Mix, match, learn
New York City has invested billions and billions of dollars in training teachers, building accountability systems, reducing class sizes and otherwise trying to improve public education. Yet the city, like the nation, remains plagued by a gap in student performance measured on the basis of race. More than 50% of the city’s white and Asian school kids in grades 3 through 8 passed this year’s state English tests. Fewer than 20% of the city’s black and Latino kids did.
In fact, the so-called achievement gap widened this year compared with last.
The inequality in opportunity by ZIP code is appalling. And one reason the life-damaging unfairness persists is that America’s most diverse city has assiduously avoided a strategy that has proven effective in raising achievement:
Integration — the mixing of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics in single schools and classrooms.
Typically, rationalizations against desegregation start with the fact that many sections of New York have different populations. Brooklyn’s Brownsville is mostly black and poor, Douglaston in Queens is largely white and upscale.
But in many neighborhoods, that excuse doesn’t wash. Consider Mayor de Blasio’s home turf of Park Slope — an example of inequality and a potential laboratory for integration.
PS 321 is located at 7th Ave. and 1st St. The student body is 73% white, 7% black and 9% Hispanic. Nine percent of kids are eligible for free lunch.
The newly released state test results showed 76% of PS 321’s students scoring proficient in English, and 82% in math.
PS 282 is less than 10 minutes away at 6th Ave. and Berkeley Pl. Mapped into an adjoining district and widely shunned by the immediate, predominantly white neighborhood, the school draws from a broader zone and has a student body that’s 7% white, 68% black and 22% Hispanic. Fifty-seven percent of its kids are eligible for free or reduced price lunch.
On the tests, only 28% of PS 282’s students scored proficient in English, 29% in math. Both are below the city average.
As an Op-Ed in these pages by Sarah Garland details, there are similar gross disparities elsewhere, including on the Upper West Side.
While holding to our belief that all schools, regardless of student body, can raise achievement — as shown by the most successful traditional and charter public schools — we urge de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña to add mixing of highand low-achieving students to the reform tool kit.
Some plans proposed by Councilmen Brad Lander and Ritchie Torres, also in these pages, are worth strong consideration.
Another obvious tactic would be to integrate thriving and struggling schools that are close enough to achieve the goal without busing white or minority children.
For example: Determine kindergarten admissions to PS 321 and PS 282 by lottery — so that children get randomly assigned to either school.
A similar kindergarten admissions lottery might break racial barriers on the Upper West Side that separate blocks-apart PS 199 (mostly white, high-performing) and PS 191 (mostly black and Latino, low-performing).
Experience has proven that black and Hispanic children have lower achievement when schools are extensively segregated — and that integration produces positive results. Why?
Poor children, who in urban areas happen to predominantly be black and Latino, come to school without the advantages and support of many higher-income white students.
While they often also attend schools with the weakest teachers, even superstar instructors struggle to, say, teach reading in a classroom where 20 out of 30 kids need added resources and extra attention. But a reasonably good teacher should be able to help four or five struggling readers in a classroom get up to speed.
Which partially explains why, between 1970 and 1990, when school systems across the country worked aggressively to mix students of different skin colors, the black-white educational achievement gap shrank substantially.
What’s crucial to note is that the trend was driven not by white youngsters doing worse, but by black youngsters doing better.
Research shows that black students who attended desegregated schools were more likely to graduate high school and more likely to go to college and graduate.
A 2011 study showed that black youths who spent just five years in desegregated schools had gone on to earn 25% more in the world of work than those who never did.
While the New York we experience on the subway is diverse, our schools are severely segregated. According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project, roughly three in four black students in New York City attend schools with student bodies that are at least 90% black or Latino.
More than a half century after Brown vs. the Board of Education, separate and unequal still prevails, sometimes starkly, within short walking distances. It’s time to try meshing the two worlds where it is logistically feasible in the hope of producing betterment for both.