Dive Brief:
- A bill being considered by the New York City Council would create a new office within the city's Commission on Human Rights to study segregation in its public schools.
- WNYC reports the bill’s primary sponsor, Councilman Ritchie Torres, expects the office could produce annual reports about the prevalence of racial segregation in schools and its causes, which he says go beyond housing patterns because there are segregated schools in integrated neighborhoods.
- New York has an expansive human rights law, and if school segregation were considered from its framework, officials would have to pay attention to the impact of segregated schools even if they don’t exist because of bad intentions.
Dive Insight:
New York has long been criticized for the extent of segregation in its schools. The city’s department of education is currently considering a plan to redraw school boundaries in an area of the Upper West Side and Harlem. While the lines won’t move far, two predominantly wealthy and white schools and one predominantly poor and black/Latino would see a radical shift in student populations.
Mid-size urban districts had a particularly hard time maintaining diversity in their schools as suburbs sprung up around them with their own schools. That legacy limits the impact of small-scale solutions in a lot of places. But after decades of integration following Brown v. Board of Education, more recent data shows schools are more segregated now than they have been in a long time.
