A common refrain one would hear from elected officials is that housing segregation begets school segregation. A study from The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs challenges that statement and then some.
Titled “The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools,” the report, authored by a team of assistants and researchers at The New School, including senior research fellow and lead author Nicole Mader, focuses on who gets left behind as a byproduct of school choice.
“Our analysis shows that the expansion of school choice in New York City in the past 10 years has, indeed, allowed thousands of children to leave low-performing schools for higher performing schools, often outside their neighborhoods,” reads the report. “But it has also resulted in higher concentrations of poverty and shrinking enrollments and budgets in the schools they leave behind, making it ever harder for those schools to serve their neighborhoods well.”
Mader said that the spark for the study came as a result of Election Night 2016.
“School choice has been a controversial topic for a long time, but with the election of President Trump and the appointment of Education Secretary Devos, who has been a lifelong supporter and funder of school choice, it’s become even more important that we understand the potential effects of choice,” Mader said. “Here in NYC, there has been an active conversation around the segregative effects of middle and high school choice, but most people think that our elementary schools are segregated because housing is segregated, since they assume that most elementary students attend the schools they are geographically zoned for.”
Mader’s report is based on analysis of school enrollment data for approximately 715,000 students who entered kindergarten in New York City public schools in the past decade. Between the 2007-08 and the 2016-17 school years, there was a 12 percent decrease in kindergartners attending their zoned schools.
It’s something that Cordell Cleare, district leader of the 70th Assembly District in Harlem, has seen up close. But she prefers to look at the problem the old school way.
“I just recently spoke on this issue a couple of weeks ago,” said Cleare. “How can we desegregate our schools? It’s hard to desegregate schools right now because our neighborhoods aren’t too integrated.”
Families in higher income, mostly white neighborhoods tend to be satisfied with sending their kids to zoned school. The story is different specifically for Black families and children.
“We were very surprised to see the sheer scale of choice: up to 40 percent of kindergarten students didn’t go to their zoned elementary schools in 2016-17,” Mader explained. “This means that almost 30,000 families are leaving their zones every morning to bring their kindergarten students to schools that are farther away, many in other districts and some even in other boroughs. We were also surprised to see that Black families are most likely to choose a school—up to 60 percent in 2016-17—so in many ways the burdens of choice are bearing most heavily on those families.”
According to the report, 46 percent of white families enroll their kids in schools that have lower numbers of nonwhite and free-lunch eligible kids than their zoned school. Mader noted that there are exceptions in gentrified areas of Brooklyn and neighborhoods such as Harlem.
Cleare has seen that statistic in the flesh using the eye test.
“What I’ve seen is that most of the people that are moving into the neighborhood do not send their children to school in the neighborhood,” Cleare said. “Every school should be a quality school. People who have the wherewithal and the access are going to take their kids somewhere else, and often that’s not us.”
Community Service Society of New York President David Jones agreed with Cleare on Black and Brown New York families usually not having the access to send their kids elsewhere, but also advised against the concept of just making all schools quality schools. He pointed the finger at elected officials and the teachers’ unions.
“My concern here is throwing up our hands and saying, ‘That’s the way things are,’” said Jones. “It’s an abdication of government responsibility. We can do better than this. But I think we have to be careful about going down the path; it hasn’t happened. There are a couple of things that go on.” Jones cited the seniority in teachers’ unions that allows those with higher rank to choose where they want to teach.
“What tends to happen in the poorest neighborhoods is there’s a higher concentration of substitute and per diem teachers or teachers with disciplinary problems teaching at those schools,” said Jones.
To demonstrate the inadvertent effects of school choice, the report tells the story of District 1 on the Lower East Side. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the city first introduced school choice, a few progressive alternative schools in the district used race as part of the admissions process. The result? A balance of Black, Latino, white and Asian kids. When Michael Bloomberg’s administration took over and made admissions race-blind, several schools in the district became largely white and middle class.
A Department of Education representative said the report doesn’t refute the housing segregation begets school segregation talking point, it just states that a lot of families don’t send children to their zoned schools and nothing else.
“School choice on its own doesn’t guarantee high-quality or diverse schools,” said a DOE representative. “We are investing in an Equity and Excellence for All agenda to improve every single school and ensure our classrooms are more reflective of our city.”
In a statement, the DOE representative pointed to programs such as Kindergarten Connect (a centralized online tool for families to apply to kindergarten) and offering free, full-day 3-K and pre-K for all as examples of making the school choice progress easier and improving school quality.
But the fact of the matter is the schools in mostly low-income, Black and Latino neighborhoods don’t have as many resources as schools in mostly white neighborhoods. This leads to more families from the former, with the means, to look for schools outside of their district. When others step in to try and right the ship, there’s a backlash.
Lindsey Christ, education reporter for Spectrum News NY 1, recently posted a video on Twitter showing white parents shouting in anger during an Upper West Side Parent Council meeting over the plan to diversify schools in the neighborhood. The plan would require all local middle schools to reserve a quarter of the seats for students who scored below grade level on state math and English exams. In the end, the effort would diversify the schools to reflect the area and New York City as a whole.
Carranza shared the story on his Twitter page and drew ire from some accusing him of singling out white people. During a recent visit to a school in Queens, Carranza told media members, “I will pay more attention in the future when I retweet, to make sure that the language that is automatically generated in the retweet is something that I would say. If that has caused any kind of pain, then I apologize for it.”
Matt Gonzales, school diversity project director for New York Appleseed (a group that advocates for integrated schools), didn’t hold back when asked about the Upper West Side situation.
“I find this moment to be critical to exposing the hypocrisy of white liberalism,” Gonzales stated. “For generations, Northerners have looked down on Southern bigotry as if they were somehow above all of that. They are not. They just do it with a smile—racism with a smile.”
So who’s to blame for all of this?
“We have to look at the racist history of this country if we are interested in assigning blame,” Gonzales asserted. “Segregation is/was not a natural manifestation. It was designed by public policy through racist housing policies and school choice mechanisms that allowed white parents to escape schools and communities serving mostly Black and Brown students, while concentrating people of color into communities that were strategically underinvested in and criminalized. In New York City, responsibility for disrupting segregation and pushing for integration falls on Mayor de Blasio. The new chancellor also has a responsibility to push initiatives to promote integration.”
Mader also believes that change rests on City Hall’s shoulders and cited New York City Council Member Brad Lander’s Desegregating NYC plan as an example.
“Because segregation is a multifaceted issue, touching education, housing, criminal justice, the mayor could be a driving force unifying action on all those fronts, but has yet to show the courage and leadership required to do so,” said Mader.
Lander’s plan points toward issues in housing, education, infrastructure and the reasons the city finds itself in its current condition. Education doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Where you live, the transportation available and even the type of food available to you all play a role in your education.
But this doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and give up. At least not according to Jones.
“We can’t just sit back and say it’ll work out,” Jones said. “Obviously, the fight on the Upper West Side isn’t surprising. Having been a parent and a grandparent, we’re all about equality and fairness until it comes to your own child and grandchild. This is a very human condition. I’m not condemning parents for wanting the best. That’s why the system has to do everything they can to ensure children have a chance.”