In the backroom of a bar in Astoria Elle Biscoff-Church, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff and closest confidant and the mayor’s inner circle might be debating one of the most intractable educational issues: how to address the segregation of New York City schools
In the sixties, a decade after Brown v Bd of Education the Department of Education began to plan busing students to integrate segregated schools. A grassroots organization, called Parents and Taxpayers (PAT) demonstrated and gained support of most electeds and the city backed off, see David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in New York City Schools (1968),
One can scarcely conceive of an issue more important to the future of the cities than the failure of the New York City Board of Education and the political structure of the City of New York to institute an effective desegregation of the city’s schools during the 1960’s.
In February, 1964 Reverend Milton Galamison organized a citywide boycott and demanded the integration of school. see Clarence Taylor Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle for School Integration in New York City(1997)
In the mid sixties James Madison High School was integrated and a decade later a major racial incident occurred, the school was closed for three days. The NYC Human Rights Commission wrote a detailed, highly publicized report followed by an examination by the NY Times.
Far from being accidental, the commission said, the riots were “virtually predictable” and stemmed from Madison’s nearly total failure to assimilate the black students into the life of the school. For 10 years, black children had been making the long trek out of the Brownsville, BedfordStuyvesant and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn —some taking subway and bus trips that lasted more than an hour—only to be treated when they arrived as unwanted outsiders. Many felt they had been reviled by the merchants near the school along Kings Highway, talked down to by the faculty and snubbed by their white classmates. The result, said the report, was a deep‐down hostility among both whites and blacks that made such outbreaks inevitable, not only at Madison but at the other formerly all‐white high schools in the city that have been similarly “integrated.” “The fact is,” the report concluded, “we know how to integrate through redistricting, reassignment of students, busing. What we do not know is how to make integration work on a permanent basis.”
The school community initially rejected the recommendations in the report.
Fran Schumer, at the time a recent graduate of Madison wrote an perceptive essay in the Harvard Crimson,
Prisoners of Class
By Fran Schumer
December 19, 1973
IN A QUIET, residential area of Brooklyn, N.Y., a crowd of angry white teen-agers surrounded the main doors of James Madison High School chanting “We want the Niggers, we want the Niggers.” Armed with sticks, rocks and fragments of glass, they waited for the black students in the school to leave the building …
White students, assaulted and insulted by blacks, get scared. Black students, who hate riding the trains for three hours every day to attend a school with an all-white administration nestled in an all-white community, strike out at the whites. The black parents voluntarily commit their kids to this school transfer program because they believe their kids can get a better education at Madison than they can at the decaying neighborhood school. White parents fight tooth and nail the entrance of more black kids into the school because they fear the fall of property values and they can’t afford to exit the scene. And teachers at Madison, who would prefer to have the children of lawyers and doctors as their students, children who don’t cut class, don’t etch “fuck” on the desks, don’t shoot-up in bathrooms, throw up their hands and cry to administrators, “If we can’t perform our role as teachers, at least protect us in our role as policemen.” The school community initially rejected the recommendations in the report.
Today Madison, with 3600 students is a school sought after by parents, See school snapshot here
In 1979 District 22 (Flatbush, Sheepshead Bay) quietly designed and implemented an integration plan.
Students from adjacent addresses in the northern end of the district were bused to the same all White, underutilized schools in the southern end of the district. The elected, religious and parent leaders were briefed, with a caveat, “if we don’t craft a plan the feds will, and we won’t like it.”No press releases, no NY Times article, a skilled, politically astute school board crafted, implemented a school integration plan, today, not likely.
With gentrification increasing, the black and white school population decreasing and the Hispanic and Asian populations increasing the city schools have become a melange, kids from over a hundred nations. Hispanic kids from many nations, Black kids from the Caribbean as well as Africa, speaking different languages, aa true mosaic.
New York City Schools by Race:
- Hispanic / Latino: 41.6%
- Black / African American: 19.3%
- Asian or Asian / Pacific Islander: 19.0%
- White: 16.4%
- Two or More Races / Multi-Racial: 2.3%
Schools reflect their neighborhoods by race and ethnicity. Two districts (2 and 15), on their own removed “screens” and other hindrances to increase integration. In spite of central office prodding, other districts have shown little interest in integrating local schools.
