Local Efforts Underway to Integrate NYC Schools Start Small

Segregation in the New York City public schools is nothing new but an influential study and a decade of using the system's current model for school choice have spurred efforts, official and unofficial, to change it. 

The City Council made its move when it passed the School Diversity Accountability Act, which Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law this month. It requires the Department of Education to provide demographic data on schools and detail the steps it plans to improve diversity. One of the bill’s main sponsors, Council Member Brad Lander, said this new legislation won’t immediately desegregate schools but it’s an important first step.

“This is definitely not one size fits all,” Lander said. “But let’s start by declaring that we prefer it.”

The new legislation provided an opportunity for groups that have long wanted to test their own solutions at the district or even school level. “And hopefully you come up with some experiments that are worth trying at a larger scale,” Lander said.

Those experiments range from developing specific diversity quotas for individual schools to redrawing school district lines to better reflect racial and economic diversity. One of the most popular ideas among advocates is a system called controlled choice, which maintains the Bloomberg-era ability of parents to choose which schools they will enroll their children in while maintaining common levels of diversity across all schools. (It would likely be based on socioeconomic status, relying on a metric like eligibility for free and reduced lunch; in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled to limit the use of race as a factor in school assignments.)

New York City assigns students to schools through an algorithm-driven choice system that matches families' ranked preferences with open seats. The system has had a dramatic effect on schools and families but there is a persistent group, namely poor families of color, who have not benefited from the choices. 

Advocates in certain neighborhoods — on the Upper West Side and Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Prospect Heights, Brooklyn — are promoting a system called controlled choice, where parents can still assert their preferences but the district administration ensures that each school’s enrollment reflects the community’s overall diversity.

Controlled choice first developed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1981, as a way to pre-empt the rampant violence, unrest, and white flight that occurred throughout the 70's just across the Charles River in Boston.

The system was developed by Michael Alves, an educational planner who worked for Massachusetts’ statewide desegregation office. After a few false starts, officials settled on what’s now called “the Cambridge plan.” Within a few years, diversity within schools started to stabilize and, more importantly, the new system didn’t lead to the kind of white flight that happened when cities like Boston used forced busing to desegregate schools.

“It became very clear that this model certainly would have transfer value elsewhere in Massachusetts and around the country,” said Alves, who today runs a consulting company that helps school districts develop and manage their own controlled choice systems. “So as the years rolled on, what we began in Cambridge certainly began to be replicated throughout the United States.”

Since then, it’s been a successful desegregation tool in dozens of cities across the country, including Montclair, New Jersey, Berkeley and San Francisco, California, and even Boston. It’s still used in Cambridge, where about a third of students in every school come from low-income families.

Lisa Donlan, president of District 1’s Community Education Council, said she's hoping to try controlled choice in her district. To start, she's looking to fund a family resource center to make information more accessible to all families. She also cheered the new requirement to collect diversity data from schools.

“When we decide to count something we are saying it’s important,” she said. 

Underpinning some of the anti-segregation momentum is a study published last year by UCLA researchers that showed New York’s schools were the most segregated in the nation, largely due to race and class separation within New York’s public schools. Researchers John Kucsera and Gary Orfield criticized the state’s “dismal” efforts to desegregate schools over the more than 60 years the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Matt Collette is a reporting fellow at the Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project. This story was produced with support from Renaissance Journalism’s Opportunity Gap initiative. Follow him on Twitter.