Learn to learn together
After years of walking on eggshells, Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña deserve credit for putting forward a concrete plan to diversify city public schools that remain, in far too many ways, intensely segregated. It sets clear numerical targets; it details a dozen helpful steps designed to curb the problem.
But it aims too low, and still sidesteps a headon reckoning with policies that, especially at the elementary level, keep far too many schools relatively homogeneous in a metropolis that is anything but.
New York City’s schools, which educate 1.1 million students, are badly Balkanized. Overall, the pupil population is 40% Hispanic, 26% black, 16% Asian and 15% white.
Yet just one third of schools qualify as what the Department of Education deems “racially representative” — meaning, where combined black and Hispanic populations make up at least 50% but no more than 90% of the student body. Mixing matters, and not for cosmetic reasons. Low-income students in integrated schools score far higher on tests than those isolated in schools serving only kids like them; they are less likely to drop out and likelier to go onto college.
And economic and racial stratification makes it that much easier for us, as a city, to consign schools that near-exclusively serve black and Latino populations to what a President once called the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Enter de Blasio, who has spent countless breaths decrying New York’s tale of two cities, but has until now allowed the tale of two or three or more school systems to persist.
The diversity plan he and Fariña released Tuesday at long last sets targets, which the city advertises as both ambitious and achievable: increasing the number of students in racially representative schools by 50,000 over the next five years; reducing the number of economically stratified schools by 10% within five years, and upping the number of schools that serve English Language Learners and students with disabilities.
Achievable? We damn well hope so. Ambitious? Not in the slightest.
Under the city’s definition, about 500 schools currently qualify as racially representative. Using a back-of-the-envelope average school population of 800, the city is committing to moving about 60 more into that column over five years — a mere dozen a year in a system of 1,800 schools.
And about that definition: Even in a predominantly black and Hispanic system, counting a school that’s as much as 90% black and Latino as racially representative feels wrong.
The report’s prescriptions are sound, as far as they go.
It’s smart to eliminate “limited unscreened” high school admissions, where students need to show up at an open house or visit a school’s table at a High School Fair to qualify. That unnecessarily complicates the admissions process to advantage two-parent families, among others.
De Blasio and Fariña also rightly commit to making the intimidatingly complex system of high-school choice far more accessible, and to taking a series of steps to diversify specialized high schools without doing away with the singletest ticket to entry.
What they don’t do is mandate broad and creative approaches, community school district by community school district, to make larger strides, including mixing kids more proactively based on family income, a system known as controlled choice.
Where there are wildly segregated schools in close proximity whose populations can easily be mixed, leaders ought to be boldly leading, not leaning back.