On Tuesday, the New York City Department of Education (NYDOE) released Equity and Excellence for All: Diversity in New York City Public Schools. The much-anticipated report outlines a plan to remedy an infamously inequitable school system, one that serves students in the United States’ most diverse city.
New York City finds itself at the epicenter of the school segregation conversation as we near the 60th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine entering Central High School under armed government guard. This civil rights anniversary, which falls on September 25, serves as a stark reminder that cities across the country are still confronting separate and unequal school systems. These systems represent the consequences of years of racially biased housing and education policies, some of which were the direct result of the very legislation intended to integrate U.S. public schools.
New York City finds itself at the epicenter of the school segregation conversation as we near the 60th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine entering Central High School under armed government guard. This civil rights anniversary, which falls on September 25, serves as a stark reminder that cities across the country are still confronting separate and unequal school systems.
New York City is no exception. According to a 2014 study out of UCLA, the city’s students were the most likely in the country to attend “intensely-segregated public schools.” The New York Times recently calculated that black and Hispanic students in the city, on average, attend elementary and high schools where the student body is 80 percent black or Hispanic.
The report released Tuesday was inspired, in part, by these statistics and by growing criticism of a stratified school system. It purports to increase diversity and promote more equitable access to good education for all students through a series of goals and a timeline for taking action. These steps include: the elimination of high school admissions screening procedures which unfairly disadvantage low-income students and students of color; streamlining application processes; and focusing on diversity in conversations about rezoning, admissions goals, magnet grant funding and advanced classes.
Among other goals, New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña aims to get 50,000 more students into “racially representative” schools and reduce the number of “economically stratified” schools by 100 within five years.
The report was released to the great interest of many educational leaders and organizations, including Teaching Tolerance, which has applauded Chancellor Fariña’s leadership in the past. But it also elicited comments from critics, who cite three central concerns:
- Small-scale goals to a big-scale problem. (Is placing 50,000 of the approximately one million students into racially representative schools a worthy goal?)
- The department’s definition of “racially representative” schools.
- The unwillingness by the NYDOE to list segregation as a problem, much less solve it.
The fact that the report does not mention school segregation or integration at all garnered the attention of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York City-based journalist who has written extensively on the issue. In a Twitter thread, she expressed her disappointment with the report, stating, “The proposed steps are tiny, painless and won’t address systemwide inequality in any large-scale way.”
Fariña, for her part, does not view the report as a cure for what ails New York City Schools.
“As a longtime educator and leader, I know the real, sustainable change comes from the ground up,” she wrote in a guest editorial for the Washington Post. “I believe that what we’ll learn from our Advisory Group and district meetings will have a larger, longer-term impact than the policy changes we make today.”
New York City’s high-profile plan will be seen as a litmus test for how cities approach the brutally persistent problem of school segregation. For educators and educational leaders, it’s important to recognize, remember and name the history of systemic segregation and how it impacts students today. Until then, a call for increased diversity is welcome and inspired, but incomplete.
Collins is a staff writer for Teaching Tolerance.
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