Redlining’s Redlight to NYC Public School Integration

By wswartzSpring 2020

Of the 895 students admitted to Stuyvesant, the best public high school in NYC, in 2019, seven students were Black. Despite being one of the most diverse cities in the world, New York City has the most segregated school system in the world. Education is one of the primary predictors of economic success. Simply earning a high school degree boosts one’s weekly median earnings by $192.[4] Thus, a racial divide in educational opportunities has far-reaching economic consequences for the rest of people’s lives. Click the map or link below to see the predominant degree attainment, average household incomes, and racial sociodemographics for different census tracts in NYC. https://hamilton1812.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=9b16da1c6d024cbeaec89008f63d33a4

A Brief History of Segregation in New York City Schools

In the 1930s, to assess the safety of a mortgage loan, banks began the practice of redlining. Banks rated neighborhoods based on how likely residents were to make their mortgage payments. However, the primary reason for rating a neighborhood as red (the most unsafe rating) was the prevalence of Black residents. Click the map or link below this paragraph to see which neighborhoods were redlined. 

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=11/40.794/-74.132&city=manhattan-ny

  Consequently, Black residents in NYC were often unable to secure housing loans, preventing them from accruing generational wealth like White residents. Redlining practices have had long-term consequences, as we can see from the former map that redlined neighborhoods are often still the poorest in current times. 

Busing In NYC

Despite the efforts of many civil rights activists in the 60s and 70s, busing (the practice of transporting students to schools within or outside their local school district to combat segregation) was never implemented in NYC. In 1964, White parents marched and managed to stop a busing plan from being implemented. Busing requires sending POC students to higher-performing majority-White schools, and sending White students to lower-performing majority-POC schools. To this day, busing proposals are struck down because wealthy White parents don’t want their children to go to under-performing schools. As recently as 2016, parents protested a plan to send children from the Upper West Side to a lower-performing majority-Hispanic school.[1] A lack of busing forces lower income students to remain at their local public high school. NYC’s school systems are shockingly racially homogenous for a city with so many cultures. 

How Public Schools in New York Work

The stratification of schooling in NYC starts long before high school. Property taxes from surrounding residences fund local public high schools.[5] This way of financing invariably leads to educational differences between economic classes, as by living in more affluent neighborhoods, students are automatically sent to better public elementary schools. Data from Fig 1 shows that students from economically advantaged neighborhoods are much more likely to score higher on the NYC state tests.

Test score differences plague the city from K-12. Since students from wealthier neighborhoods have higher test scores, they are more likely to be admitted to a better high school. The high school that students go to has a massive effect on their future, as a study conducted by Measure of America showed that high school graduation rates differed as much as 34% from low-income to high-income areas.[6] Thus, a student’s school district is a significant factor in determining whether students can even go to college, let alone achieve an advanced degree. 

Why Does it Matter?

Redlining practices from the past are still having massive effects on today’s NYC. POC students go to underfunded schools, which has an enormous impact on their economic future. Unfortunately, this won’t end. This cycle perpetuates itself; POC students are forced to go to poor schools. They then have lower-incomes, because their schools have failed to prepare them for college and life[8]. This forces them to live in poorer neighborhoods, causing their kids to go to those very same schools and perpetuating the cycle of inequality. If we hope to break the chokehold that systematic racism has on this country, we must address it at its root. While some argue for school choice, the process of kids ranking their favorite schools and then being matched via an algorithm, there is significant evidence that this hurts lower performing schools [3]. Most solutions include funding NYC public schools more equitably, but one of the best (and more interesting) solutions includes implementing a lottery system for high schools, as these have been shown to boost POC children’s enrollment by as much as 13%.[7] None of these solutions would integrate NYC schools overnight, but they would all be a step in the right direction. NYC has the most segregated school system in the world, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Citations

  1. Shapiro, Eliza. “Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html
  2. Test Results, https://infohub.nyced.org/reports/academics/test-results
  3. Brathwaite, Jessica. “Neoliberal Education Reform and the Perpetuation of Inequality.” Critical Sociology, vol. 43, no. 3, May 2017, pp. 429–448, doi:10.1177/0896920516649418.
  4. “Measuring the Value of Education : Career Outlook.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/education-pays.htm.
  5. Property Taxes, https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/property/learn/proptax.htm
  6. (MoA), Measure of America. “High School Graduation in New York City.” Measure of America: A Program of the Social Science Research Council, https://measureofamerica.org/d2gnyc/high-school-graduation-in-new-york-city/
  7. Algar, Selim. “NYC Admissions Changes Will Boost Black, Hispanic Enrollment at Top Schools by 13 Percent.” New York Post, New York Post, 28 Feb. 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/02/16/nyc-admissions-changes-will-boost-black-hispanic-enrollment/.
  8. Moore, George W., et al. “High School Students and Their Lack of Preparedness for College: A Statewide Study.” Education and Urban Society, vol. 42, no. 7, Nov. 2010, pp. 817–838, doi:10.1177/0013124510379619.