NYC has country’s most segregated public schools: report

New York State has the most segregated public schools in the nation and New York City is one of the most segregated school districts in the country, UCLA researchers said in a report Wednesday.

Nearly 30 percent of the state’s public schools had minority enrollments of 90 percent or more, even though 51 percent of the state’s students were white in the 2010-2011 school year covered by the report.

“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,” said UCLA Civil Rights Project co-director Gary Orfield.

“Decades of reforms ignoring this issue produced strategies that have not succeeded in making segregated schools equal,” he said.

Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, and New Jersey followed New York on the most segregated school list.

New York State’s segregation of students, which has increased over the past 20 years, was primarily due to demographic changes in New York City schools

Nineteen of the city’s 32 community school districts had 10 percent or fewer white students in 2010.

Department of Education spokesman Devon Puglia brushed off the study’s findings and said school officials “value the incredible diversity among our students.”

The study’s authors also questioned charter schools’ commitment to diversity since their student populations consist mostly of black and Latino students.

UCLA researchers found that 100 percent of charter schools in the Bronx, 90 percent of charters in Brooklyn and 97 percent of Manhattan charters had less than 10 percent white enrollment in 2010.

Orfield, one of the study’s co-authors, recommended state and local education leaders, including charter leaders, develop weighted admissions, targeted recruitment and other policies to make schools more diverse.

“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,” Orfield said.

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