City school deseg plans failed: report

Mayor de Blasio’s halting efforts to diversify the city’s infamously segregated public schools hit a couple of potential stumbling blocks on Tuesday.

First, a report issued by The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs found that programs begun by de Blasio to integrate public schools with the use of admissions targets tied to English language learners and kids living in poverty failed to increase racial diversity at the schools.

The report, called “Promising Outcomes, Limited Potential: Diversity in Admissions in New York City Public Schools,” parsed city data in arriving at its conclusion that the programs started in 2016 didn’t work as intended.

The schools in the Diversity in Admissions project were not permitted to target race or ethnicity directly in admissions, the report said. But principals hoped that broadening categories like income and language would increase diversity.

“That has not proved true: There was no statistically significant change in any race or ethnicity category on average across the first 19 schools in the pilot,” the report found. The 90 city schools now participating in the Diversity in Admissions project serve about 37,000 students — or roughly 3% of public school students citywide.

Meanwhile, in a separate development, a group of Brooklyn parents was poised Tuesday night to file a lawsuit challenging a de Blasio effort to provide added resources to kids from underserved communities to help them gain entrance to elite high schools.