Long-Awaited Plan for Integrating Schools Proves Mostly Small-Bore

NYC's racial segregation begins when children are there/four years old. At that age, middle/upper class parents begin preparing their kids to take the gifted and talented exam. Gifted and talented programs don't even exist in poorer neighborhood schools. That said, most uneducated parents lack the skill, knowledge and access to prepare small children for testing at that age. The system segregates students in this fashion from the outset, relegating black/brown students to substandard classrooms and school; it then uses test scores to justify the segregation thereafter.

Please let us start by fully intend the wealthiest distircts in the upper west side. Let's see what the parents so except for pulling their kids out.

At the elementary level, the idea of real estate being destiny is a totally false argument. All the housing project kids in Brownstone Brooklyn, for example, are funneled to a few schools, which inevitably become undesirable. Meanwhile, some zones--like the ones in Cobble Hill and Park Slope--don't contain a single building that is subsidized by the city. All the schools are walking distance from each other, so there is no reason NOT to distribute the project kids evenly among all the schools. Moreover, elementary school---when the academic work isn't particularly hard and half the learning is of a social nature--is the perfect time to be mixing it up and giving all kids the chance to excel, including the poor ones. Shame on the De Blasio administration for not redrawing the maps out here....It would have been easy.

The challenge is not the children, it is the allocation of scarce resources. We all know what works, well developed teachers, effective administrators and a supportive school community. Residential segregation plays a role in school segregation but in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods the segregation in schools persist. Let's look at the schools as they are now, there are many schools that have learning communities where children thrive. If there are children that are academically disadvantaged, let's look at ways to support their learning and challenge the students who benefit from advanced instruction. We're in the twenty first century. As a city we must be strong and of good courage so all of our children will have the opportunity to thrive inside and out of the classrooms.

What I find pretty ironic is the the people advocating putting children in low performing schools always put their children in high functioning schools or in private schools. deBlasio's children went to the "testing-in" high schools, so his children were totally segregated. Until parents take responsibility for their children's education, low performing schools will continue to do poorly. As I asked a guidance counselor in a middle school in an area of the Bronx with mostly low income residents, "Bet you see a lot of kids falling through the cracks?" Her answer, "Not a lot - all of them are falling through the cracks."

Let's focus our limited resources on improving the quality of teaching and support services in neighborhood schools instead of pursuing policies of social engineering designed to satisfy ideologues who have other concerns..The middle class is decreasing rapidly in NYC and the rich will do as they please.So let's deal with the demographic realities.

The article states "Elementary schools are segregated largely because of housing segregation, but middle and high schools are segregated in part because many schools screen students based on grades and test scores."

Does this mean admitting students who have excellent grades and high test scores to middle and high schools automatically equals segregation?

Diversity is just one part of education. Educating students in the class room is more important. Reducing the stress and strain of busing on the entire family is more important. Keeping students close to home in our scary world is more important. Communities are not as isolated today as they were in the post war years. So diversity can be achieved more naturally. But Mayor Bill wants to ride the issue into a second term at the expense of education and families with children in the school system.

Just once it might be interesting for the NY Times to talk to the parents who send their children to schools that have few white students to find out their views.

Do they want to spend money busing their kids to a different school?

Or do they just want the school their child goes to now to have the same resources that some very rich charter schools have -- catered lunches, guaranteed class sizes, the ability to push out kids who take too many resources and make sure the cost of educating those students who have more needs is not part of their own child's school budget, which can now pay for even more aides, tutors, and very small class sizes for struggling students?

The very richest charter schools that are the LEAST diverse have long wait lists we are told. Not because they are charters. But because they have massive funding the students there get to be free riders on the larger system without having a penny of it coming from their school's budget.

I am glad the Mayor is working toward policies to increase diversity and he should be commended for it.

The primary mission of the public schools should be education, not diversity for its own sake. Screened schools serve that primary mission by providing an environment in which students with above average abilities can be challenged to learn.

"middle and high schools are segregated in part because many schools screen students based on grades and test scores."

Well that dog just won't hunt. Having academically inclined and gifted students in one place is just wrong if it means that some races are under represented. Time to lower the bar!

The purpose of a school is to educate. High achieving students learn best when they are challenged, not being forced to sit through remedial work. That is why "middle and high schools ... screen students based on grades and test scores" -- because it makes sense to segregate children according to their abilities, not by their race or religion or any other quality that does not have anything to do with learning.

DiBlasio is small time. What did you expect?

