Richard Carranza is talking about integration. Can he make it happen?

Dana Goldstein, September 3, The NEw York Times

Richard Carranza is eager to talk about segregation.

New York’s new schools chancellor wants to talk about how the nation’s largest school system is clustering the poorest children (mostly black and brown) in one set of classrooms, and the richest children (mostly white) in another set — and failing to live up to its progressive ideals.

He wants to talk about how school zones contribute to segregation and whether “gifted and talented” classes, where white and Asian students tend to cluster, ought to exist.

He says his ideas go further than finding ways to admit more black and Hispanic students to the city’s most elite high schools, a proposal he and Mayor Bill de Blasio  unveiled in June.

[What is the SHSAT exam. And why does the mayor want to get rid of it?] 

But, as the first full school year of Mr. Carranza’s tenure begins, the question is whether he will venture beyond what he calls “a values conversation” to effect large-scale citywide change.

If Mr. Carranza lives up to his vow to take on segregation, he will go up against powerful forces that have kept alive the historic paradox of New York City education: In one of the nation’s most diverse and politically progressive cities, the schools are among the most segregated in the country.

Since the 1960s, research has shown that poor and nonwhite students perform better in integrated schools. In the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, years of integration in the ensuing decades coincided with shrinking achievement gaps between black and white children.

Some of that progress has been lost in recent years, as judges lifted desegregation orders. Yet in cities from Cambridge, Mass., to Dallas, efforts to close the yawning achievement gap have led officials to experiment with programs aimed at giving more students access to the best schools.

In New York, racial separation in the city’s schools has persisted, driven not just by residential housing patterns, but by policies designed to keep white and middle-class families from fleeing public schools. In-the-know parents can take advantage of school choice and gifted and talented programs. Some of the city’s best schools admit only students with good academic track records, keeping those schools overwhelmingly white and Asian in a city where two-thirds of students are black or Hispanic.

In order to succeed, Mr. Carranza will need the full backing of Mayor de Blasio, who during his first term did not make integration a priority.

Before Mr. Carranza was hired in March, he had never run a school district even approaching the size of New York City, with its 1.1. million students. He had been the mayor’s second choice, after the first backed out on live television. His short stint running the Houston schools did not suggest he would be a firebrand on the issue of segregation.

Mr. Carranza says he was surprised by what he found in New York. “I’m coming to a blue city in a blue state thinking, ‘Wow, this is really progressive,’” he said in an August interview. But once in office, he found “a system of segregation that is baked into the system and is just kind of accepted.”

Even before Mr. Carranza’s arrival, disparate parts of the system had announced desegregation initiatives — changes to some school zone lines on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and in Brooklyn, and an effort to set aside seats for low-income and low-performing students at a handful of high-performing middle and high schools.

Ritchie Torres, a City Council member representing the central Bronx, where the schools are some of the city’s most segregated and lowest-performing, called Mr. Carranza’s blunt talk “refreshing.” But, like other advocates, Mr. Torres wants more.

He wants the city to consider busing across neighborhoods, with or without the acquiescence of white parents. He also wants the city to set a deadline, within a year, for all 32 community districts in the system to adopt an integration plan.

Mr. Carranza says that he isn’t comfortable with deadlines or ultimatums — he wants to change hearts and minds. Or, as he puts it, he hopes to create “the space for the organic conversation, the organic understanding, the hard conversations, to happen.”

He plans to unveil a broader agenda in December, but needs more time to study the system, he said. “I have to remind folks I’ve been here four months.”

Steep Odds at Many Schools

For many children in the Bronx, segregation is the norm. Jocelyn Jimenez, an eighth-grader with a waist-length ponytail and cat-eye glasses, is one of them. The daughter of a maintenance worker and a house cleaner, both Mexican immigrants, Jocelyn, 12, has seen very few white children in her journey through the public schools. Her elementary school, Public School 103, was 3 percent white; her middle school, Intermediate School 181, is 4 percent white.

Nearly half of city elementary schools have student populations that are 90 percent black and Latino, according to the New School. While much of that segregation is driven by housing patterns, school zoning lines and parental choice also play major roles. An analysis by the City Council found that 14 of the 32 districts have enough residential diversity to meaningfully integrate schools — but only if key policies change.

Within that context, Jocelyn has had some real advantages. She was placed in honors classes in elementary school and is now part of a gifted and talented program. This summer, she was selected for the Dream Intensive program at P.S 89 in the Bronx, a five-week crash course to help low-income students prepare for the SHSAT, the test that controls admission to eight of the specialized high schools.

At a city information session this summer on the high school admissions process, she sat in the Lehman High School auditorium in the Bronx with her father, Baudel Jimenez, and dozens of other families.

