We Know it When We See It

This is the story of how a handful of women didn't look the other way after recognizing that their school enrollment system, for years, had been explicitly set up to advantage White families and disadvantage families of color. With years of advocacy, a strategic press presence and some excellent timing,  D15 Parents for Middle School Equity  managed to put an end to a decades-old screening-based admissions policy that funneled most of our diverse district's White and higher income students into the three well-funded, selective middle schools with the best reputations. After our work was highlighted in the recent podcast  Nice White Parents , we thought we'd offer more details about how it all unfolded, in the hope that our experience can prove useful to others interested in making change.

Why did we do this? How? What lessons can our story teach others interested in reforming systemic processes that are tired, unjust and reinforce inequities by creating two entirely different sets of educational experiences for White kids and their Black and Brown peers?

We started our advocacy by calling attention to the subjective, unfair and educationally incoherent screening process, and its connection to upholding the systemic separation of students on the basis of race, ethnicity and income. After our survey, we circulated a petition, held a  public forum , spoke to any member of the  media  that would listen to us, and testified before our  Community Education Council , the  Panel on Educational Policy  and the City Council. We also continued to build our base in our community with a  Facebook group  and several  public meetings .

Initially, we thought we needed to put forth our own proposal for an alternative to the existing process. We explored many options (such as  controlled choice  or  "ed opt" ) and strongly considered advocating for one of those. But our key moment came when we realized that as a small group of mostly White women, we really had no business calling for any particular solution without input from the entire community. 

We decided not to demand a solution that WE as White and privileged parents thought was best. Instead, we began to demand that the DOE acknowledge that its system was unworkable, and insist that it redesign a new, more equitable process with systematic input from ALL stakeholders.

We sought a district-wide middle school assignment process based on:

• Transparency
• Fairness to ALL our families
• Equitable admissions standards
• Meaningful community input
• And sound educational theory

We proposed a "learning lab" to bring together various stakeholders from across the district to devise a better and more equitable method of placing kids into the sixth grade. We brought our idea to the Community Education Council and tried to get it on the ballot for our local  Participatory Budgeting  election, but for about two years, we had little luck.

We kept going though. We supported pro-equity candidates on our Community Education Council, continued to amplify our message wherever possible in the media and online, and joined forces with other  advocates  across the City as the school integration movement grew.

For years it appeared that we were making incremental progress, which mostly consisted of keeping the question of middle school integration and screening in the center of lots of dialogue around the district and the City. But then, in June 2017, the NYC DOE issued its  Equity and Excellence Plan , which we, along with many  others , considered barely able to scratch the surface of the segregation entrenched across the City. It also did not use the words "segregation," "desegregation" or "integration" once in the entire document. However, someone in the DOE must have snuck in this paragraph, which initially got very little attention: 

"The DOE will kick off community stakeholder engagement processes in several districts that have already engaged in conversations about fostering school diversity. The DOE will work alongside school leaders, parents, community and elected leaders in each of those districts to develop diversity plans. The DOE will act as a technical advisor to the process in order to support stakeholders in accessing the resources and expertise they will need to need to develop and implement the plan."

In August 2017, we received an email inviting us to a meeting at the  WXY Architecture + Urban Planning + Design Studio , and explaining that as part of the DOE's Equity and Excellence Plan, the DOE had hired WXY to facilitate district-wide discussions to redesign the D15 middle school admissions process. We were astonished and somewhat bewildered. With equal parts curiosity and skepticism, we decided to attend.

We found that the DOE had contracted with WXY to plan a year-long  community engagement proces s to bring together stakeholders from across the district to devise a new student assignment procedure. This proposal was far more extensive than the single-day lab we had proposed. WXY invited us to join the Working Group that would oversee the process, which would include three large community workshops to understand the problems and identify solutions.

Despite our caution (and honestly, our disbelief that our advocacy had come to fruition), we joined the Working Group, and spent a year engaging deeply with the question of not only how to re-design middle school admissions, but equally as importantly, how to ensure that voices from all across the district were heard - not just the loudest, which so often means those with the most privilege. Key to getting it right was making sure that the Working Group was actually representative of the district. We were not encouraged by the fact that initially the DOE claimed to be unable to find any parents from Sunset Park to join the group, so we called for a delay until they managed this. But they actually listened, slowed things down, and eventually the Working Group did include a wider range of voices.

