New York City’s deeply segregated school system is shaped by race, class disparities, and the historic impacts of redlining. This often forces Black and Hispanic parents of all backgrounds to make difficult decisions to secure a “quality” education for their children.
The late civil rights attorney and subsequent Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, successfully making the case that segregation was unconstitutional. The tipping point was research collected by Harlem’s own Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, two pioneering psychologists and education advocates who fought for integration in the city and nationwide. The law changed — but the practice remained.
The city’s latest data for public schools indicates that the bulk of the system’s racial makeup is Hispanic/Latino students (41.6%), followed by an almost even percentage of Black (19.3%) and Asian/Pacific Islander students (19%). White students are in the smallest chunk (16.4%). However, not many community school districts (CSDs) reflect racial demographics, according to NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools in an equity report.
At the elementary school level, 25% of all schools were “racially representative” of their communities. The ones with greater representation were concentrated in the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn. At the middle school level, representation was higher overall at 37%, and K–8 schools had the lowest overall at 22%, said the Research Alliance report.
Although there has been some progress since the 1950s, it’s been more than 70 years and New York City still struggles to meaningfully integrate its public and private schools, instead sorting its youngest into an “educational apartheid” that often subjects Black and Hispanic students to under-resourced and underfunded institutions. Decades of research show that this crippling inequality in educational experiences “reinforces differences in socioeconomic outcomes, from student test scores and high school graduation rates to income and wealth in adulthood and even life expectancy.”
“With the work of integration, it is often difficult. If it was easy, somebody would have done it already,” said NYC Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels in an interview with the Amsterdam News. “When we are approaching this work, we are to approach this work[do so] from a space of listening, from a space of ensuring that we are thoughtfully engaged, because we want all the perspectives to be understood.”
Samuels launched an on-the-ground initiative to fully integrate schools by 2028 through school district working groups in Districts 3, 7, 13, 16, and 25, representing the Upper West Side and West Harlem, South Bronx, Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and North-Central Queens. The working groups are made up of teachers, principals, parent leaders, and community organizations. They are tasked with coming up with strategies to address structural and instructional inequities in their districts. The plan is to eventually have working groups in all 32 school districts.
Navigating NYC schools as a parent
In NYC, parents have what’s called “school choice” — they can select from a range of options about where to send their children, whether in the public school system, schools inside or outside their zoned neighborhood districts, or private charter schools. Black and Hispanic students, in particular, were the most likely to attend charter schools over public schools, according to the Research Alliance. The Independent Budget Office (IBO)’s race and ethnicity data for 2023–2024, charter schools comprised 45.9% Black, 43.3% Hispanic, 4.5% White, and 3.5% Asian students.
It’s a daunting process for any parent, but Black and Hispanic parents of various income levels have long complained about the choice between under-resourced local schools or long daily commutes to “better” and “safer” school districts. The choice between an education centered in community and culture or academic rigor and access; seemingly, between all Black and Hispanic, or mostly white schools.
“People are talking to me all the time from all over, and especially about the story,” said Samuels, about the debate over New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones’s story about choosing to have her daughter educated at a “poor Black” public school in 2016. “It was a heartfelt story; it landed with me. It brought up some of [my own] experiences, but most importantly, reminded me of the work that we have ahead and brought it into full focus.”
Samuels, 48, who is Jamaican-born, recalled having to make a similar choice as a parent when his first child was born before he became chancellor. His family was living outside of the city at the time and he thought that an independent, mostly white school would provide his son with the “rigorous” education and access to a network he was looking for. However, he realized the school wasn’t meeting the cultural needs of a “young Black boy.” He moved his son to a public middle school with more diversity and “more affirming experiences.”
“He was one of two Black kids in his grade when he was in a private school, and in public school, he’s connected with more kids of color and kids from all over the city, from all walks of life,” said Samuels.
Naturally, not every parent can afford or wants to choose this path.
One parent, entrepreneur Marlon Rice, 50, runs the Stoop Set block party series in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. A Brooklyn native, he was raised, went to school, lives, and works in Bed-Stuy. In addition to his festival event, he’s been a Department of Education (DOE) vendor for about 18 years, has taught programming in various school districts, and recently ran for the State Assembly. He has always attended majority-Black public schools and considers himself middle-class. He also firmly believes that education starts in the home with homework, studying, role models, and extracurricular activities, whether a child attends mostly Black or white schools.
