Douglas Ready and his colleagues starkly outline the challenges facing New York City schools: gaping inequalities of opportunity mean we are missing out on the talents of large numbers of low-income and minority students. Almost sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, separate schools – for minority and white students and for low-income and middle-class students – are almost always unequal.
While virtually all efforts today to close the achievement gap focus on improving segregated high poverty schools, research suggests we should be paying at least as much attention to reducing concentrations of school poverty themselves. Trying to make “separate but equal” schools for rich and poor work has proven highly frustrating. Despite the considerable attention showered on high poverty schools that beat the odds, majority low-income schools are 22 times less likely to be high performing as majority middle-class schools. Meanwhile, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, low-income fourth grade students who have a chance to attend schools with low concentrations of poverty are two years ahead in math of those attending high poverty schools.
New York City has the third most segregated schools system in the country and could learn from more than 80 school districts nationally that use socioeconomic status (often based on eligibility for subsidized lunch) as a factor in student assignment. These districts – from Raleigh, North Carolina to Chicago -- have learned a great deal about how to integrate students since the era of compulsory busing. Today, districts rely on choice and incentives, such as magnet schools and charter schools, to voluntarily integrate schools by economic status and race. For example, the Community Roots Charter School in Brooklyn, which my colleague Halley Potter and I profile in Diverse Charter Schools, has attracted a broad cross section of students who are thriving in an economically and racially integrated environment.
New York City’s public school choice infrastructure opens up the possibility of students moving beyond segregated neighborhoods to integrated schools, but as New York Appleseed has demonstrated, the city’s choice programs today actually exacerbate segregation. Properly structured, with weighted lotteries to encourage socioeconomic integration, choice could promote far more integrated schools than New York City now has. And as the public school choice plan in Cambridge, Massachusetts demonstrates, economic integration can produce far higher graduation rates for black, Latino, and low-income students, while white and middle-class students continue to do well. Higher income and white students gain too from being in classes where students bring a variety of life experiences to the classroom.
If the new mayor wishes to end the divided nature of New York City, there is no better place to start than by chipping away at segregation in the public schools. Socioeconomic integration will not be possible in all New York City public schools, but now is the time to think creatively about giving more children of all backgrounds a chance to attend economically integrated schools that will provide an environment in which students can flourish.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, has been called “the intellectual father of the economic integration movement”in K-12 schooling, and “arguably the nation's chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions.” He is also an authority on teachers’ unions, private school vouchers, charter schools, turnaround school efforts, labor organizing and inequality in higher education.
