Go further, faster on integration
As the last school year was ending, Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced the city’s long-awaited plan to increase diversity and combat segregation in its public schools. It’s now three months later; students are back in school. Yet little progress has been made in implementing the Education Department’s much-needed plan.
Take, for example, the School Diversity Advisory Group. A centerpiece of the DOE’s plan, the group is supposed to support community-driven efforts to decrease school segregation, evaluate initial policies and develop “formal recommendations on citywide policy and practice.”
On paper, it sounds promising. Unfortunately, that is still the only place the advisory group exists: on paper. The group has yet to meet, and beyond the three individuals named in the plan, no one else has been appointed to it. It’s not even clear which organizations the DOE intends to include on the panel.
Given the pressing nature of the problem — New York City public schools are among the most racially segregated in America — and a June 2018 deadline for policy recommendations, this lack of progress on even administrative tasks is frustrating.
It becomes even more so when we consider that our city boasts a robust community of education stakeholders with proven strategies to tackle segregation — strategies that are being effectively ignored.
Working against sometimes daunting odds, these school leaders, teachers, community organizations and parents have shown that it is possible to provide public school students with supportive and effective learning environments that are also diverse.
This is true, for example, of the coalition of public charter schools that I represent, which are committed to dramatically expanding the number of racially and economically diverse charters in America.
Charter schools often get blamed for contributing to the segregation of public schools. But our member schools — more than 100 diverse-by-design public charters in 14 states and DC, serving over 25,000 students — demonstrate how public schools of choice like ours are ideally positioned to push back on the forces that have contributed to school segregation.
Charters can draw students from a wider area, overcoming the structural impediment behind the true cause of school segregation: neighborhood segregation.
For example, Community Roots Charter School in Brooklyn has almost equal numbers of black and white students, complemented with Asians and Latinos. A quarter of Community Roots students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The district school it shares a building with, Public School 67, is a zoned school — 89% black and Latino, and 96% low income.
By being able to draw from across the district, Community Roots can bring children together from multiple backgrounds. And by being a charter, the school has the flexibility to set aside 40% of kindergarten seats for residents of three nearby public housing complexes.
In fact, some of New York City’s most diverse schools are charter schools. Together, these diverseby-design campuses already enroll close to half of the modest fiveyear goal the city set for itself of putting 50,000 students in racially representative schools.
And because of new support announced recently by the Walton Family Foundation, the number of mixed-income public charter schools in New York City will grow in the coming years to serve an additional 2,400 students.
As public charter school leaders, we are so dedicated to diversity because we know it works. Research continues to show that when we work to break down racial and economic barriers in our public schools, students benefit.
Students who attend mixed-income schools have higher test scores, are more likely to enroll in college and are less likely than peers in schools with similar poverty levels to drop out of college.
Just as importantly, they gain valuable experience thinking in terms of “we” instead of “us” and “them.” They’re better prepared to live in, work in and contribute to the multicultural, polyglot world in which we live. We advocates for diverse-by-design public schools were excited when Mayor de Blasio and the DOE announced their diversity initiative.
And there have been some small signs of movement. This month, it was encouraging to see the city announce a plan to increase economic diversity in District 1, on the Lower East Side, borrowing from how charters have been thinking about enrollment and outreach.
But the problem of segregation in public education will not be solved with pledges alone. We need to have hard conversations with an eye toward action. New York’s diverse public charter schools are ready to partner and contribute their experience and expertise as part of the solution. We just need the mayor and Department of Education to listen.