With little fanfare or advance notice, the de Blasio administration released its much-anticipated plan to combat racial segregation in city schools. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.
The city says it will make changes to school admissions policies to try to make it easier for poor, homeless or otherwise disadvantaged students to gain access to better schools. It's part of a plan to address the lack of racial diversity the system.
"This is something in writing now that is a road map for what is going to come forth and really holding people accountable," said Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña.
City schools are among the most racially segregated in the country, but last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted that his diversity plan would be modest in scope, despite his focus on fighting inequality.
"We're not going to put forward a plan that says we're instantly going to wipe away 400 years of American history and create a perfect model of diversity. But we can make a major difference in a number of schools," the mayor said.
The biggest policy change will impact about one-fifth of the city's 1,800 schools. They will no longer be allowed to prioritize students for admission who have taken a tour or met with a school representative. The city says that favors more privileged students, whose families speak English and have the time to navigate the admissions process.
But critics already are saying the plan doesn't go far enough. Indeed, the 13-page plan does not even use the words segregation, desegregation or integration.
Instead, officials refer to the issue as one of "diversity."
"To me, diversity is obviously racial. But it's also about language, it's socio-economics, it's about gender issues. It's a whole gamut of things," Fariña said.
Advocates say this approach minimizes the problem of racial segregation, allowing schools like Stuyvesant High School, which only accepted 13 black students out of 926 students this year, to still claim diversity, since many students are from immigrant families.
The plan includes a few goals, including getting 50,000 more students over the next five years to attend schools that the Education Department classifies as diverse. But to be considered diverse, a school only needs to have 10 percent of students who are not black or Hispanic.