Our skepticism of the DOE's commitment to making actual change also began to diminish when they included this slide in the introduction to the first public workshop.

It was the first time the DOE had publicly acknowledged the segregation of the City's schools. We became a little less skeptical that the process was for real.

The first two workshops were well attended, and included introductory  presentations , food and small breakout groups to discuss the current state of middle school admissions and possible alternatives. People from all across the district attended, and shared their experiences and ideas. Built around the principles of  participatory design , these discussions were honest, heated and revelatory.

For the first time, the DOE asked in a big way the people impacted by their policy not only how they felt about it, but whether it was equitable. A principal of a heavily immigrant school described using money from her own budget to pay for a bus and a translator so families from her school could participate in middle school tours. A Black mother from Red Hook relayed refusing to let her son apply to one of the "Big Three" schools because of the stories she'd heard from friends describing discrimination and harassment there. And an elementary school teacher explained the subjectivity of the behavior grades he gave his kids, given the lack of any standardized grading guidance provided by his school or the DOE.

City Councilman Brad Lander described the first workshop as having "the potential to strengthen inclusive democracy, combat inequality at its roots, and profoundly shape the future of New York City."

That might have been a bit of an overstatement, but it certainly was a powerful evening.

The workshops also explored a ton of  excellent data , which showed clearly how each screen served to exclude Black and Brown students from the most competitive schools.

At the end of the 2017-2018 school year, the WXY process concluded.

After a year's worth of discussions, data analysis and surveys and community workshops, the Working Group concluded that there was no way to preserve any method of screening students that wouldn't ultimately violate the rights of one group or another.

The Working Group also agreed that changing admissions in and of itself was not enough; in order to integrate the schools successfully, a comprehensive set of initiatives was necessary to transition schools from serving relatively homogeneous groups of children to vastly different ones.

The result was the  D15 Diversity Plan , a 110 page report. The most significant of its recommendations was the elimination of all school screens in favor of a weighted lottery that gave preference at all schools to students receiving free and reduced price lunch. The plan also includes a multi-year sequence for implementing the inclusion and other recommendations for supporting integrated student bodies at all schools.

As luck would have it, the 2019-2020 school year was the first year that the new plan went into effect.  Initial data  shows that economic segregation in sixth grade decreased by 55% and racial segregation decreased by 38%; these results are both large and statistically significant. Before schools shut down due to Covid-19,  reports  were largely positive, and  described  students from across the district attending schools children from their neighborhoods had never attended under the old system. You can read more about the change in enrollment patterns  here .

Although simple changes to demographics are far from what's needed to bring about what the students of  IntegrateNYC  call  "The 5 R's of Real Integration,"  schools can't be integrated without the first step of bringing kids into the same schools. That's what the former admissions process prevented, and what the new Diversity Plan achieved. Take a look at the enrollment in the two largest middle schools in our district (both approximately 1100 students), MS 51 and MS 88 - located blocks away from each other, but mirror images of each other in terms of enrollment in 2014-2015, the year we started organizing:

In 2019-2020, after the first year of the new admissions plan went into effect, the two schools looked like this:

It is clear that removing screens in favor of a weighted lottery instantly decreased segregation. And as  this article  chronicles, the white flight many predicted not only failed to materialize, but students from each side of the district are finding positive experiences at schools they never would have considered previously.

We remain hopeful that once we get through the challenges of Covid-19, D15 will begin to fully implement the non-admissions pieces of the Diversity Plan, to start to create real integration and fully realize the true promise of a comprehensive approach to building schools that are inclusive of children of all backgrounds and abilities. Given that the district's initial implementation of these measures was tepid at best even pre-pandemic, we have begun to organize to make sure that in the aftermath of the pandemic, implementation of the full plan reemerges as a priority.