“My parents said, ‘We want you to be sheltered in Blackness. We want you to have an education that’s deeply rooted in Blackness,’” said Rice about his upbringing. “I went to an all-Black elementary school. I went to a Gifted & Talented junior high school that was all Black. I went to Brooklyn Tech (a specialized high school) at a time [when] it was 35, 40% Black, and then I went to an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities).”
The community overall is in a state of transition and far more gentrified than when Rice was younger. He said “new white neighbors” in the district don’t always send their kids to local schools, though. His daughter graduated from P.S. 11 and his son now attends third grade in the same school in District 13, which is one of the districts on Samuels’s working group list that he oversaw as a superintendent. About 97% of students at P.S. 11 met state standards for the English test and 96% met state math test standards, according to Department of Education data.
“I believe that all of us as parents are constantly looking to make decisions about where to put our kids, and there is this decision based on class and resources,” said Rice. “Unfortunately, a lot of our parents in the district are not wealthy and so the options are not as vast. Many of them simply have to send their kids to zone schools because they don’t have the resources or opportunity to go outside of that. … We find inequity when people without resources are forced to deal with the educational inequities of schools that are underfunded and underprepared.”
Another parent advocate, Rasheeda Brown Harris, 45, works at a “healing center” school in the Bronx. She was raised in New York City by an active single Black father. She is half-Black and Korean, but identifies as a Black woman. Her 16-year-old daughter is currently a junior at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts. She said the thought of putting her daughter in a predominantly white school, or even a majority-Spanish–speaking and South Asian environment similar to her neighborhood in Jackson Heights, Queens, made her uneasy.
“In hindsight, knowing that she would have been around Spanish-speaking peers, and would have had that exposure, I do believe that it would have helped her to … build empathy for any other-language–speaking child — to know [that] these are my neighbors, these are my classmates,” said Harris, about some of her regrets, “but at the time, I was just thinking about the teachers not being able to ‘teach’ because they would be so busy … maybe trying to communicate with the kids or teach them how to speak English … and of course, the test scores weren’t that great.”
Harris had her daughter tested for G&T at 4 years old, happy that the daycare had prepared her for it. Her daughter stayed there for kindergarten through eighth grade. Although she received prep for the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT), she decided to opt out of that and state exams.
TAG’s student population is about 46% Asian, 10% Black, 17% white, and 17% Hispanic; 98% of students met state standards for the English test and 96% met state math test standards, according to the DOE. Most students from TAG matriculate and attend the city’s specialized elite high schools: 30% go to Bronx High School of Science, 15% to Brooklyn Technical High School, and 8% to Stuyvesant High School, said the quality report, although significantly fewer Black and Hispanic students are admitted to specialized schools each year.
Harris had her daughter tested for G&T at 4 years old, happy that the daycare had prepared her for it. Her daughter stayed there for kindergarten through eighth grade. Although she received prep for the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSHAT) test, she decided to opt out of that and state exams.
“Some parents don’t have options,” said Tanesha Grant, 50, an avid education advocate from Harlem who founded Parents Supporting Parents New York.
Grant grew up in the city’s foster care system after she was left at Lincoln Hospital. She has three children who attended public schools and two in college. She worked hard at home to supplement her kids’ education, especially when it came to learning about Black history. She never trusted any “white-facing institution” to educate her children about her culture and her Blackness. She was among the first parent advocates to fight for culturally responsive education and curricula in public schools. She said she’s currently working on keeping her grandchildren informed about their history as well.
Fiction writer Leslie Ann Murray, 45, is not a parent but does vividly remember her experience of attending Thomas Jefferson High School, a majority-Black school with a challenging reputation in East New York, in the 1990s. Her mother was an “illiterate” working class immigrant from Trinidad who barely knew how to navigate the city when her family settled in Brooklyn. Murray said the trauma she experienced at Jefferson was a direct result of underfunding and systemic racism that landed many students from the neighborhood either in jail or dead.
“I was impacted by the lack of education. I had a high school teacher, Black guy, just like the students who would say, ‘I don’t give a f about you ners.’ He would sit there in his classroom in my 10th grade English class, eating, while we just sat and talked and slept,” she said. “People were blamed for their poverty.”
She said her experience was one of acceptance and not advocacy in her youth, but now she is an educator and creator of the Brown Girl Book Lover series. “I think the question that should be discussed is: why do we have so many divided, unequal schools? Why is our neighborhood and our tax dollars tied toward how our schools get funding? Why are Black and Brown kids from birth slated — this is a caste system — to do poor, slated to do bad, slated to not become something because of the educational system and where they were born?” said Murray. “I hope this spurs us on, not only thinking about the unequal system we’re in, but how do we change it and how do we create tangible change.”
