According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project, New York State has the most segregated public schools in the nation. Nearly three-quarters of the charter schools in New York City are considered “apartheid schools” because less than 1% of their enrollment is white. Charters are often more racially segregated than the district in which they are located.
2014 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, which ruled that legally-sanctioned racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
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New York Schools Most Segregated in the Nation
UCLA report identifies alarming trends throughout the Empire State
LOS ANGELES–A report released today by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project finds that public school students in New York continue to be severely segregated. Public school students in the state are increasingly isolated by race and class as the proportion of minority and poor students continues to grow, according to the CRP report, “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future.”
The study explores trends in enrollment and school segregation patterns from 1989 to 2010 at the state and regional levels, including the New York City metropolitan areas of Long Island and the New York City District, and the upstate metropolitan areas of Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.
The report also documents the history of school desegregation in the state and across its geographic regions, including key desegregation cases and remedies in Yonkers, Rochester, and Buffalo.
In New York City, in particular, the report highlights both historical and current practices and policies perpetuating racial imbalance and educational inequity across schools, and challenged by parents and community organizations.
Educational problems linked to racially segregated schools, which are often intensified by poverty concentration, include a less-experienced and less-qualified teacher workforce, high levels of teacher turnover, inadequate facilities and learning materials, high dropout rates, and less stable enrollments. Conversely, desegregated schools are linked to profound benefits for all students.
“This report runs the geographic gamut: from the upstate metros dealing with transforming demographics and an urban-suburban divide, to Long Island, one of the most segregated and fragmented suburban rings in the country, and New York City, the largest school district in the country,” said John Kucsera, lead author of the report.
Specific findings at Various Geographic Levels
Statewide:
At the state level, the proportion of Latino and Asian students has nearly doubled from 1989 to 2010, as the exposure of these groups to white students has decreased.
Concentration levels have increased for black students in intensely segregated minority schools (where less than 10% of the student body is white), and there has been a simultaneous and dramatic increase in black exposure to Latino students over the last 20 years.
In terms of poverty concentration, statewide patterns show that schools become more low-income as their enrollment becomes majority minority.
Nearly 50% of public school students were low-income in 2010, but the typical black or Latino student attended a school where close to 70% of classmates were low-income. Conversely, the typical white student attended school where less than 30% of classmates were low-income.
Upstate Metropolitan Areas:
In Buffalo, the typical white student attended a school with 30% of poor students compared to 73% for the typical black student, two and one half times more.
Black and Latino students experienced a substantial increase in the percentage concentrated in intensely segregated schools (those with less than 10% white students) since 1989.
In the Syracuse metropolitan area, the proportion of black students grew by 4%, but black isolation rates skyrocketed. The average black student attended school in 1989 with a third of students from their own race; twenty years later, the typical black student attended schools with nearly half black students.
The majority of school districts in upstate New York remain predominantly white. In the Rochester metro, however, near a quarter of school districts are drastically changing, with most substantially integrating nonwhite students.
In the Albany metro, 97% of the metro’s multigroup segregation – measured by the distribution of racial groups in schools across the metro – occurred between rather than within districts. A total of 59 out of 65 districts in 2010 were predominantly white or nonwhite.
New York City:
Across the 32 Community School Districts (CSDs) in New York City, 19 had 10% or less white students in 2010, which included all districts in the Bronx, two-thirds of the districts in Brooklyn (central to north districts), half of the districts in Manhattan (northern districts), and only two-fifths of the districts in Queens (southeast districts).
73% of charters across New York City were considered apartheid schools (less than 1% white enrollment) and 90% percent were intensely segregated (less than 10% white enrollment) schools in 2010. Only 8% of charter schools were multiracial and with over a 14.5% white enrollment (the New York City average).
Magnet schools across the New York City district had the highest proportion of multiracial schools (47%) and the lowest proportion of segregated schools (56%) in 2010. However, 17% of magnets had less than 1% white enrollment and 7% had greater than 50% white enrollment, with PS 100 Coney Island having a white proportion of 81%.
New York Metropolitan Area:
For the New York City metro in 2010, the five boroughs represented nearly 60% of the state’s total black students, two-thirds of the total Asian and Latino students, but only 10% of white students.
In Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, where charter schools consist of around 10% of all public schools, nearly all charters were intensely segregated in 2010, with less than 10% white student enrollment. 100% of the Bronx charters, 90% of those in Brooklyn, and 97% of the Manhattan charters were intensely segregated.
