When I pointed out at a Community Education Council meeting in June that such increases in travel hassle will necessarily lead to "a lot of unhappy parents," a woman bearing a strong resemblance to Elizabeth Warren snapped back at me: "You mean a lot of unhappy white parents!" To recalibrate the percentage of disadvantaged kids at each sub-district school to between 25 and 35, as is the current goal of the re-zoning process, will require many more 5-year-olds having to travel further than walking distance to kindergarten, in a dense swath of South Brooklyn. (These proxies for poverty and disadvantage frequently overlap with racial categories, and are routinely-if sloppily-used to measure racial composition.) The combined rate of the seven schools in our area is more like 30 percent, ranging from a low of 11 percent to a high of 100. In a city full of ethnic clusters and housing projects, that's basically all of them.Īn example: At the elementary school my eldest daughter just graduated from, just 12 percent of the student population either qualifies for free or reduced-price student lunch, lives in temporary housing, or is learning English as a second language. Striving for uniform demographics among schools even within a sub-district, let alone a full district-or borough, or city-requires mandating that more students travel further distances away from neighborhoods that have different racial or socioeconomic concentration than the average. The city's political class has been on its heels ever since an influential 2014 report from University of California, Los Angeles' Civil Rights Project concluded that Gotham is "home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation." According to The New York Times, "Last year, New York's elementary school gifted classes enrolled about 16,000 students and were nearly 75 percent white and Asian." This is in a system whose overall ethnic composition is 41 percent Latino, 26 percent black, 16 percent Asian, and 15 percent white, with 73 percent of kids defined as living in poverty. It contains all sorts of anomalies, and the gifted and talented emphasis-which kids can start testing for at age four-is definitely one. The New York Department of Education, with 1.1 million students (including 123,000 serviced by charters), is the country's largest. "Today they have become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together…These programs segregate students by race, class, abilities and language and perpetuate stereotypes about student potential and achievement." "The current 'Screened' and Gifted and Talented programs…segregate students by race and socioeconomic status," the report concludes. The most telling statistics concern not the vast achievement gap between, say, charter schools and traditional public institutions among otherwise comparable populations of poor and minority kids, but rather the fact that whites and Asians disproportionately make it through most school "screens," whether they be tests that can be prepped for, or simple attendance criteria that can (with effort) be met. The report, consistent with the advisory group's name and leadership (the three co-chairs are Hispanic Federation President José Calderón, NAACP New York State Conference President Hazel Dukes, and Maya Wiley, senior vice president for social justice at the New School), is fundamentally mobilized around the issue of demographic composition, rather than the problem of school quality. That last sweeping item in particular illustrates the overarching goal that dominates discussion of New York's public education system (in which both of my daughters are enrolled). Among the proposals: Phase out most gifted and talented programs and the tests upon which they are based, eliminate almost all criteria having to do with student performance (for instance, no more auditions for performing arts schools), and radically overhaul admissions policies so that "all schools represent the socioeconomic and racial diversity of their community school district within the next three years, and by their borough in the first five years… the city as a whole" within 10. The mayor's hand-picked School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG) came out yesterday with a detailed set of recommendations to " desegregate" New York's public schools. Beginning Tuesday, de Blasio, who enjoys sweeping control over his city's school system, has a golden opportunity to act upon his prejudice. New York City Mayor and 15th-ranked Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio professed his hatred last month for the "charter school movement," "high-stakes testing," and other educational policies bequeathed to him by his reform-friendly predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.
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