Learning to learn together

Many were the worries that a diversity plan removing middle-school admission screens in Brooklyn’s District 15 would chase middleclass and upper-middle-class white families out of the public school system, if not out of the city entirely.

Before the reforms, most middle schools in that community school district, which includes both poor and working-class Sunset Park and Red Hook and high-end Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Mayor de Blasio’s own Park Slope, picked their students in part using test scores, attendance and other qualifying factors. That sorting cemented many divisions. After the reforms, academic screens were banned, replaced with a ranking and matching system that gives no preference to higherperforming kids and sets a target 52% of each school’s seats for low-income families, English language learners and kids in temporary housing.

Critics painted a nightmare scenario: Threaten to send kids to schools outside their immediate neighborhood for sixth to eighth grade, schools where test scores were in some cases substantially lower, and motivated parents might just opt out in large numbers.

The first year’s preliminary admission data are out, and so far, the fears have not come to pass. The overall ethnic and racial composition of this year’s sixth-grade class remains the same as last year. Eight of the 11 schools’ cohorts now fall within the district’s target range for diversity, which means they are much more successfully mixing kids from different racial and economic backgrounds.

Two asterisks with sharp points: One, this year’s class is 7% smaller overall than last year’s was, a first-time-in-a-long-time drop, and not a small one. That can’t continue. It would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed if rather than white flight, the plan spurs white, black, Hispanic and Asian flight.

Two, we don’t yet know how the kids and parents are liking their new schools, or how well they’re, you know, learning.

But the sky isn’t falling yet.