An official from the Department of Education laid out the process, which she had gone through herself as a parent: There are more than 79,000 eighth-graders vying for seats in more than 700 programs, many of which have requirements in terms of grades, test scores, attendance, interviews or auditions. The most popular have dozens of applicants per seat.

“I visited 17 schools when I went through this process,” the official said.

Mr. Jimenez leaned forward with his hands clasped, listening carefully to every word. He feels nervous and wants to be sure his daughter’s grades and test scores stay high. “She needs to focus so it never goes down,” Mr. Jimenez said.

Jocelyn faces steep odds. Black and Hispanic students last year received just 10 percent of the offers to the specialized high schools. At Jocelyn’s middle school last year, only 8 of the 124 students who took the SHSAT received an offer, and less than a third of the students who participated in the Dream program got into one of the schools.

In contrast, at the Christa McAuliffe School, in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, one of the top feeders to the specialized schools, 205 of 251 test-takers got offers last year; at that school, only 8 percent of the students are black or Hispanic.

If Jocelyn doesn’t make it into a specialized school, she’d like to go to either Beacon High School in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, or one of the two Early College High Schools affiliated with Bard College, in Manhattan and Queens. They are among a group of highly successful schools that screen students and have as many as 35 applicants for each seat. Those schools, too, skew heavily white and Asian. At Beacon, for instance, 60 percent of students are drawn from those groups.

Mr. Carranza has denounced those kinds of admissions screens, saying they created “a permanent underclass in New York City” without access to the best schools. But so far, the only action he has taken is to announce that a group of 11 screened high schools will set aside seats for low-income children or those who are still learning English. The list did not include Beacon or other of the city’s most coveted and least-integrated high schools.

The Department of Education said it would continue to add more schools to the list.

Extremes and Evasion

When it comes to tackling school segregation, New York City has never offered a profile in courage. In the years after the Brown decision, there was organized white resistance to school rezoning and busing in the city. Some white parents kept their children home from newly desegregated schools. Politicians and education officials chose not to fully implement the integration plans produced by a string of committees and commissions.

Mayors including John V. Lindsay and Edward I. Koch spoke explicitly about the importance of keeping middle-class and white parents happy by allowing them to segregate their children in separate schools and classrooms, including gifted and talented programs.

By the 1990s, the schools were a story of extremes. The system had some of the best public schools in the nation, but also some of the worst. Graduation rates and test scores were especially abysmal at the big neighborhood high schools in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which served large numbers of black and Hispanic students.

In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools. With his hard-charging chancellor, the former antitrust lawyer Joel Klein, he all but eradicated neighborhood high schools, requiring every student to apply to a high school. The idea was to allow low-income children to escape underperforming schools. But it also left some of the neediest students, particularly those without engaged parents able to help them through the application process, stuck in the least desirable programs.

Amid this whirlwind of reform, with intense pressure on schools to raise test scores, integration was not a priority. In his 2014 memoir, Mr. Klein recalls visiting a school building on the border between the Upper East Side and East Harlem. Inside, a gifted and talented school catered almost exclusively to white and Asian families, while a regular school served black and Latino children. Mr. Klein was outraged by the disparity, but concluded that integrating the two populations by merging the schools would be “too much to ask” of the white and Asian parents.

“After all,” he wrote, “our goal was to create more good schools, not to destabilize those that were doing well.”

In 2013, Mayor de Blasio succeeded Mr. Bloomberg with a new vision for education, based more on community engagement and less on competition or choice. He quickly delivered on his campaign promise of providing universal access to public preschool.

But when it came to integration, he and his first schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, hesitated. When asked about rezoning schools to make their student populations more diverse, Mr. de Blasio demurred, saying he wanted to “respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area, oftentimes because of a specific school.”

In 2017 he released what he had billed as a grand plan to create more diverse schools. But it did not use the word “segregation,” and its modest goals, according to an analysis by the New School, could be accomplished just through expected demographic changes in the city.

Then, in June, with his new chancellor on board, Mr. de Blasio announced the city would seek to eliminate the specialized high schools test, and would instead select students based on their state test scores and class rank, which would increase the number of black and Hispanic students admitted to those schools.

To put that plan into practice, the city needs the backing of the State Legislature, which created the admissions system in the first place. In the meantime, the city is expanding a program that admits students who scored below the cutoffs on the test, and limiting that program to students from low-income schools.

Even if the legislature approves getting rid of the test, though, it would affect only a tiny fraction of the city’s students. Similarly, the plan to have some of the selective high schools set aside seats for low-income students and those still learning English has so far had a negligible effect on the system over all.

