City kids ‘zoning’ out

40% flee bad schools in own neighborhoods

Forty percent of the city’s firsttime kindergarten students enrolled in schools outside their zone in the 2016-17 academic year, according to a study released Wednesday.

A decade earlier, just 28 percent of kindergartners fled their neighborhood classes, said the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

The dramatic increase in parents seeking better schools outside their zones is an overlooked factor in analyzing school segregation — whether by race, class or academic need, the report said.

“For those who hoped school choice would lead to a more equitable system, this report poses one more sobering paradox,” study authors Nicole Mader, Clara Hemphill and Qasim Abbas concluded.

School choice has become an explosive issue as the Department of Education considers a pilot plan to reserve seats in top middle schools on the Upper West Side for 25 percent of underperforming students.

Fifty-nine percent of black kindergarten kids went to schools outside their community in 2016-17 — about half landing in charter schools. That compared with 39 percent for Hispanics, 29 percent for whites and 28 percent for Asians.

While benefiting some students of “wealthier and more educated parents,” the report said, “other kids with less activist parents were left with poor-performing neighborhood schools.”

School choice, the report argues, results in what amounts to a brain drain at many schools in low-income and predominately black and Latino communities.

“School choice may indeed give thousands of children better educational opportunities by allowing them to escape low-performing schools in their neighborhoods,” said the study.

“But the schools they leave be- hind face ever-greater challenges as they struggle to serve the city’s neediest children.”

In Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, fewer than 25 percent of kindergarten kids went to local schools.

“In gentrifying neighborhoods, where more than half of parents exercise school choice, this means that the racial and economic diversity of the neighborhood is not reflected in the local schools,” the report said.

In addition, the study notes that in higher-income, mostly Asian and white communities a higher percentage of kids are enrolled in their zoned schools because parents’ satisfaction with them is greater.

While parents are given choices of where to enroll their children, they also get first crack at seats in their neighborhood schools.

City leaders, including Mayor de Blasio, have long claimed that school segregation is largely caused by housing segregation.

But the report said housing segregation is not the only explanation in a school system in which two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic and one-third are white and Asian.