By Elizabeth A. Harris
For
all its kaleidoscopic diversity, New York City has one of the most
segregated school systems in the country, with divisions created and
reinforced by decades of policy decisions. But over the past year, some
areas of the system have begun experimenting with ways to desegregate,
if not by the color of children’s skin, at least by their families’
wealth.
A
middle school in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, hopes to set aside seats for
poor children in fall 2017. A small district on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan is looking to shake up admissions so that poor and
middle-class students will learn together. And a popular elementary
school in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan has reserved more than 60 percent of its seats this coming school year for students from low-income families.
In
a system in which about 75 percent of students are poor and nearly 70
percent are black or Hispanic, these efforts depend on some degree of
local socioeconomic diversity. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, rich
and poor live near one another, as they do in parts of Manhattan where
public housing projects are next to expensive apartment buildings. But
in most city school districts, where poor children live near other poor
children, no such diversity exists. There, meaningful integration would
require major intervention.
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Source: The New York Times and the Empire Report
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