Small Steps, but No Major Push, to Integrate New York’s Schools

 

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