The New York City public school system is the nation’s largest. It has 32 districts and 1,800 schools under its jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, it is also the nation’s most segregated. In 2014, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project wrote that New York’s schools were “intensely-segregated,” and that students of color had “the lowest exposure to white students” of any school system in the country.
In response to these allegations and what is very obviously a problem, the New York City Department of Education has released a new plan today to make their schools more accessible, integrated and diverse.
Black and Hispanic students are 70 percent of the population that NYC public schools serve; the department’s goal is to integrate schools by adding 50,000 students to what school officials term “racially representative schools.”
These are schools in which black and Hispanic students are at least 50 percent (but no more than 90 percent) of the student body.
Despite 70 percent of its students being either black or Hispanic, only 30 percent of New York’s public schools currently count as “racially representative schools.”
Outside of race, the school system’s new plan also calls for making classrooms more economically diverse — officials plan to ensure that schools have student populations that come from a wide variety of economic backgrounds. The plan calls for “serving more low-income or more high-income children” in schools that are economically homogeneous.
Inclusivity was also addressed in the new plan — the department wants to ensure that students for whom English is a second language and that have disabilities “are welcomed and served effectively.”
This last point is near and dear to New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s heart.
She recalled her time in kindergarten in The Washington Post, saying that she “was absent for the first six weeks of kindergarten,” due to her teacher renaming her.
“My teacher decided to replace my hard-to-pronounce Spanish last name, Guillen, with something easier for her — Quillan. I didn’t raise my hand during roll call.”
Only after her father — who spoke very little English — came to her school and demanded that her teacher call her by her name did Fariña begin to raise her hand to be counted.
Fariña says this new plan will ensure “equity ad excellence for children who [don’t] speak English, for black and Latino children, for children with disabilities, for homeless children, for children whose parents aren’t wealthy.”
Fariña and her Department of Education have a lot of ideas on how to make their push for increased diversity happen: 12, in fact.
These include making the application process for school easier and expanding parents’ online access to applications, expanding diversity targets in department admissions processes, making positive impacts on district diversity a criteria for opening new schools, rezoning to make schools open now more diverse and having STEM programs create plans for increasing the number of young women and minorities enrolled in their programs.
Much has been made of late of research that shows having racially and economically diverse classrooms benefits students. And having racially diverse teachers benefits students as well.
We hope that New York's plan is a success, for the sake of all those enrolled in its schools. If you'd like more information on the city's diversity plan, you can access on the Department of Education's website.
