Dive Brief:
- New York City’s lack of socioeconomic diversity in many of its neighborhoods makes desegregating neighborhood schools a challenge, and the city's department of education is not inclined to force systemic change.
- The New York Times reports individual schools dominated by wealthy students are launching programs to reserve seats for students from low-income families, but the education department has shied away from a comprehensive plan, opting instead to give schools the flexibility to make their own enrollment changes.
- One diversity initiative being considered by schools and districts in New York is controlled choice enrollment plans, where families list their top schools and administrators actively balance school diversity.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. Supreme Court mandated desegregation in schools in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, saying separate but equal is inherently unequal. While there were decades of progress, educators and researchers have noticed a retrenchment of segregation in recent years. Many urban districts are shaped so that wealthier, white families can keep their kids in higher-performing, better-funded suburban schools.
Still, urban areas like New York can easily feature very low-poverty schools relatively close to high-poverty ones and mostly white schools next to mostly black or Latino ones. In many districts, magnets and other selective enrollment schools attract a disproportionately high number of white students from wealthy families. Administrators across the country will have to get creative to turn the tide of segregation back once again.