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

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/nyregion/new-york-city-schools-segregation-carmen-farina.html

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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.

But no comprehensive plans have emerged from City Hall or the Education Department. The schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, has said she wants to avoid mandates in favor of proposals that bubble up from schools and local communities “organically.” That approach, say critics like Councilman Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx, amounts to tinkering around the edges of a dense and vast problem.

“If you believe, as I do, and as Thurgood Marshall did, that diversity is an essential element of educational equity, then promoting it through small-bore voluntary initiatives — there’s a disconnect there,” Mr. Torres said in a recent interview. “It reflects a lack of commitment.”

In District 9, which Mr. Torres represents, 92 percent of students are poor. In 22 of the city’s 32 districts, which serve hundreds of thousands of students, a similar challenge exists: At least three-quarters of students come from poor families.

The heightened attention in the city to segregation and how it might be solved reflects a growing awareness of the issue around the country, something that John B. King Jr. has emphasized as federal education secretary.

“I think we’re at a moment in the country’s history where there is a level of enthusiasm around the importance of diversity,” said Dr. King, who is a former New York State education commissioner. “There is new momentum, although there are also lots of reasons to worry.”

Last fall, the city’s Education Department said seven schools could set aside a portion of seats for needy children or for those learning English, an approach suggested to the department by a group of principals. The agency expanded the program several months later, inviting schools around the city to propose changes to their enrollment policies that would increase their diversity.

Chancellor Fariña and other city education officials said they had initiated other plans that should affect diversity.

The department has expanded the number of dual-language programs, which provide instruction in two languages and can create ethnically and socioeconomically mixed classrooms. It has reduced academic screening in three districts and has started gifted-and-talented programs in four low-income districts that did not already have them.

Ms. Fariña said she had also encouraged superintendents to consider how they could decrease segregation in their districts. And Mayor Bill de Blasio recently pointed to expanding prekindergarten programs and creating affordable housing as ways to create less segregated schools.

“If you look at the history of integration, the more that you mandate, the less likely it’s going to take,” Ms. Fariña said. “That’s not to say eventually we don’t want to go citywide, but I do think this is also a way of getting different models that work and comparing one to the other.”

She added, “I want something people will believe in and fight for and, once it’s in place, will not be undone by any of the waves of the future.”

Educators in several districts are already discussing ways to create more socioeconomically mixed schools, including District 1 on the Lower East Side, one of the city’s smallest.

There, officials are considering a system often called “controlled choice,” in which families pick a certain number of schools they would like their child to attend, and the district picks from among them, with the demographic makeup of the schools in mind. If a child is poor enough to qualify for free lunch, for example, he or she should perhaps go to a school with a relatively high proportion of middle-class students.

Some who study education have said they would like to see controlled choice applied more widely, perhaps by adding socioeconomic controls to the high school application process.

Much of the push toward desegregation is coming from parent groups and individual schools. Middle School 447, the Math and Science Exploratory School in Boerum Hill, is one. In fall 2017, it hopes to be among the next group of schools to reserve seats for low-income students.

Over the past several years, Arin M. Rusch, the school’s principal, said that the number of white and affluent students in her classrooms had increased and the number of poor children had fallen, as the neighborhood became increasingly gentrified and the school’s reputation grew.

Many schools use income as the basis for desegregation because the ability to consider race in admissions has been significantly reduced. But Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a public policy research group, said that desegregating by class rather than by race could be easier to sell politically, and that there was significant evidence that having poor and middle-class students learn side by side was generally good for children, especially those who are poor.

“There is a strong body of research that it’s the socioeconomic status of classmates that drives achievement,” Mr. Kahlenberg said. “So this is not just a politically cute way of avoiding the elephant in the room.”

At M.S. 447, Ms. Rusch is trying to be conscientious about one of the pitfalls of a school-by-school approach. Schools are part of intricately interwoven systems, and any change in the population at one is likely to affect the schools nearby.

In the case of M.S. 447, which has screened applicants by their grades as well as with an assessment that it performs, the fear is the school will effectively steal high-achieving lower-income students from neighboring schools. So the school is changing its admissions criteria to look for students with a range of academic abilities, not just the top performers.

“As we want an academic range because we think it’s good for our kids, so might other schools want the same,” Ms. Rusch said.

Despite the limited scope of the efforts, some who study segregation see this as an important moment of possibility, a chance to take a few first steps and to build momentum for further change in the nation’s largest school district.

David Tipson, executive director of New York Appleseed, an organization that advocates greater integration in schools, said the city deserved credit for the progress it had made in recent months.

“Everyone wants systemic change, but to say that smaller steps are somehow antithetical to that, I don’t think it’s logical, and I don’t think there’s evidence for it,” Mr. Tipson said. “These small steps make a big difference in the lives of individual families and children.”

But even some who are pleased to see these early steps say the Education Department could be pushing harder.

Halley Potter, a fellow at the Century Foundation who studies educational inequality, said the administration seemed willing to “consider proposals that have really clear public support, but they haven’t seemed as willing to take a leadership position, to stick their neck out on the issue.”

Clara Hemphill, editor of the Inside Schools website and director of education policy at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, described this as an “important crossroads in the history of the city,” a moment where the long, hard work of integration could finally begin.

“Are the efforts scattershot right now?” Ms. Hemphill said. “Yes. But grass-roots efforts are building critical political support for integration, something we didn’t have half a century ago.”