by Diana Montaño

As the school year begins in the “melting pot” of America, New York City students will walk through the doors of schools belonging to what the UCLA Civil Rights project has called the most segregated public school system in the nation.

When asked why it is that segregation is still so pervasive in America’s schools, Dr Patrcia Gandara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, says it comes down to education reform approaches that have not prioritized desegregation.

“It hasn’t been on the agenda of the people who make educational policy,” she says. “The agenda now and for many years has been that of higher standards, having more exams so as to have higher standards. But they haven’t been thinking about this.”

This is true of New York City, where in his 12 years as mayor, Michael Bloomberg made high-stakes testing and an unprecedented expansion of publicly funded, privately run charter schools the centerpieces of his education policy.

And in the era where “school choice” became a tenet of free-market-style school reform, charters became an increasingly appealing option for parents disillusioned with the public school system.

“So many parents get so tired of fighting that they just put their children in charters,” says Yanuaira Lopez-Souza, a Harlem mother who this past Spring had to call almost every day for two months while her daughter was on the Kindergarten waiting list at the prestigious PS 75 in the Upper West Side.

Lopez-Souza, who says it feels as though her East Harlem neighborhood has more charter schools than public schools at this point, didn’t consider charters as an option. Charter schools’ emphasis on discipline and academic rigor was not appealing to her.

“The entire day there isn’t a moment for them to enjoy being children,” she says. Instead, she chose to fight to get her daughter into PS 75.

But most parents don’t have the tenacity she did to get their kids into the schools of their choice when faced with barriers in accessing schools located in predominantly white, wealthy neighborhoods – even within their own districts.

“Most recently one of the ways segregation has manifested is parents who have been denied access to their local schools are increasingly choosing charter schools,” says Ujju Aggarwal, a New School University professor and researcher with the City University of New York who has studied segregation in Manhattan’s District 3 extensively.

Charter schools are publicly funded, privately run entities that have become controversial primarily due to a seeming lack of accountability to the public. Unlike public schools, they do not have to report finances, for example, and do not have to follow the same protocol as public schools for such disciplinary measures as expelling a student.

Aggarwal says it is this lack of accountability that is the most troubling for school reform advocates who oppose charter expansion. She says that in her research, parents told her of one Manhattan charter school that expelled a number of English Language Learners around the time of testing, ostensibly to maintain high scores.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of charter schools becoming a fallback for parents of color denied access to “good” public schools, is the fact that by choosing a charter, these parents are, in fact, only falling deeper into school segregation.

According to the Civil Rights Project, New York City charter schools exhibit a hyper-segregation even more acute than traditional public schools.

While in 2010 traditional public schools had 14.5% white, 29.8% black and 40.1% Hispanic student populations, charter schools had 3% white, 62.1% black and 30.8% Hispanic student bodies.

With these numbers in mind, it is questionable whether market-oriented “school choice” solutions will ever help the Melting Pot city achieve the promise of school integration made 60 years ago.

This is why advocates like the Parent Leadership Project in Manhattan, or the District 15 Community Education Council in Brooklyn along with local legislators, are proposing alternative frameworks such as controlled choice admissions policies and the elimination of neighborhood-defined school zones.

Only time will tell if new mayor Bill de Blasio, who came into office in January with a strong anti-charter stance, is up for the challenge.

See Diana Montaño’s article on segregation in New York City schools and what a group of mothers is doing about it here: https://legacy.radiobilingue.org/en/features/madres-latinas-de-nueva-york-buscan-aumentar-acceso-a-las-escuelas/ .