In the school cafeteria of PS 73 in the Concourse section of the Bronx on March 8, a discussion on how to improve diversity across the city’s public school system had finally put the issue of school desegregation at the forefront.

It was the first of five town hall discussions on the topic, a product of the city Department of Education’s (DOE) Equity & Excellence for All plan. The plan, announced last year, seeks ways to promote a healthier mix of ethnicities across the borough.

The plan was also the product of Bronx Councilman Ritchie’s Torres’ bill he co-authored with Brooklyn Councilman Brad Landers that sought a greater ethnic balance in schools in the hopes that a child’s exposure to an ethnicity not their own can prepare them for a more globalized world in the years ahead.

And while the city has placed school diversity at the forefront, neither Mayor Bill de Blasio nor his appointees at the city DOE will concede the plan is intended to desegregate a public school system that’s been operating on segregated terms for decades.

“Words matter. Because how can you prescribe the right solution when you refuse to even diagnose the problem correctly? And the administration is loathed to acknowledge that our school system is segregated,” said Torres, speaking to the Norwood News from his office on Bathgate Avenue. The city’s stance, Torres notes, falls in line with denialism.

But the group’s formation is as close the DOE will admit to suggesting segregation, while unintended, is systemic. That’s evident at the Concourse school, where its neighborhood is predominantly home to black and Hispanic students, and one of the more segregated communities in the city.

A Decades Long Problem
Undoing school segregation is quite lofty. In a city impacted by the effects of redlining, a federal policy where so-called “hazardous populations” comprised of mostly minority neighborhoods were deliberately deprived of investment, leading to a segregated city, a segregated school system soon followed.

Even today, current zoning laws have been drafted to keep affordable housing units reserved for low-income earners out of wealthier, whiter neighborhoods such as the case in the East Bronx communities of Country Club, Edgewater Park, and City Island. In 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg recommended downzoning, reinforcing segregation that’s bled into the school system.

But while the city has chipped away at housing segregation, up to this point it has allowed school segregation to worsen. A 2014 UCLA study revealed that a black student in New York City only attended public school with 17 percent of white students in 2010, down six percent when compared to 1970.

The simple though often complex educational policies imposed by the public school system make it difficult to go for an easy fix. On the elementary and middle school front, parents typically send their children to schools closest to their home. In a city already plagued by housing segregation, this practice only promulgates segregation.

A data map available from IntegrateNYC, a nonprofit pushing for diversity across the school system, shows white students are separated from black and Hispanic students across the New York City public school system. Meantime, another map by the Anti-Discrimination Center, which litigates cases involving alleged discrimination, shows a deep disparity between where whites and minorities live. Overlapping the datasets together will show a relationship between segregated schools and communities.

“The evidence is clear that wherever you have racially concentrated poverty you’ll have far worse academic outcomes,” said Torres.

The evidence was shown in a 2016 report by Measure of America, a Brooklyn-based think tank group, where neighborhood disadvantage is tethered to a low high school graduation rate. Community District 5, covering the South Fordham, University Heights, Morris Heights, and Mount Hope sections of the Bronx, had the lowest high school graduation rate in 2015 with only 60.9 percent of students graduating on time. The neighborhood is largely segregated, where whites comprise 1.4 percent of the district’s population.

While the report credits the Bloomberg-era educational policy of school choice–where high school students can choose to enroll at a school outside their neighborhood and less restrictive–for moving the graduation needle some, high school graduation rates are still the poorest in largely segregated communities.

School choice itself can pose problems to desegregating the system since students rank their schools according to their preference. Students who choose to go to their neighborhood school will get priority, while those who don’t live in a given community will be given secondary preference.

For Torres, school choice gives the “illusion of equity.”

“[T]he truth is those who have the most money, and the most information will have the best choice. There are people who hire specialists that assist in navigating the public school system,” said Torres.

The DOE’s Equity and Excellence plan is doing away with some of its school choice criteria that puts students at the top of admissions preference come 2019, among them the attendance of open houses and high school fairs that had put students at the top of the list.

Torres’ bill inspired the DOE to launch a pilot program that allows for controlled choice, where parents of students can sign up for their desired school choice, but adds filters that allow for a more diverse mix of students. 

Despite Torres’ and Landers’ bill passing, the two were largely alone on sounding the alarm.

The DOE’s push to desegregate the system is incremental, Torres suggests. He’s aware an even greater nudge to overhaul the system requires too much political capital. And his colleagues, he notes, are unwilling to trade it in.

“The attempt to desegregate public education is politically treacherous territory,” said Torres. “There’s no political constituency for integrating the schools. So if the mayor were going to pursue it, he would do so because it’s the right thing to do not because of his political interests.”

Editor’s Note: This series is made possible by a fellowship from Marguerite Casey Foundation, which supports low-income families in strengthening their voice and mobilizing their communities to achieve a more just and equitable society for all. School Diversity Advisory Group town hall events take place at 6:30 p.m. on the following days: April 17 at Forest Hills H. S., 67-01 110th St., Queens; May 15 at CSI H. S. for International Studies, 100 Essex Dr., Staten Island; and Frederick Douglass Academy, 2581 7th Ave. Child care, language translation services, and food are served.