fight us at every turn. One of the biggest obstacles we face is the cost of real estate in diverse neighborhoods. We therefore depend upon the city to assign us space in underutilized school buildings.
Mayor de Blasio, however, has consistently dragged his feet in doing so. In fact, even before he became mayor, he was one of the most vocal opponents of our Upper West Side school, claiming that in giving us space, the city was being “deaf to the priorities and needs of the community.” It’s time to make integration a priority.
Consider Success’ Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, school. It’s a model of diversity: About a quarter of the students are white, a third are Hispanic, a third are African-American, and more than half are from low-income households, a level of diversity virtually unheard of in surrounding schools. At the Brooklyn School for Global Studies, with which we share a building, 4% of the students are white and 85% are economically disadvantaged; at Public School 29, a school just four blocks west, 74% of the students are white and only 10% are economically disadvantaged.
Our Cobble Hill school now needs space for a middle school. Given District 15’s tale of two school systems, you’d think the de Blasio administration would jump at the chance to help.
The city, however, is insisting on putting our school in a building more than two miles beyond District 15’s borders, a move that threatens to destabilize our school’s fragile community.
Attacking school segregation requires all hands on deck. We in the charter sector must move beyond our traditional comfort zone, serving disadvantaged students, and meet the demands of parents who have other high quality options.
As for the city, while the mayor and schools chancellor no doubt have good intentions, sometimes the first step in solving a problem is admitting you can’t do it all yourself. If the city treated us as allies in the fight against segregation, charter schools could create tens of thousands of new seats in racially and socioeconomically diverse schools in coming years.