It is the story of many American cities. Despite decades of efforts, school districts have made little progress on desegregation.
In dozens of places, racial divides have grown more pronounced. A growing wave of litigation — including the affirmative action cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina last summer — has challenged the fairness of policies intended to create more diverse student bodies.
But recently, New York City has become the unlikely focus of renewed efforts to reduce racial segregation in public schools.
This spring, a lawsuit challenging selective admissions in New York’s schools, where huge numbers of Black and Latino students attend schools that are less than 10 percent white, was allowed to move forward in the state courts. It recalls an earlier set of court cases that tried to uproot separate and unequal academic tracks for Black and Latino students — and that argued that segregated schools and classrooms denied their rights.
The tactics for attacking segregation today are different from those employed in school districts generations ago. Across the city, some local districts and schools are trying other ways to mix student bodies without explicitly using race, as a way to avoid limits created by past Supreme Court cases.
Here are four things to know:
School districts have a more limited menu of options for pursuing desegregation.
Since Brown v. Board of Education prohibited racial segregation in public schools seven decades ago, a robust body of research has shown that racially and economically diverse public schools can benefit all children.
But in most places, court-ordered busing has ended. Today, public schools are limited in how they can consider race in order to integrate their student bodies.
Current efforts — including those in more than 200 New York City schools — generally use socioeconomic diversity as a race-neutral alternative.
In Cambridge, Mass., families rank their school choices, and those are then used to balance low-income and affluent children across the district. Some cities like Minneapolis have redrawn school attendance zones to reduce the number of schools with large populations of low-income students.
In many cities though, children attend segregated schools. Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor and an expert on the Supreme Court’s role in education, said “the sorry state of racial integration in the nation’s public schools is not attributable to legal obstacles.”
“Instead, there is a lack of political will to pursue the legal means that are available,” he said.
Efforts to further limit desegregation efforts are likely to continue.
Even before the New York segregation case, the city was one of a handful of places where some schools were trying to diversify student populations using race-neutral admissions.
But a growing wave of lawsuits is seeking to limit those efforts. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear one of the most high profile of those cases — involving a prestigious Virginia magnet school’s admissions policies.
The school eliminated its high-stakes admissions exam in 2020, because of concern over its tiny Black and Latino student enrollment. Instead, it set aside spots from a cross-section of feeder middle schools, and gave weight to groups like English-language learners.
Still, even though the court cleared the way for the admissions strategy, the Virginia lawsuit has marked a new front in the battle over student admissions.
“The case will remain worthy of examination as a canary in the coal mine,” Sonja B. Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in The Stanford Law Review in January. “The groundwork” is being laid “for a much bigger legal transformation,” she said.
In New York, desegregation efforts center on admissions.
In a system where more than 70 percent of children are low income and just under two-thirds are Black or Latino, it is tough to create diverse schools in every neighborhood. But the city’s approach to admissions has come under fire for worsening segregation.
A large swath of public middle and high schools in New York use selective admissions, more than in any other city. In Los Angeles, for example, only a tiny handful of high schools screen students.
If successful, the segregation lawsuit in New York could force major changes to selective programs — or even their elimination. Several ongoing local desegregation efforts illustrate options that the plaintiffs could push for in a settlement.
In northwest Brooklyn, middle schools stopped using academic screens before the coronavirus pandemic, and instead adopted a lottery. In 2018, about two-thirds of the area’s white students were enrolled at three popular middle schools. But the schools today are far less homogenous.
In parts of Harlem and the Upper West Side, middle schools reserve spots for low-income children. There have been modest rises in low-income students in those schools, but some schools that primarily serve low-income students have struggled to bring in affluent families.
The debate over gifted classes is especially heated.
Across the nation, gifted education is regarded as one of the most high-profile symbols of segregation.
In Columbus, Ohio, for example, Black students made up more than half of all public school students in 2020, but about a quarter of gifted enrollment. In New York, Latino children make up 41 percent of the overall system, but receive about 21 percent of all gifted offers.
There is little consensus about how school districts might better identify gifted children or make the programs more diverse. Some parents and educators argue that gifted programs are important tools for challenging high-achieving children. Others argue that they should be eliminated in favor of individualized accelerated learning.
In New York City, about 2,600 students enter the gifted program in kindergarten each year, after preschool teachers nominate them for a lottery. Another 1,800 children are offered gifted spots in third grade. Black and Latino students are underrepresented in both groups.
Though the program is tiny, it can be viewed as a pathway into selective middle and high schools, where race and class divisions are especially stark. Some schools have ended the program, and it could be a focus of the lawsuit as it moves through the courts.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a former senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about school segregation, said one challenge for the city’s kindergarten model was that “when you’re talking about 4-year-olds, the concept of merit isn’t all that relevant.”
“It’s probably the most problematic aspect of the system,” he said.
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