Dive Brief:
- A new report by the Century Foundation finds the first year of preschool expansion in New York City, championed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, featured especially homogenous classrooms when it comes to race.
- The city is now in its third year of the program and has begun using a unified application process for the entire preschool system, which may have increased diversity in each classroom — but in the first year, recruitment among community-based programs especially tended to result in homogenous cohorts.
- Halley Potter, the Century Foundation report’s author, sees the data as a starting point for New York City, which has been taking small steps toward improving entrenched school segregation, and she said the real disappointment would be seeing little to no change in coming years.
Dive Insight:
When districts are organized around a neighborhood schools model, segregated buildings are nearly impossible to avoid. People live near people who look like them. For some, including the black community, that comes from leftover effects of government-sponsored redlining that legally restricted their grandparents — or even parents — from buying homes in certain neighborhoods. Immigrants often arrive and settle next to contacts they have from home, creating additional homogenous communities and compounding no longer legal but continued practices of discouraging certain families from certain areas.
Some districts have escaped desegregation orders by arguing alternative benefits of a neighborhood schools model that happen to also leave some schools majority white and others majority black or Latino, for example. Alternatives, including bussing, continue to be strongly opposed among some families, making the issue of segregation a long-term challenge for schools.