Affirming what studies have shown for decades, a new report from The Civil Rights Project shows that "New York has the most segregated schools in the country."
According to the report, the five boroughs represent almost 60% of the state's black students, and two-thirds of the state's Asian and Latino students, but only 10% of white students. Only 20% of the schools in the metro area were considered diverse.
Minority students who attend diverse schools tend to perform better, and are healthier and earn more as they get older. All students benefit from diverse schools, as they develop better critical thinking and problem solving skills than those in segregated schools.
"In the city, we find that there's a great proliferation of school choice, with virtually no consideration of civil rights necessities," Dr. Gary Orfield, a distinguished research professor at UCLA and co-author of the report says in a video accompanying the results.
The report finds that "Charter schools take the metro’s segregation to an extreme"—73% of charter schools are considered "apartheid schools," with less than 1% white enrollment. Only 8% of charter schools were considered "multiracial."
How did we get here?
Local and political resistance influenced New York’s history of school desegregation. Around the time of Reagan’s administration, the state moved away from desegregation efforts and instead focused on other practices and policies like accountability systems, school choice, and charter schools. By the early twenty-first century, most desegregation orders in key metropolitan areas were small and short-lived due to unitary status, and many programs designed to voluntary improve racial integration levels, like magnet schools, are now failing to achieve racial balance levels due to residential patterns, a lack of commitment, market-oriented framework, and school policy reversals.
Dr. Orfield points to a system of magnet schools similar to Connecticut's as a way to help diversify New York's classrooms. Across New York City, magnets had the highest proportion of multiracial schools and the lowest proportion of segregated schools.
"They create a tremendous educational invitation," Dr. Orfield says of effective magnet schools, adding that to alleviate the chronic segregation, New York should "create diversity plans, seek students of different backgrounds for individual schools, provide transportation so that opportunity isn't allocated just on the basis of family resources, and create really strong and desirable education incentives, and not to test students to get in but to allow them to choose."
The reports' authors also recommend integrating public housing authorities and other development authorities with school authorities [PDF].
You can read the entire report here [PDF].
