The Trouble With 'Desegregating' New York's Schools
The progressive educational policy establishment, along with its allies in government, has finally figured out why so many New York City public schools do such a poor job. The problem, it seems, isn’t with the DOE, the teachers or their powerful union.
No, the problem is racial segregation. In fact, according to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, New York City “is the epicenter of educational segregation for the nation.”
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This isn’t legally enforced racial separation. The new segregation, according to the advocates, is neither mandated nor coercive, but just as insidious. “More than half of New York City’s public schools are over 90 percent black and Latino,” say City Councilmen Brad Lander and Ritchie Torres, who are leading the charge to rectify this “deep injustice.”
“Fussing over the racial composition of the city’s schools should be the last thing education advocates worry about.”
Lander and Torres have plans. One particularly destructive one would “adopt a more formal approach to diversity in high school admissions, including specialized (and screened) high schools.”
New York’s elite high schools are some of the city’s crown jewels, renowned for their merit-based exclusivity. Changing admission requirements to the city’s top schools for the sake of feel-good social justice would erode the schools’ tradition of excellence in the service of dubious ends.
Other proposals are equally pernicious, including a demand that the city “adopt a formal policy and strategy for making diversity a priority in admissions, zoning, and other decision-making processes,” and create an Office of School Diversity within the city’s Human Rights Commission.
By bringing “school segregation” under New York’s expansive Human Rights Law, the very existence of racial imbalance in schools would demonstrate discrimination, opening the door to lawsuits.
Now, it’s true that a majority of the city’s schools are 90 percent black and Latino, and that half of all black and Latino students attend such schools. But these numbers don’t mean very much when placed in the context of...
Read the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Seth Barron is project director of the Manhattan Institute’s NYC Initiative. He blogs about New York City politics at City Council Watch.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post