So, there is overwhelming segregation and the plan is to attempt to decrease segregation by less than 5% in 5 years - by the way, there will be two mayoral elections within that period, so no accountability. Very disappointing. As for the concern over middle class and white flight - the public school system should not be organized around that fear. If brown/black children are allowed to enroll in the well-heeled elementary schools some of the concern around separate and UNEQUAL schools for brown/black children will abate.

I am in favor of school integration (and my kids attend one of the very few truly diverse and inclusive public schools in New York City -- a charter school, not coincidentally). To understand the challenge, however, I think people need more information about the demographics. According to the City's data, New York City's public schools are 14.9% white and 15.8% Asian overall. To reflect the population, a school with 500 students would have to have 75 white students, 79 Asian students, 200 Hispanic students, 130 Black students, 65 English language learners, and 97 students with disabilities. Personally, I think that would be a beautiful thing, but creating that type of integration system-wide, while meeting the academic and other needs of all students, is a tall order.

So the "plan" is to wish all of our schools were more diverse. But this can't happen without dragging down the good schools / putting a big fleet of school buses on the streets / chasing the middle class out of the city. So good luck with that.

If you try to diversify NYC public schools, you will force middle and upper-middle class families to flee NYC. There are already limited options for families who want excellent education for their kids. Don't try to destroy good NYC public schools for the sake of diversity. Instead, please try to improve all public schools so all kids of all colors get quality education in the five boroughs.

So if a White or Asian middle class family is told their kids cannot go to the local school for the sake of "diversity" they will be fine with it and that will lead to less segregation. Hmmm, didn't Judge Sand try a similar social experiment in Yonkers by forcing low-income housing on White middle-class neighborhoods in the 80s. It is my understanding that not only the quality of the schools plummeted but the White flight was so great Yonkers became more segregated in the 90s than ever before.
When it comes to schools parents want the best for their kids. And the "best" is not taking your high-achieving child out of a great school, bus them to a low-income neighborhood where your child will be taught how to proceed through a metal detector without setting it off.

Speaking of District 2, THIS would be integration in Lower Manhattan: Re-map DIstrict 2 and District 1. The District map as it stands now is RIDICULOUS.

D2 comprises all of Manhattan below Central Park, with a bit of the Upper East. Four of the richest neighborhoods in the entire U.S. (Tribeca, Chelsea, W. Village, and UES) are in District 2.

The only area below Central Park that is NOT District 2, is TINY District 1. D1 is the East Village and a portion of the Lower East Side, and includes almost all of the housing projects in Lower Manhattan. Huh? Who came up with this, and why?

The mother's milk of education is MONEY (as parents are beckoned to contribute monetary donations to schools), and parents volunteering. The multi-millionaires in D2 are equipped to do both; the many residents in D1 who live below the poverty line are not. And there are many other factors leading to a HUGE difference in the schools of these two districts, which lie right next to each other.

Integration? How about chucking District 1 and just make ALL of Lower Manhattan District 2. Spread the wealth from west to east! Or, make everything below 14th Street District 1, and Central Park-to-14th Street District 2.

When we lived in the E. Village my son attended a D1 elementary school and stayed there even after we moved to Brooklyn. But the middle school the dearth of choices and overcrowding in D1 made us leave the district.

The Mayor continues on his mission of driving the middle class out of New York. The City's higher performing high schools are bursting at the seams by having students bused in from all over the City for triple sessions. Locals look to go elsewhere, often to the specialized schools far away from home. These schools do their best to keep standards high despite heavy pressure to force increased enrollments. Some local schools, formerly very desirable, are no longer so. The busing of tens of thousands of students is off-budget so no one cares.

Neighborhood schools should be just that, and all schools should be good ones. Children should not spend an hour or more commuting to school and then at the end of the day another hour or more before getting home to do a little work and to relax.

It is patronizing to believe that black children can learn only when put into white schools. Many brilliant black people came from all-black schools, learned despite not having all the amenities that some white schools had, and became part of our professional class.

White schools in America's "heartland" are necessarily not producing educated citizens. Our last election proved that. Are we to bus the children of the heartland elsewhere? Apples don't, as they say, fall far from the tree.

Birth control. If parents could focus their attention, and whatever teaching abilities they have, on fewer babies, we'd have better-prepared schoolchildren.

Of all colors.

Even the heartland might find, with fewer mouths to feed, that it has time to read some (real) history, Scientific American (if nothing else), and notice that spring and spring blooms are coming along ever earlier, year after year.