Making Choice ‘More Equitable’

Some question whether high school is the place to start.

“They’re doing it backward,” said Michael Alves, a consultant who specializes in crafting school integration plans. “I’ve never worked with a district, regardless of size, that said ‘Well, we’re just going to focus on high school.’ You have to be looking at the entire system.”

Other cities offer potential models. In Cambridge, Mass., a “controlled choice” admissions system, which uses both parental choice and family socioeconomic status when assigning students to elementary schools, has succeeded in creating schools that more closely match the city’s overall demographics.

In Hartford, Conn., themed magnet schools draw middle-class and affluent children from the suburbs on a voluntary basis, opening up seats in suburban schools for low-income children from the city.

In Montgomery County, Md., screening for elementary and middle school gifted programs is now universal, so parents no longer need to request special testing. And in Dallas, the district has opened a popular new set of magnet schools with themes like technology and single-sex education. They admit children from across the region by lottery, with no academic requirements, and reserve half their seats for low-income students.

Mr. Carranza says he is willing to consider all these models, and suggests that New York’s extensive public transportation system makes it easier to move children outside their neighborhoods, depending on their age.

But the number of children in all those other district’s integration programs combined is tiny compared to New York’s enrollment. And across the country, systemwide integration has generally required extensive busing; Mr. Carranza says he supports a more limited use of transportation, to make school choice “more equitable.”

Mr. Carranza says that he and his staff are studying elementary and middle school zones across the city and considering whether any of these boundaries are encouraging segregation. He is questioning why there are so many hurdles for parents to get their children into special programs like gifted and talented, and even whether such classes should exist.

Unlike Mr. Klein, he says he isn’t concerned if he scares the 15 percent of New York City public school parents who are white, or the quarter who are middle-class and affluent. “The narrative around, ‘We need to bring certain groups of kids back into the school system, or not allow certain groups of kids to leave the school system,’ is a really problematic perspective,” he said. “Because it assumes that certain groups of kids add value, and certain groups of kids don’t.”

The mayor has not echoed the chancellor’s rhetoric on segregation, and his office did not respond to a list of questions about busing, school zone changes and other specific desegregation tools. Instead, in a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said, “The mayor and chancellor share the same commitment to social justice. As we’ve proven in New York City, leadership and strong community engagement are making real progress toward achieving school diversity.”

Mr. Carranza, too, has been somewhat cautious. He says he doesn’t want to force integration — he wants parents to come along willingly, to places like Public School 161 on West 133rd Street in Harlem. The neighborhood is becoming more racially and economically diverse, but that isn’t visible at P.S. 161. Ninety-five percent of the students are Hispanic or black. Only 2 percent are white. Test scores are below city averages.

But on a tour led by the school’s principal, Pamela Price-Haynes, Mr. Carranza liked what he saw. Children who had recently immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Senegal and Yemen were conducting a science experiment, effortlessly using the word “hypothesis.” The staff spoke proudly about the school’s winning debate team and its swim lessons, dance and chess.

Back in his chauffeured car, whisking downtown to his office at the Tweed Courthouse, Mr. Carranza sighed. Test scores can’t capture what P.S. 161 is all about, he said. He wished parents — white parents, college-educated ones — would understand how their children could thrive at a school like this. “Parents would be better served if they actually visited schools in the neighborhood,” he said, instead of simply looking up test scores or demographic numbers online.

But the city has given families the ability to opt out of attending schools like P.S. 161. Nearly 60 percent of the kindergarten families zoned for it use the city’s choice process to escape it, just as across the city white and middle-class parents choose to avoid similar schools. They can be seen across New York City in the early morning hours, walking their children, hand-in-hand, past their zoned schools.

Ultimately, Mr. Carranza said he believes parents have the right to do that. He suggested that better programming and after-school opportunities could lure middle-class families to a broader array of schools. “Parents will always do what they want to do, or need to do, for what they feel is good for their children,” Mr. Carranza said.

It is an argument similar to the one made by the Bloomberg administration, and by the mayor and Mr. Carranza’s predecessor, Ms. Fariña.

Mr. Torres, the Bronx councilman, for one, notes the gap between what Mr. Carranza has said, and what he has actually done — at least so far. “There remains a profound disconnect between the boldness of his rhetoric and the timidity of the Department of Education’s policy,” he said.

Mr. Carranza said he looked forward to hearing Mr. Torres’s ideas. “His expressed desire to not be incremental has also been expressed to me by lots of people,” he said. “People are starting to get excited and motivated to have this conversation, this discussion, and then to develop a plan.”

“I’m really optimistic,” he added. “I’m excited.”

Follow Dana Goldstein on Twitter: @Danagoldstein