Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells a poignant story about how her whole extended family “chipped in for a down payment” to move from The Bronx to Westchester, so that she and her brother could be enrolled in better schools.
“I grew up between two worlds,” she’s said, “and experienced firsthand how a child’s zip code can shape their destiny.”
That turned out great for Ocasio-Cortez — but a lot of working-class families can’t afford to do what hers did.
Instead, they find themselves boxed out of high-quality schools that are practically in their own back yards.
As every New York parent knows, the city’s public schools are governed by archaic attendance zone maps.
And — surprise, surprise — these maps carry forward the legacy of racist public policies from the Jim Crow era.
That’s the conclusion of a new report, “And Stay Out!,” published this month by my organization Available to All, a nonpartisan watchdog that defends equal access to public schools.
We found that many of New York City’s most coveted public elementary and middle schools are bound by attendance-zone maps that replicate the patterns of racist “redlining” maps from the 1930s.
For decades, those maps restricted mortgage loans in areas where more people of color lived, until Congress outlawed the practice in 1968.
Look, for example, at the attendance zone for the Emily Warren Roebling School in Brooklyn Heights, a highly regarded elementary school where 76% of the students are white or Asian.
Its current attendance zone encircles, almost perfectly, the area shaded blue, or “desirable,” on the redlining map drawn in 1938.
That means children who live just a few blocks to the east, in areas shaded yellow or red on the old redlining map, are excluded from the Roebling School.
Our analysis found the same pattern in all five boroughs — the primary reason why New York City has been called “the epicenter of educational segregation in the nation” by UCLA expert Gary Orfield.
But today’s school-zone maps are color-blind; white families on the wrong side of the line are equally out of luck.
They’re also downright bizarre: When NYC public-school admissions expert Alina Adams showed one school map to her son, he responded incredulously, “Did a drunk toddler draw this?”
What’s more, these maps are a big part of the housing affordability crisis that drove Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign.
Wealthier families cram into the zones of the most desirable public schools, driving up home prices in some of the city’s most family-friendly neighborhoods.
Mamdani has proposed eliminating gifted-and-talented programs for kindergarteners as a means of addressing the schools’ racial divisions.
But it’s not going to work.
For one thing, those programs are relatively small, with only 18,000 children participating citywide in grades K through 5.
What’s more, the city’s merit-based G&T programs are truly open to all students in the district, and have become increasingly diverse in recent years.
Send those kids back to their assigned schools, and the underlying problem remains.
New Yorkers, and Americans across the country, cherish the democratizing ideal that the neighborhood public school represents.
But we can ditch the archaic zoning maps without endangering the schools themselves.
For example, the city could switch to student-based zones, guaranteeing each child an equal opportunity to enroll at any public school within a three-mile radius of his or her home.
If too many local kids apply for admission, the school would hold a lottery.
That would preserve schools’ neighborhood quality while unwinding this reprehensible gerrymandering that punishes our most vulnerable kids.
Or we could retain the zoning maps, but require each public school to reserve 15% of its seats for students outside the zone — a modest change that would open up opportunities for tens of thousands of city children.
In this era of declining public-school enrollment, most schools have the space to add more kids, if only the DOE would let them attend outside their zone.
Look at PS 6 Lillie D. Blake in Manhattan, a coveted school where 90% of students are reading at grade level.
But its enrollment has dropped by over 30% since 2010 — leaving plenty of room for children outside the zone.
If Mamdani wants to address the housing affordability crisis, and if he wants to give low-income black and Hispanic kids an equal shot at the American Dream, then he’s going to have to address the policies that reserve the best public schools for those who can afford to live in zones that preserve the discrimination of decades past.
It’s the maps, Mr. Mayor.
Tim DeRoche is the founder and president of Available to All and author of “A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools.”
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