Dear Commons Community,
The New York City Independent Budget Office released a new report yesterday indicating that the Department of Education will have difficulty desegregating middle schools because of the large concentrations of poor students in certain neighborhoods and schools.
About a third of the city’s roughly 600 middle schools serve overwhelmingly poor students, and more than half of the city’s low-income adolescents are clustered in just a quarter of middle schools, according to the report.
Low levels of academic achievement in schools with highly concentrated poverty have long plagued urban school districts, and decades of interventions have not produced clear solutions. Studies have shown that breaking up those clusters of poverty could help improve schools across the board.
Over the last year in particular, parents, activists and city officials have pointed to segregation in middle schools as a contributor to the persistent achievement gap between white, Asian and middle class students and their poorer peers, who are often black and Hispanic. As reported in the New York Times:
“Parent groups in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and on Manhattan’s Upper West Side have proposed new middle school admissions policies in the hopes of curbing segregation before students enroll in sixth grade. Parents in Upper Manhattan and central Brooklyn are experimenting with similar plans of their own.
But the report shows just how challenging it will be for the city to address middle school segregation across the school system.
The Independent Budget Office studied more than 158,000 students from 279 middle schools between 2013 and 2014. It considered students low income if they live in poor parts of the city, in neighborhoods with above-average levels of violence, or in neighborhoods where adults have low levels of education and have low incomes.
The researchers found significant opportunity and achievement gaps between students at schools with high levels of low-income students and those with a wealthier population. Several of the 25 middle schools identified as having the lowest numbers of poor students — schools where fewer than 17 percent of the student body come from low-income homes — send a sizable portion of their students to the city’s specialized high schools, which require a test for admission. At least 20 percent of students at five of those schools were offered admission to a specialized high school.
Just over half of eighth graders at one of the schools with the fewest poor children, the Salk School of Science in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, received an offer to a specialized school
None of the schools with the smallest populations of poor students are in the Bronx, but 22 of the 25 middle schools with student bodies that are at least 93 percent poor are there.
Several of those schools are among city’s worst-performing: eight are in the city’s Renewal program for struggling schools, and two have been closed by the Department of Education for poor performance since 2014.
A more integrated school system could help combat the ills of housing segregation, activists say, by offering children early opportunities to travel outside their neighborhoods and meet peers from other parts of the city.
The schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza, has already approved the desegregation plan on the Upper West Side and has indicated that he will approve one for District 15, which includes Park Slope.
When told of the report’s findings, Will Mantell, a department of education spokesman, said that the city was “investing in a comprehensive equity and excellence for all education agenda to provide students with high-quality instruction at every New York City school. Working towards more diverse and inclusive schools is a key part of that agenda.”
The housing segregation in New York and many other cities makes it very difficult to develop comprehensive plans to integrate high poverty middle schools without resorting to policies such as busing that many parents will resist.
Tony
