The trouble with ‘desegregating’ New York’s schools
By Seth Barron
January 5, 2017
The progressive educational policy establishment, along with its allies in government, has finally figured out why so many New York City public schools do such a poor job. The problem, it seems, isn’t with the DOE, the teachers or their powerful union.
No, the problem is racial segregation. In fact, according to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, New York City “is the epicenter of educational segregation for the nation.”
This isn’t legally enforced racial separation. The new segregation, according to the advocates, is neither mandated nor coercive, but just as insidious. “More than half of New York City’s public schools are over 90 percent black and Latino,” say City Councilmen Brad Lander and Ritchie Torres, who are leading the charge to rectify this “deep injustice.”
Lander and Torres have plans. One particularly destructive one would “adopt a more formal approach to diversity in high school admissions, including specialized (and screened) high schools.”
New York’s elite high schools are some of the city’s crown jewels, renowned for their merit-based exclusivity. Changing admission requirements to the city’s top schools for the sake of feel-good social justice would erode the schools’ tradition of excellence in the service of dubious ends.
Other proposals are equally pernicious, including a demand that the city “adopt a formal policy and strategy for making diversity a priority in admissions, zoning, and other decision-making processes,” and create an Office of School Diversity within the city’s Human Rights Commission.
By bringing “school segregation” under New York’s expansive Human Rights Law, the very existence of racial imbalance in schools would demonstrate discrimination, opening the door to lawsuits.
Now, it’s true that a majority of the city’s schools are 90 percent black and Latino, and that half of all black and Latino students attend such schools. But these numbers don’t mean very much when placed in the context of the demographics of the school system as a whole — more than 67 percent of all students in the system are black and Latino to begin with.
The student body of New York City is overwhelmingly “minority,” so how meaningful is it really to talk about “racially segregated” schools?
Lander and Torres say the problem is getting worse, and that “many of the best-regarded public elementary schools are getting whiter.”
But white kids comprise less than 15 percent of the city’s entire student population, and many of them live in outlying areas like Staten Island or Belle Harbor. Absent a massive program of busing, or forced population transfer, there aren’t enough white people to satisfy the progressives.
Advocates blame historical residential patterns — i.e., Chinese-Americans in Chinatown and Puerto Ricans in Spanish Harlem. But if such patterns were really at fault here, elementary schools would have much higher racial segregation than high schools.
However, racial disparities in the school system are much the same across grade level: 59 percent of black and Latino kids attend elementary schools that are 90 percent black or Latino, while 52 percent of black and Latino teenagers attend high schools that are 90 percent black or Latino.
Plus, while certain excellent elementary schools on the Upper West Side or Park Slope may be “getting whiter,” the opposite is true at several of the city’s excellent selective high schools. At Stuyvesant HS, for instance, where admission is based entirely on one test, the proportion of white students dropped from 23.7 percent in 2011 to 19.1 percent last year, because they were out-performed by the city’s growing Asian-American student population.
Many of these Asian kids are either immigrants or children of immigrants, and come from communities that have poverty rates that are close or equal to those of black and Latino kids.
Fussing over the racial composition of the city’s schools should be the last thing education advocates worry about. Certain charter-school models have demonstrated that an entirely black, Latino and underprivileged student population can excel, and even outperform, wealthy suburban districts where most of the kids are white.
The United Federation of Teachers, along with its policy apparatus in the universities and its allies on the City Council, should focus on improving the quality of teaching, and leave grandiose schemes of social engineering aside.
Seth Barron is the NYC Initiative project director at the Manhattan Institute.
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