“Poor” and Black are not synonyms
Many of the parents the AmNews spoke to acknowledged that there are, of course, amazing majority-Black institutions and Black and Brown educators across New York City. It’s not just the presence of Black or Latino students, or placement in a certain neighborhood, that determine the quality of a school. Diverse enrollment coupled with student-teacher ratio; parent engagement; total counselors, social workers, and security guards, and overall safety; academic rigor; level of discipline; afterschool programming; mentorship; community-based partnerships; and low absenteeism all play a factor, they said.
“I vehemently am opposed to this notion that all Black somehow means poor performing and less than — my whole career has been about opposing that very notion,” said former NYC Schools Chancellor David C. Banks, who resigned in 2024 before former Mayor Eric Adams’s indictment; was previously president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation; and was principal and founder of the first Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx, an all-boys, majority-Black public school that currently has a 92% graduation rate for the class of 2025.
There’s also been a mass exodus of Black families from the city, and therefore fewer Black students in the public school system overall, said Samuels, largely because of affordability. In 2016, when Hannah-Jones was first putting her daughter in school, the system was 27% Black compared to the current 19.3%.
“We see that 30,000 kids across the city are in largely Black and Brown populat[ed] schools that are below 200 kids, and those schools, we know, won’t be able to get the resources that our kids need,” said Samuels. “That means that they won’t have the strong, necessary extracurricular activities. They won’t have the advanced courses. Their teachers don’t necessarily have other teachers to collaborate with and push students. That is part of what contributes to this idea in predominantly Black schools, they don’t necessarily have the resources and are not getting access to a high-quality education. That’s what Mayor Mamdani, and I are committed to making sure that we disrupt.”
Banks said that he “intentionally” didn’t prioritize an integration policy while in office and he recalls disappointing some advocates. He preferred front-loading the NYC Reads and NYC Solves programs to boost math and reading scores, as well as ushering in the Black Studies curriculum citywide.
“It’s very hard to define what integration even means, number one, and number two, when you look at the demographic patterns, it’s a challenge in and of itself. Number three, look at housing patterns in America — it’s always been challenged,” said Banks. “Generally, when people talk about integration, that’s what they’re talking about: How do you allow a few more Black kids to go to schools with more majority-white kids … because to be very clear…they’re not talking about white kids coming into Brownsville.”
NYU Research Alliance director Kathryn Hill and data analyst Erin Readling added that historically, this “burden” to integrate schools has been placed on Black students in terms of travel, and experiencing discrimination and violence when they did.
NYC schools’ integration plan
To be “truly integrated,” said Samuels, involves more than just Black, white, Asian, and Hispanic demographics. He wants to see inclusion of multilingual learners, students with disabilities, students in temporary housing, and other vulnerable populations.
His working group plans probably build on a movement to integrate schools that gained traction under former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio signed the School Diversity Accountability Act, which required the education department to track and publish school-segregation data, in 2015 and was in office when white and Black parents fought over racially and economically integrating P.S. 307, as described in Hannah-Jones’s article. In 2017, the DOE formed the New York City School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG) to make recommendations about how to make more schools more racially representative, define what that means, and measure it. The SDAG proposed that elementary and middle schools better reflect the demographics of their districts’ residents. Districts 1, 2, 3, 13, 15, 22, 27, 28, and 31 were identified as racially diverse and recommended to be prioritized for developing integration plans, said Research Alliance.
“People should recognize that there’s no one policy that is going to be a silver bullet,” said Samuels, when asked about specific policies beyond the working groups. “When you do start these policies, [and] we don’t have the input of the local community on what that is and what the impact is going to be, that’s when we often see huge backlash against such policies. The goal of the working group is to be able to work with communities — to tease out solutions and get to policies that work for people, because they were designed with people.”
Banks said he’d be “shocked” if there was a “real” timeline for the integration plan. He criticized Mamdani, Samuels, and the DOE for the lack of Black leadership in the education department and the recent resignations of administrators, such as former Deputy Chancellor Simone Hawkins.
NYU Research Alliance analysts said it’s important to focus on research and evaluation, implementing the Five R’s of Real Integration, and it’s “not enough to just move bodies around.”
Other parents and advocates said they’d like to see the administration’s plans focus on building equitable funding and resources for lower-tiered schools; support more G&T programs and specialized high school prep at younger grade levels; and make it easier to visit a school site before admissions time. Both Grant and Rice also emphasized that city and state leaders should reform the Fair Student Funding formula so school allocations are no longer tied directly to enrollment numbers.
