Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times hasan extensive article on the racial segregation that exists in the New York City schools.  This is the second article in a series examining the changing racial distribution of students in New York City’s public schools and its impact on their opportunities and achievements. The previous article chronicled the experience of Rudi-Ann Miller, one of 40 black students at Stuyvesant High School, which has 3,295 students.

In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school system looms as one of the most segregated. While the city’s public-school population looks diverse — 40.3 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14.9 percent white and 13.7 percent Asian — many of its schools are nothing of the sort.

About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.   The article looks specifically at Explore Charter in Brooklyn as a case study.

“… of the school’s 502 students from kindergarten through eighth grade this school year, 92.7 percent are black, 5.7 percent are Hispanic, and a scattering are of mixed race. None are white or Asian. There is a good deal of cultural diversity, with students, for instance, of Haitian, Guyanese and Nigerian heritage. But not of class. Nearly 80 percent of the students qualify for subsidized lunch, a mark of poverty. The school’s makeup is in line with charter schools nationally, which are over all less integrated than traditional public schools.

At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.

The school’s enrollment is even more racially lopsided than its catchment area. Students are chosen by lottery, with preference given to District 17, its community school district, which encompasses neighborhoods like Flatbush, East Flatbush, Crown Heights and Farragut. Census data for District 17 put the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade population at 75 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent white and 1 percent Asian. But the white students go elsewhere — many to yeshivas or other private schools.

Tim Thomas, a fund-raiser who is white and lives in Flatbush, writes a blog called The Q at Parkside, about the neighborhood. He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”

One very telling exchange was as follows:

“Jean McCauley, 47, is a single mother with two sons by different fathers, both gone from her life. When her older son, now 26, began school, his father had a friend in TriBeCa, and they used his address to get him into Public School 234, a well-regarded, largely white school. “I feel so grateful for my son being in that environment,” she said. “Expectations were so high. That school had everything. It was a world apart.”

He graduated from college and works at a real estate agency.

For her younger son, Brandon Worrell, she didn’t have that option. He is in sixth grade at Explore. She considers it a good school, but fears he doesn’t learn racial tolerance. “At Explore he can’t compare to anything,” she said. “He won’t know how to communicate with other races. He won’t know there is a difference. I think color will always be the first thing he sees.”

She added, “I speak to Brandon about race. But he doesn’t get it. It’s abstract.”

Tony