Learning to learn together

He’s late, but he’s learning: Mayor de Blasio, who’s kept education integration efforts at arm’s length for years, just embraced dozens of recommendations from an advisory group on diversity, while seeding efforts for five community school districts to design homegrown plans to better mix their kids across ethnic, racial and economic lines.

As we on this page have been writing for years now, children in New York City schools are shamefully clustered by background. That’s one of the forces perpetuating yawning achievement gaps between (mostly) low-income black and Latino kids on the one hand, and (mostly) middleand upper-middle-class white kids on the other.

Sometimes the divide manifests itself in public elementary schools that are mere blocks apart: One kindergarten class is overwhelmingly of one skin color, the other, another.

Nor does fixing this, which research consistently

shows helps all kids learn better, require massive and disruptive forced-busing; it only demands creativity, persistence and courage.

Never mind the progressive bona fides of the man in charge, courage has been in short supply in City Hall since 2014. It took the bubbling up of bold parent-driven plans in Brooklyn and Manhattan to challenge screening systems and catchment zones that sort kids from the earliest age imaginable.

Now, de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, are catching up. With city grant money, two more districts in Brooklyn, one in Queens, one in the Bronx, and Staten Island’s sole district will now develop their own blueprints for change.

Integration plans must be carefully crafted. Reformers ought to engage worried parents’ concerns in good faith, not dismiss them as racist. But for the good of the city, this can, will and must be done.