Taking a step up a steep staircase while tightly holding the rail, New York City’s public education leaders are moving to diversify a handful of schools that are starkly divided by race and family income.
While Chancellor Carmen Fariña is doing more than her predecessors did to correct shameful divides that deny a fair shot at quality instruction to thousands, the progress is far too halting.
Mayor de Blasio needs to get in front of the problem, with a full-throated call to action and citywide school integration plans.
Decades after political pressure pulled the plug on forced busing programs, public schools across the country have given up on taking far less extreme steps to get students from different backgrounds into the same classrooms.
Research leaves no doubt: Racial and economic mixing is one of the best ways to lift the achievement of predominantly black and Latino kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, without compromising the learning of any other students.
When, on the other hand, kids from low-income and troubled homes cluster, it becomes that much harder even for the best teacher to get academic traction.
New York has an especially bad case of the illness. A 2014 report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project showed the number of intensely segregated schools, those defined as “90% to 100% black or Latino,” jumped by 70% between 1989 and 2010, to the point that they now represent nearly half of schools in the metro area.
Perverse pairs of schools blocks apart dramatize that reality: P.S. 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is 77% white, 4% black and 7% Hispanic. A nine-minute walk away, also in Park Slope, sits P.S. 282. It is 63% black, 24% Hispanic and 8% white.
The former is one of the city’s highest performing schools. Students in the latter are struggling to read and do math at citywide averages.
There are similarly mismatched twins across the five boroughs. Surrounding communities have over time come to accept the segregation — have, in fact, resisted any attempt to change.
And the city has left well enough alone.
Enter Fariña, who early in her tenure expressed wariness about taking the lead on integration, then leaned into limited rezonings in downtown Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.
Last year, the city launched a pilot program changing admissions criteria in seven Brooklyn and Manhattan schools to prioritize blending students by background, including poverty level.
Thursday, the Department of Education announced that a dozen more Manhattan and Brooklyn schools — including, for the first time, middle and high schools — would join in.
Absolutely necessary. Totally insufficient.
Fighting the battle one or two schools at a time in a city with 1,700 distinct educational institutions is a recipe for enshrining the status quo.
Fariña needs to press more schools to take the integration leap, and select whole community school districts among the city’s 32 where schools can sensitively break up balkanization. Local boards on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn are pressing for just such broader plans.
Send the message to parents, kids and the system at large: We’re in this together.