Dive Brief:
- In an attempt to prevent segregation due to rezoning in Brooklyn’s Public School 307, a new proposal suggests implementing a quota system that would give free or reduced-price lunch students priority for half the seats in each class.
- Parents are divided over the proposal, which is very similar to a Manhattan rezoning proposal that was recently scrapped amid controversy, The New York Times reports.
- The community education council covering P.S. 307 is slated to vote on the proposal within the next 45 days.
Dive Insight:
Resegregation in schools is a hot issue, and the preventative approach taken by the P.S. 307 community education council is designed to avoid further polarization and isolation between strata of schoolchildren.
Sixty years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, little is being done in the U.S. to prevent resegregation. The problem has been covered in-depth in St. Petersburg, FL, for example, but is happening throughout the country.
A recent study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that the average Latino student in California attended 84% non-white schools in impoverished areas. And in Minneapolis, segregation in urban schools has grown quickly and dramatically. The impact is severe: “Test scores in the most minority-concentrated schools lag integrated schools in the metro by about 25 percentage points,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
As for New York, rezoning efforts between P.S. 307 and P.S. 8 have long since provoked consternation, giving body to the debate over what can and should be done to integrate urban schools.