Integration now

Booker T. Washington Middle School and West Preparatory Academy both serve children in grades 6 through 8 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The two schools, two blocks apart, are separated by miles demographically and academically. And this shameful story is repeated dozens of times in a New York City public school system now awakening — with an extra jolt from new Chancellor Richard Carranza — to the harm caused by segregation of children by race, class and achievement.

Of the 201 students at West Prep, 3% are white; 1% are Asian; 58% are black; 36% are Hispanic. Two-thirds are economically disadvantaged.

Less than a third of students there meet state standards — meaning, score at level 3 or 4 — in English Language Arts. Just 14% do so in math.

Of the 850 kids at Booker T., 62% are white; 11% are Asian; 8% are black; 13% are Hispanic. About 1 in 10 are economically disadvantaged.

Close to 90% of kids there pass state English and math tests.

Push past the irony that a school named after a pioneering black educator is overwhelmingly white in a school system that’s anything but. Ask why we tolerate this reality.

In America, perhaps in New York especially, background is not supposed to be destiny; indeed, it is the very purpose and promise of our education system to prove otherwise.

Yet as a result of where they live and where they have attended elementary school in an increasingly choice-driven public school system — choice that in most respects is a wonderful thing — the sixth graders who arrive at Booker T. and a few other middle schools in the district have often been educated surrounded by children who look like them, from fellow families of means.

Meanwhile, the sixth graders who arrive at West Prep and other overwhelmingly black and Hispanic middle schools mostly attended elementary schools with children who look like them, from families without means, and often with serious challenges that include homelessness.

They may have started out in kindergarten a bit behind their white and Asian peers, but generally, schooling has pulled them further apart.

So they then don’t — can’t — get into desirable public middle schools, which in Community School District 3 choose their student populations based on kids’ choice-order rankings, interviews and, at least in the case of Booker T., an admissions test.

We are not talking about 17-year-olds who goofed off in high school and couldn’t get into the college of their choice. We are talking about 11-year-old boys and girls.

When a classroom is full almost entirely of disadvantaged kids, the job of educating them becomes that much harder, if not overwhelming.

When classrooms are mixed and educators are well-equipped to handle it, everyone can benefit.

Which is why the fact that New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in America is a problem for us all to acknowledge and collectively work to solve.

We must do this by opening up schools that serve as academic enclaves for the white and wealthy. By making far more attractive to all good schools that now predominantly serve blacks and Latinos. By improving, or closing, schools that fail.

And by explaining to parents, without scolding them, how kids who look different and come from different backgrounds can learn brilliantly together.

To his credit, Carranza has called segregation by its name and vowed to integrate kids more aggressively than his predecessor, who walked on eggshells whenever the topic came up.

And to her credit, the superintendent of Community District 3, which includes Booker T., West Prep and 15 other middle schools, has offered a modest proposal to increase the number of underprivileged students at the Booker Ts of the district.

The draft plan, unfortunately foisted on parents rather than developed from the ground up, would guarantee that 10% of admissions offers would go to students who score at the bottom (level 1) on state tests, and another 15% would go to those at level 2.

It is fair to ask how the mandate might contort the way we evaluate school performance in a city that’s grown used to seeing test scores as a proxy for quality.

It is fair to ask why the district hasn’t focused as much on diversifying majority-minority schools as on opening up majority-white schools.

And it is more than fair to ask whether it wouldn’t make more sense to simply require schools to educate some threshold number of students in or near poverty rather than some threshold number of students who fail the state test.

But it is unfair to refuse to nudge schools with hardened racial, ethnic and economic disparities, that are in the same neighborhood and meant to serve the same city, toward genuine diversity.