Segregation is not a thing of the past. Although there may not be laws in place that demand it, it still exists in our schools. It may come as a surprise that the nation’s most segregated schools are located in New York.
The UCLA Civil Rights Project released a study this week entitled “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation,” which looked at 60 years worth of data going up to the year 2010. It determined that in 2009 New York state’s black and Latino students had the “highest concentration of intensely-segregated public schools” in which white students made up less than 10% of the student population. “For several decades, the state has been more segregated for blacks than any Southern state, though the South has a much higher percent of African American students,” the authors wrote.
What’s worse is that there is a level of “double segregation” happening. According to project director Gary Orfield, not only are students of color often separated from white students, but there tends to be a division based on income as well. The typical black or latino student attends school with twice as many low income students as their white peers. These kind of statistics bring on residual problems such as entrenched violence, teachers from the least selective programs and health issues. ”They don’t train kids to work in a society that’s diverse by race and class,” he said. “There’s a systematically unequal set of demands on those schools.”
Those who believe that New York City doesn’t contribute to these alarming statistics would be wrong.
While segregated schools are located throughout New York state, the segregation of schools in New York City — the country’s most heterogeneous area — contributes to the state’s standing. Of the city’s 32 Community School Districts, 19 had 10 percent or fewer white students in 2010. All school districts in the Bronx fell into that category. More than half of New Yorkers are black or Latino, but most neighborhoods have little diversity — and recent changes in school enrollment policies, spurred by the creation of many charter schools, haven’t helped, Orfield argues.
Only 8 percent of New York City charter schools are considered multiracial, meaning they had a white enrollment of 14.5 percent or above, the New York City average. “Charter schools take the metro’s segregation to an extreme,” according to the report. “Nearly all charters” in the Bronx and Brooklyn were “intensely segregated” in 2010, meaning they had less than 10 percent white student enrollment. The Civil Rights Project considers 73 percent of New York City charters to be “apartheid schools,” in which less than 1 percent of students are white, and 90 percent were “intensely segregated.” (Orfield clarified that he uses the word apartheid to make “people understand what it’s like when you have a law that requires racial separation — we are very close to that level.”) Charter supporters have argued that Orfield’s methodology compares schools’ racial composition to those of boroughs or cities, but not their immediate surrounding neighborhoods.
As a native New Yorker, hearing that New York has the most segregated schools in the nation was a bit jarring, but the facts they present are not surprising.
Our neighborhoods are extremely segregated, so it can only follow that our schools will be as well. For many students, high school is the first and only opportunity to have some autonomy over what kind of schools they go to and, unfortunately, the competition is stiff. The root of this problem is much deeper than the schools.
The New York State Education Department had this to say:
“Both racial and socioeconomic integration can contribute to advancing the student outcomes we want and ensuring the kind of society we want that reflects America’s democratic principles. The nation, the state, and our school districts all have work to do,” spokesperson Dennis Tompkins said. “Over the years, the Board of Regents and the Department have supported a variety of initiatives along these lines, including the Rochester Urban-Suburban Initiative. More recently, the Department required students at two failing Buffalo high schools to be provided with access to high-quality programs at a suburban BOCES, and the Board of Regents called for legislation to allow the creation of regional high schools.”