However a UCLA Study reveals,
- State Rankings: New York is ranked first nationwide for the segregation of Black students and second for Latino students (trailing only California). [1]
- Intense Isolation: Roughly 85% to 90% of Black students and about 75% to 84% of Latino students in New York attend predominantly nonwhite or intensely segregated schools (schools with 90% or more nonwhite student enrollment). [1]
- New York City’s Role: NYC operates one of the largest and most segregated school systems in the country, where over 94% of public school students attend predominantly nonwhite schools. [1, 2]
The current NYC Chancellor has designed five districts to explore school integration plans with no timelines.
In the last few weeks school segregation has grabbed headlines.
Nicole Hannah Jones, a NYTimes investigative reporter and principal author of the 1619 Project wrote a blazing NY Times article: her daughter was in a failing middle school, and according to Jones the blame should fall on the school leader and the school system.
A few days later Jones and Chancellor Samuels confronted each other on a panel with Jones abusing the chancellor for not mandating timelines for integration plans at the school and district level.
David Kirkland, the former leader of the NYU Metro Center, commented
When Keeping White Families Matters More Than Protecting Black Children
What does it say about a school system when the possibility of losing white children commands more urgency than the actual loss of Black ones?
That is the question I carried away from last night’s town hall on school integration at Washington Irving High School. I left profoundly saddened — not because I learned anything new about segregation in New York City, but because I watched, in real time, how a system rationalizes its refusal to change, even when the consequences of that refusal are borne disproportionately by its most vulnerable children.
Perhaps the most painful part was watching a school chancellor I know, respect, and publicly endorsed in the Amsterdam News struggle to answer a remarkably straightforward question: What is your plan to address segregation in New York City’s schools?Mayor de Blasio appointed a School Diversity Advisory Group,
As the 2018 report of the Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group concluded:
Decades of research has taught us that diverse, integrated schools offer academic and social benefits for all students. Researchers have identified three major advantages to integrated schools: (1) all students benefit when they can learn from classmates who have different life experiences to share, evidenced by higher academic outcomes, stronger critical thinking skills, and increased creativity; (2) all students benefit from reductions in prejudices and implicit biases and improved social-emotional well-being; and (3) all students benefit from experiences that prepare them for an increasingly diverse society.
In 2023 Norm Fruchter and his team provided a detailed analysis of the school segregation with specific recommendations and understands the political risks,
What might be the responses to such a proposed diversity policy to reduce the intense segregation of the city’s high schools? That proposal would trigger a citywide firestorm of outrage and opposition. Opponents would charge the mayor and chancellor with ill-conceived and unfair social engineering. Critics would blast the policy as unjustifiable affirmative action. Many parents would respond with alarm to the realization that their children’s selection of a “good” high school was suddenly jeopardized, while others would support the proposed policy. Fierce discussion about equity, privilege, political correctness, and reverse racism would dominate the city’s education policy arenas.
There is a growing body of evidence to support the research.
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly
selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty
housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO’s
impacts on children’s long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that
moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age
13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single
parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative
impacts, perhaps because of disruption effects. The decline in the
gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the
duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an
important determinant of children’s long-term outcomes.
,Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, uses “Big Data” to explore big ideas.
The new study highlights a powerful way to boost opportunity. It doesn’t involve handing out money, and it appears to pretty much pay for itself. It works by harnessing the greatest influence there is on kids — other kids.
The study, just released, is the latest landmark finding from Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, and his Opportunity Insights group, along with other scholars.
… the low-income children thrived because of something that can be hard to talk about: They acquired better-off friends and thus a window into middle-class lifestyles and aspirations.
“The single strongest predictor of economic mobility across areas is the fraction of higher-income friends that low-income people have,” Chetty told me. “In communities where you have more cross-class interaction, kids do much better.”
The researchers used anonymized Facebook friend networks and cellphone location data to show that children in these redeveloped neighborhoods spent more time in homes outside of public housing and befriended kids in more affluent families.
Those friendships were the driver of increased upward mobility, the study found. Some Americans flinch at gentrification, perceiving exploitation and marginalization, but the truth is more complicated: When it leads to cross-class interactions, that can be a plus for children.
And as this study suggests, some of the best coaches we can find to help struggling children escape poverty may be other children and their families.
Watch Chetty explain his research on a superb youtube
Mamdani’s housing initiative, “Block by Block,” to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade may also raise educational outcomes
