The Department of Education’s report Diversity in New York City Public Schools released in 2017 outlined goals to achieve “Equity and Excellence for all.” Their goals are to increase the number of students in racially representative schools, decrease the number of economically stratified schools, and increase the number of inclusive schools to serve English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities. The DOE assigned a School Diversity Advisory Group to work with the community and help New York City achieve these goals.
The report doesn’t address New York’s segregation problem by name. The word segregation is never mentioned, but it’s referred to in roundabout phrases like “increased diversity” and “racial representation.” The way data is represented also goes out of its way to avoid talking about segregation. It uses the phrase “economically stratified” to define schools that don’t have students from integrated income levels, but won’t say that schools without racial integration are segregated or even racially stratified. Instead it says “30.7% of schools are racially representative today,” leaving readers to infer that the rest are segregated. The report doesn’t mention that a significant percent of economically stratified students are also minority students. The language purposely leaves out politically loaded words like “segregation” and “integration.” There doesn’t seem to be a reason not to call the plan an attempt at integration until you check the date of its release, in June 2017, and remember that the mayor was in a reelection campaign and that integration is a controversial problem.
A major concern when reading this report is that the bar seems really low. The first goal in the plan is to increase the number of students in racially representative schools by 50,000 over the next five years, but there are 1.1 million students in NYC public schools, and there are no plans mentioned to continue this success after the first five years. The second goal is to decrease the number of economically stratified schools by 150 in the next five years, but there are over 1,700 schools and again there’s no mention of change after that. The third goal in the plan is to increase the number of inclusive schools for English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities and this goal doesn’t even have a number goal to strive for.
While the proposals for how to achieve these goals might be criticized for not adequately addressing the problems of NYC schools, the report and case studies of various other schools make it seem like desegregation is best solved on a case by case basis. “The larger, long-term work of making our schools more diverse must be driven by meaningful community discourse and debate,” and this statement probably refers to community efforts to integrate their local public schools. Most of these proposals would be amazing for New York City schools as a whole, like online applications and increased STEM/AP participation, but the most important work of integrating NYC schools is still left to be done at the community level with the support of the DOE.
I find myself dissatisfied with the Department of Education’s report Diversity in New York City Public Schools simply because it seems to be avoiding serious issues that need addressing such as segregation, as Christina pointed out, and instead tries to provide inconsequential initiatives and goals to reflect an image of progress in the school system. Like Christina mentioned, the report does not mention any inflammatory words such as segregation. However, I understand that the report was released around the time that DeBlasio was seeking reelection and we have become more politically correct so the administration wanted to avoid such words.
The second issue with the report was the lack of indicatives that made an actual difference. Both Christina and Annmarie mentioned that the administration outlined goals such as increasing STEM Diversity in 24 High schools and giving magnet funding for 19 schools. Although these seem like great initiatives, in the broader context, these numbers do not make a significant difference in the number of high schools that have STEM diversity and magnet funding. Furthermore, the report does not specify how or in what types of school they are going to enact these initiatives’ addition, a big issue I had with this report was that it did not clearly clarify or outline many of the initiatives that it was going to take. A lot of the initiatives mentioned diversity in every aspect of the education system such as “7. Plan for diversity when opening new, high-quality schools and programs.”, but when I read the proposal I did not understand the specific actions that the committee was going to take.
Although I appreciate that the Deblasio administration has taken steps to release the diversity report which includes their steps of tackling the increasing issue of segregations in schools and their neighborhood, I think that the administration should not have outlined so many initiatives that probably make negligible progress due to the sheer amount of work required to make these changes. Instead, I think that the demonstration should focus on a specific goal such as providing more STEM opportunities for students and aggressively seek to implement this imitative in a lot of schools so they can clearly show their results in pursuing the goal. Right now, it seems like the demonstration is focusing on too many goals and it has neither resources nor the time to successfully achieve the goals.
You both make interesting points about the absence of certain words – like segregation – that might have been considered too political. Kash, I find your idea that the task force should have identified one goal (like STEM) and sought to put time and resources into achieving that one goal intriguing. But where would that leave the DOE in terms of addressing segregation? Or do you think desegregation should not be the goal?
This is only for testing purposes