NYC’s DOE, “Equity and Excellence for All: Diversity in New York City Public Schools” is a great starting point for NYC to have a foundation to desegregate schools. It is better than not getting anything done, however, there are multiple flaws within the proposal itself.

On page 4, the DOE lists 3 goals to desegregate students and increase racial representation within the school communities. From a glance, they seem like great steps, but when we compare it to the actual data, the goals are pretty much low.  For example, goal #2 states: “Increase the number of students in a racially representative school by 50,000 within the next five years”.  Currently there are 1.1 million students attending NYC public schools. If we calculate the ratio, the DOE plans on just increasing representation by 5%. That number is going to decrease as more students are getting enrolled into the school system each year. As defined by DOE, “a racially represented school is considered if blacks and Hispanics make up at least 50%, but no more than 90% of the student population. That potentially means that a school can technically have 89% black and Hispanic student population while still be referred to as racially represented. In my opinion, that school is not considered, “racially represented”, but in fact segregated. They quote, “30.7% of our schools are racially represented, but they never mention the percentages within each school. This data is very vague and does not tell us anything.

While I while reading, I noticed there was no mention of the word “equity” despite it being included in the name of the proposal. It was never defined or incorporated into the goals to increase diversity. It seems like it was just another fancy filler word that showed there was improvement and changing coming. Diversity is constantly mentioned, but the concept is still a little vague for me. On page 6, the DOE has begun implementing actions to increase diversity. One of which is to, “eliminate the”limited unscreened” method for admission into high schools” and instead replace it with “admission methods” to promote greater diversity.  In this particular section, the DOE states that many high-need students are not given priority into these high schools because they are faced with a barrier of resources and time. By replacing a new admission method will increase their chances. But, there is no reference as to what this new method will look like. There is no specific plan as to the step in creating this method and how can we be positive that it will actually increase diversity.

Overall, I feel that this agenda create my DOE is a great starting point, but much of there goals are too low and really vague. There are no guidelines as in how they will be able to address the multiple issues within our school system, but it is better than nothing.