City Spells Out Initiatives to Increase School Diversity

The city's plan to address segregation is not bold, according to observers. And it doesn't even use the term "segregation." But the plan is here, after much anticipation, and it does include some small, but concrete goals and policy changes.

The plan is 12 pages with four key sections, and is titled Equity and Excellence for All: Diversity in New York City Public Schools.

"My big question is whether or not this plan will benefit young people within New York City," said David Kirkland, who leads the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. "I think it’s a step in the right direction."

Education officials have set two goals that most explicitly address race and class. One is to increase the number of students that attend what the city calls "racially representative" schools. In a system where 70 percent of students are black and Latino, the city calls a school racially representative if black and Latino students combined make up at least 50 percent of the school's population, but not more than 90 percent. 

Currently, about 303,000 students — less than a third of the total school population — attend racially representative schools. The city aims to increase that number by 50,000 over five years.

Another goal, set over five years, is to decrease by 10 percent the number of economically-stratified schools. Education officials contend that too many schools serve high concentrations of either well-off students or very high-need students, including children in poverty or those who live in temporary housing. 

The plan also includes small changes in admissions meant to even out opportunities for students, such as streamlining the application process for middle and high schools. The city will also change some admissions rules, like eliminating limited unscreened high schools. These schools give priority in admissions to students who attend an open house or information session, which the Department of Education recognized as an obstacle for families with limited time and resources.

Shino Tanikawa, an advocate who chaired an equity and diversity task force made up of parents, said she had mixed feelings about the plan.

"I’m glad to see that the Department of Education is finally recognizing that this is an issue that is really important to all of us," she said, stressing that she was expressing her personal opinion and not speaking for the task force. "Having said that, the plan doesn’t go far enough for me to get really excited by it. It has no real mandate.”

Tanikawa said that for all the city's emphasis on ground-up approaches to addressing segregation, she was disappointed that it did not require that each community school district submit a plan to deal with the problem.  

Ritchie Torres, a city councilman from the Bronx, agreed that the plan did not push for systemic change. But he said he believed it was a "serious" plan — despite what he called a glaring omission of the words "segregation" and "integration."

"It is an incremental approach," said Torres. "But it legitimizes diversity as a public policy objective of the D.O.E. So, we have a foundation on which we can build deeper reforms."

Kirkland said he would like the city to include plans for anti-bias training, as well as conversations about racial diversity among communities. He said schools must be prepared to meet the needs of diverse students, once that diversity is achieved. 

"We do have this legacy of racial segregation in the United States that is a consequence of racial prejudice," said Kirkland. "Yet, its foundation is not in schools. It’s in the heart and souls of people."

The city's work must do more to foster these conversations around race, he said.