Author Kucsera states, “Many of these areas, particularly suburban ones, have experienced dramatic demographic transformation coupled with a lack of diversity-focused policies, and this inevitably leads to problematic segregation patterns.”
With the help of various New York-based community groups, researchers, and civil rights organizations, the report provides a host of recommendations and actions to help create and maintain integrated schools from the federal level down to local communities and schools. These include altering school choice plans to ensure they promote diversity, supporting communities that are experiencing racial change by helping them create voluntary desegregation plans, and creating regional or interdistrict programs in urban/suburban areas.
“In the 30 years I have been researching schools, New York State has consistently been one of the most segregated states in the nation–no Southern state comes close to New York,” commented CRP Co-Director Gary Orfield. “Decades of reforms ignoring this issue produced strategies that have not succeeded in making segregated schools equal. It is time to adopt creative school choice strategies to give more New York children an opportunity to prepare to live and work effectively in a highly multiracial state.”
Read the report and see a complete breakdown of the data. This report is the fifth in a series of 12 reports on East Coast school segregation trends.
About the Civil Rights Project at UCLA
Founded in 1996 by former Harvard professors Gary Orfield and Christopher Edley, Jr., The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles is now co-directed by Orfield and Patricia Gándara, professors at UCLA. Its mission is to create a new generation of research in social science and law on the critical issues of civil rights and equal opportunity for racial and ethnic groups in the United States. It has monitored the success of American schools in equalizing opportunity and has been the authoritative source of segregation statistics. CRP has commissioned more than 400 studies, published more than 15 books and issued numerous reports from authors at universities and research centers across the country. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision upholding affirmative action, and in Justice Breyer’s dissent (joined by three other Justices) to its 2007 Parents Involved decision, cited the Civil Rights Project’s research.
The Civil Rights Project / Proyecto Derechos Civiles
8370 Math Sciences, Box 951521
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521
crp@ucla.edu
That really surprises me. I believe that Chicago is much more residentially segregated than New York. New York must really go to some lengths to maneuver kids around to maintain segregation.
It’s about much more than government effort, and it’s actually a difficult problem to solve in much of the state. Suburban districts are small. Racial steering hewed to district lines, meaning a 95% white district can be next to a 95% minority one. Both realtors and house buyers perpetuate the patterns. Because districts are small, demographic transitions are rapid. While some districts are also internally segregated, others have made efforts to prevent that. It just doesn’t go very far when you only have 1 high school and 4 feeder elementaries to work with. The only solution in the suburbs is to merge school districts, which is a political bomb that no one wishes to touch.
The Cooper Center dot maps show just how strongly much of New York is segregated, and how clear the lines are in some areas.
By some commonly accepted measures, New York is more segregated than Chicago. It is masked somewhat by its density, meaning it doesn’t fare as poorly in studies that involve isolation, but on a block-by-block basis, it is as bad as it gets. http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities/slide_show/9
And of course this was the case long before charter schools or school choice came along. The vast, vast majority of minority kids who attend NYC charters are zoned for schools that have been hypersegregated for generations.
We may be a small city on the east coast but the segregation in our schools is no small thing!! http://www.hobokenschools.com/2014/01/i-have-dream_26.html
Great piece on how Cuomo directed the charter school campaign in NYC.
Wow. We’re finally getting some real reporting.
A two tiered ‘minority’ ‘minority’ system. BDB HAD undeniably progressive intentions. From intent to implementation, there doth lie the shadow.
It seems important to note that while the report flags that charter schools are more segregated than district schools in the same geographic areas, the nature of the segregation is actually such that charter schools have MORE students of color than their district peers.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I am against charters (except as originally conceived), also lived in NYC for decades. I can’t see this as a very helpful statistic in fighting charters. They are a very small %age of the whole, which has been egregiously segregated for as long as I can remember.
This report reflects knee-jerk liberalism rather than liberal analysis.
The report proceeds from the implicit assumption that racial integration in a school significantly improves educational outcomes and that racial segregation in a school significantly lowers educational outcomes. However, this implicit assumption erroneously substitutes correlation for cause-and-effect.
In the pre-Brown South, racial segregation in the schools always meant significant differences in per pupil spending, curriculum, and facilities that uniformly favored the white schools. It also always meant school systems administered by govt officials who were white and who were elected by only white voters.
