Report | Within Our Reach - Segregation in NYC District Elementary Schools and What We Can Do About It

📅 Published in 2020

Preface

It is now difficult to imagine, but seven years ago, school integration was a topic rarely discussed in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration was winding to a close, the hard-nosed ideologies of “education reform” still prevailed, and integration was seen as impossible, undesirable, and even naïve to contemplate in a city as large and complex as New York.

With our 2013 and 2014 Within Our Reach policy briefings, New York Appleseed opposed the conventional wisdom. To a school system that seemed oddly fixed in a deficit mindset inherited from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and inappropriate to a rapidly changing and dynamic city, we argued that meaningful integration was possible.

Based on scores of interviews, research, and successful advocacy, we set out to uncover and demystify those formal structures beyond housing patterns that perpetuated racial and economic segregation in schools. Just as importantly, we provided practical and achievable strategies to overcome those structures. We intended that the briefings would give parents and policy makers the analytic tools they need to understand the incidence of school segregation in their communities and workable strategies to address the underlying causes.

Our hopes were fulfilled, and over the next years, we received positive feedback from parents, elected officials, policy makers, and journalists who appreciated the way that the briefings illuminated a previously opaque, but critical area of City policy making—the means by which seats in public institutions are allocated to students. The two briefings on elementary schools were especially popular, and, in recent years, our findings and observations in those briefings have been corroborated by quantitative analysis.

While much of the analysis in the elementary-school briefings still holds true today, many things have changed. In this document, we have combined and updated the original writings to reflect advocacy victories, modified policies, and other new circumstances. We have also attempted to use the most current citations available where appropriate. In a very few cases, our own thinking has shifted slightly, and we have altered the language accordingly. Even with these revisions, the writing in many ways reflects a 2013 perspective on what might be possible in New York City, and we did not go so far as to completely rewrite the document. In the years since, we have been inspired by the many students and other advocates advancing the cause of integration and anti-racism—and appalled by counter-vailing forces of racism amassing locally and nationally.

We hope readers will agree with us that the observations and recommendations continue to be useful and relevant to discussions of elementary-school segregation in 2020 and beyond.

David Tipson,

Director New York Appleseed

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