Kamar Samuels, New York City’s new schools chancellor, has laid out his vision for the school system. In a letter to staff, first reported by Chalkbeat, he wrote that he believes “that every student—starting in early childhood and continuing through graduation—deserves a school that is academically rigorous, safe, and truly integrated.”
Academic rigor and safety should certainly top the list for the city’s schools. But focusing on integrated schools—especially in the many communities where the demographics conspire against it—can detract from ensuring that the least well-off students receive a quality education.
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The long struggle for racial integration in our nation and city was born out of the unconscionable and deliberate segregation of black and white students in the South. But today’s demographics are much more complex. Forty-two percent of New York City students are Hispanic. Asian students are fast becoming the second-largest group in the system, as their numbers increase and the number of black students plummets.
Demographic concentration bedevils the goal of integration. It will be a challenge in the Bronx, where 87 percent of the students in the public schools are either black or Hispanic, and 89 percent live in poverty. Asian and white students are also concentrated in a relatively small number of districts. In 20 of the city’s 32 school districts, fewer than 15 percent of the students are Asian; in 23, fewer than 15 percent are white. Greater integration may be possible in some schools, but not enough to make improvements in integration meaningful.
Focusing on integration could come at the expense of academic excellence. In the history of New York City’s public schools, the most significant improvement in educational opportunity for black, Hispanic, and lower-income communities occurred under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg pursued a rigorous system of school accountability and expanded school choice in the form of both charter schools and new district schools.
Chancellor Samuels and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, by contrast, seem to seek a return to the Bill de Blasio years. De Blasio halted the successful Bloomberg initiatives and wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on efforts to improve failing schools rather than replacing them.
Chancellor Samuels’s embrace of academic rigor, including the International Baccalaureate program, is admirable. But he needs to find an answer to the perennial question in a school system as large as New York’s: What do you do when deficiencies in the leadership or teaching staff at certain schools limit the effectiveness of even the best-designed curricula or program? Time has shown that more money is not the answer.
Nor is reducing class size. Samuels inherits the challenge of implementing the state legislature’s ill-conceived requirement that the city meet certain limits on class sizes over the next two years. The city’s Independent Budget Office analyzed where resources should be deployed to comply with the mandate and found that districts with “higher poverty levels consistently had lower rates of over-enrollment” (that is, above state limits). Thus, money will flow away from these lower-income districts to a broad swath of middle-class districts in Brooklyn and Queens.
How can this be? Families flee low-performing schools when given the opportunity. This exodus has resulted in numerous underutilized schools in the city’s poorer areas. They already have small classes because they don’t have enough students. Samuels will need to deal with this problem, which the class-size law makes worse.
Finally, the mayor and chancellor need to look at where success has been achieved and seek to replicate it. Bloomberg’s school accountability and choice regime offers many lessons; unfortunately, this administration is unlikely to heed them.
Another exemplar to consider: Success Academy Charter Schools, which serve over 20,000 students in the city, 82 percent of them black and Hispanic, and 72 percent living in poverty. Its program embraces Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion alongside educational excellence. Yet, through its strict system of teacher accountability, this network out-performs New York City schools and many of New York State’s most affluent districts by a large margin.
If Mamdani and Samuels are committed to bringing academic rigor to all the city’s schools, they should make this their sole focus, with a plan to hold schools and staff accountable for student outcomes. They should worry less about engineering the “right” racial mix of students in schools.
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