In today’s NY State and NYC, per pupil spending in the predominately minority schools is roughly equal to that in the predominately white schools. Differences in curriculum reflect differences in student achievement, not differences driven by race or prejudice. Differences in facilities reflect suburban vs. inner-city/rural rather than white vs. minority. Moreover, many/most of the predominantly minority schools/school systems are administered by govt officials who are themselves minority or who are elected by predominantly minority voters.
Certainly, the predominantly minority schools in NY State/NYC have lower test scores than the predominantly white schools. However, this test score disparity is not caused by either racial discrimination by the school systems/local govt officials or by the concentration of minority students in the schools.
Rather, the lower test scores in the predominantly minority schools are caused by fact that there are many more low-SES students in the predominantly minority schools and by the fact that low-SES students routinely score lower on standardized tests than middle-SES or high-SES students.
There is something happening in the low-SES families that is different from what is happening in the middle-SES and high-SES families; this “something” is what is causing the low-SES students to do less well academically and, in turn, is what is causing the low-SES schools to have lower test scores than the middle-SES schools or the high-SES schools.
Granted — classroom behavior and peer pressure can influence test scores. Low-SES students are more likely to misbehave (probably because they find school more difficult/frustrating) than high-SES students and, if many students are low-achieving misbehavers, this will create peer pressure on otherwise high-achieving well-behaved students to do less well academically and to misbehave. Therefore, adding a few low-SES students to a high-SES class will probably expose the low-SES students to positive peer pressure and tend to deter them from misbehaving. However, adding more than a few low-SES students to a high-SES class will eventually result in negative peer pressure adversely impacting the high-SES students; then, the high-SES parents will flee the school. For this reason, seeking to raise low-SES students’ academic achievement via integration into middle/high-SES schools will have at most a limited positive impact on the low-SES students (they will continue to be handicapped academically by whatever that “something” is in the low-SES family’s home) and the strategy, if pursued extensively, will trigger middle/high-SES flight.
If we hope to improve the academic performance of the low-SES inner-city students, we should place little/no emphasis on racial segregation in the schools and instead focus our school reform efforts on identifying/remedying the “something” in the low-SES family homes that is preventing the low-SES students from achieving academically. That would be a truly liberal solution, not a liberal knee-jerk reaction.
Seeing as the “something” in the low-SES family homes is inextricably linked to extreme isolation and a distant remove from the “best practices,” so to speak, employed by higher-SES families, and since that isolation did not arise from benign market forces or self-segregation, but rather through intimidation, discrimination, and the actions of governments and corporations brought to bear upon people of color, not merely “poor people”, I strongly disagree that integration shouldn’t be part of education reform.
Tim,
Perfectly said.
Would Labor Lawyer, with his legal training in parsing, please address the reasons N. J. black people were turned down for Sandy Aid, at a much greater rate, than N. J. whites? The NAACP had to sue to get the information. I’d like to read the defense, with amusement.
FYI, 1%,
The American people (i.e. the tax payers, who pay state and local taxes and then, pay the corporation’s taxes, from consumer dollars), find the discriminatory effect, of the privatization movement, whether it is prisons or education, abhorrent.
The “something” is genetics.
Diane: I’m tired of Jim’s racist diatribes. I hate to ask this, but can you please block him?
Some things to consider:
Only about 15% of students in NYC are white.
NYC is highly segregated by housing.
K-12 is highly segregated.
Most charter schools in NYC are located in highly segregated areas with highly segregated schools.
“Most charter schools in NYC are located in highly segregated areas with highly segregated schools.”
Some other things to consider: 1) Charter schools are not neighborhood schools, and often recruit from outside the local community, and 2) despite that, they’re still more segregated than the public schools.
There is indeed much to consider.
newsletter came through this morning: ”
quote: “Testing Resistance Surges
Parents, students and teachers across the U.S. have sparked Testing Resistance & Reform Spring (TRRS), a rapidly growing, national campaign. In just the past month, protest actions have been reported in more than half the states. Among the highlights:
This week, thousands of parents and students across New York State are refusing to take state’s Common Core tests, with over 80 percent opting out in some schools.”
cx. Newletter is from FAIRTEST
Also, Louisa Moats did a webinar today on the struggling readers (beyond elementary schools) this will be available next week ( I believe in PDF form). If anyone would like I have her slides that say “postpone” the standardized tests (Pearson/PARCC etc)… so I am pleased that she is saying it (she was on the National Reading Panel.) Will send her slides if you wish (from a previous presentation ) jeanhaverhill@aol.com