School Segregation Persists in Gentrifying Neighborhoods, Maps Suggest - The New York Times:
School Segregation Persists in Gentrifying Neighborhoods, Maps Suggest
At the Margaret Douglas school in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, the median income in 2014 was $36,000, and the student population was 96 percent black and Hispanic. Credit John Taggart for The New York Times
The segregation in New York City elementary schools is often assumed to be a simple consequence of where people live: If neighborhoods are racially divided, so too will be their neighborhood schools.
But an analysis by a think tank at the
New School to be released on Wednesday shows that things might be more complicated. Researchers at the
New School’s Center for New York City Affairs mapped the median family income and racial makeup of schools against those of surrounding neighborhoods, and found many of the schools to have markedly less variety.
“We see a lot of areas where income is more mixed, and ethnicity is more mixed, but the schools are not,” said Nicole Mader, an education policy analyst at the center.
The
analysts’ maps provide stark evidence of something many New Yorkers know intuitively: Middle-class families, often white, are happy to live in areas where their neighbors are less well-off and are a different color; this is the very tide of gentrification. But they are less willing to send their children to schools where most of their classmates are likely to be poor and either black or Hispanic.
This impulse creates pockets of extremes. More affluent families cluster in particular schools with reputations for good academics. Many middle-class families who are zoned for high-poverty schools choose to send their children to
charter schools or
gifted and talented programs, rather than to a local school.
Take Public School 36, the Margaret Douglas school in Morningside Heights, right in the backyard of Columbia University and many of its faculty members.
According to the 2014 American Community Survey, the median household income for the school zone was nearly $69,000 a year, and 37 percent of its residents were either black or Hispanic. But at P.S. 36, the New School report said, the median income was $36,000, and the student population was 96 percent black and Hispanic.
“The question is, how do you get families with options to send their kids to these schools,” Douglas Ready, associate professor of education and public policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said. “Some of the bad reputations are warranted, but some are not.”
Using data from the city’s Department of Education and the Census Bureau, Ms. Mader and Clara Hemphill, founding editor of the
Inside Schools website of the Center for New York City Affairs, arrived at ethnic and socioeconomic estimates for each of the city’s 734 neighborhood elementary schools. At 124 of those schools, serving a population of about 63,000 students, they found the median household income was at least 20 percent lower than the income of the surrounding school zone.
They also found concentrations of extreme racial segregation. At 59 elementary schools in neighborhoods that were at least somewhat racially mixed, student populations were more than 90 percent black and Hispanic.