What are the larger lessons of the D15 experience? Will the removal of screens in our district lead, as we hoped, to the ultimate toppling of discriminatory screening across the City's middle and high schools? Will the City redraw school district and zone lines to promote integration on the elementary level? Or was this experience a one-off, possible in part because of " interest convergence ," the  notion  that “whites will tolerate and advance the interests of people of color only when they promote the self-interests of whites”? Was what happened in our district also lucky timing, due to a backlash against a video of a meeting to discuss a less drastic middle school diversity plan in Manhattan's District 3 (as Chana Joffe-Walt suggests in the conclusion of Nice White Parents)?

The answers are unclear, but not encouraging. In August 2019, the Mayor-appointed School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG) released its long-awaited  recommendations , which included restructuring gifted and talented programs, eliminating most middle-school screens City-wide, changing screened high schools admissions and redrawing district lines. However, at least a year later, the City has yet to adopt a single one of these recommendations. Then, due to Covid, the DOE  announced  it was contemplating ending admissions screens City-wide, for at least the next year. But after the announcement generated a huge controversy, the proposal was postponed, and as of late August 2020, the City still has not announced whether or how it will continue to screen kids using metrics such as grades, test scores, attendance and behavior - all of which became even more invalid sorting tools during the pandemic.

The DOE had also planned  another WXY-led district-wide integration process , this time in the middle schools of District 28. But after trying to get the community engagement process off the ground for months despite community anger and roadblocks, the DOE  postponed  it. And in D15, a  DOE proposal  to rezone parts of the elementary school zones is now also  postponed , in part due to the pandemic.

The good news is that many NYC students, some of whom went through the old D15 middle school process, are at the forefront of fighting for change as part of  IntegrateNYC  and  Teens Take Charge . They have become the real leaders of this movement, and are beginning to yield impressive  results .

The late integration activist  Courtney Everts Mykytyn  often noted how a sense of resource scarcity drives parents to fight to place their children in "good" schools, regardless of how much that perpetuates the competition for educational opportunities - and school segregation. Her point cannot be overstated. School integration is so  crucial , yet otherwise progressive White parents so often make choices that exacerbate segregation, despite supporting inclusion and diversity in theory.

This sense of resource scarcity pushes well-intentioned parents to act counter to our values and make choices that drive educational inequities. We participate without questioning in a host of educational systems (such as  tracking ,  gifted and competitive programs ,  PTA fundraising ,  resource inequities ,  education funding formulas ,  school and district zones , and  school discipline ) that historically have served to privilege White students at the expense and exclusion of Black and Brown children.

Those systems can and must be dismantled. 

This is where you come in. Start to ask questions. Ask why your district sorts kids in exclusionary ways. Question the educational purpose of the specific sorting mechanisms, such as gifted and talented programs or exam schools. Ask why certain schools, or programs are considered desirable while others are written off as harmful. Get used to doing simple data analysis to show others the disproportionality that so often results from biased educational practices. Find a graphic designer and show the disparities in clear and colorful ways that people can easily understand. Find some reporters who are willing to amplify your story, and tell it again and again until you start getting traction. 

In other words, don't accept your role in perpetuating segregation. Parents do have the power to make change - but it should be change that benefits everyone, and it must be forged by intentional listening to the voices so often excluded by the system. What we suspect made our advocacy effective was when we realized we could not presume to speak for the BIPOC families most impacted by the change we were seeking. We demanded meaningful engagement of the entire community.

If parents with privilege start calling out those inequities and the policies that created them, that's where change begins, but those parents cannot presume to speak for the people most harmed by the system.

Chana Joffe-Walt concludes Nice White Parents with this very provocative thought, which we take to heart:

Nice white parents can’t grab every advantage for our own children and also maintain our identities as good citizens who believe in equitable schools. The shame is telling us we have a choice. We can choose to hoard resources and segregate ourselves and flee the moment things feel uncomfortable. Or we can choose to be the people we say we are. But we can’t have both. We can choose to remember the goal of public schools is not to cater only to us, to keep us happy, but to serve every child. We’ve never had that school system. But we could. We could demand it. We might not. But we should know it’s within our power to help create it.

So look around your own school system. Look for the mechanisms large and small that are baked into the policies, procedures and traditions that keep kids separate and inevitably end up benefiting White students at the exclusion of others. And start to organize!

When we started questioning the process, we routinely encountered all sorts of sweeping generalizations about why there was no alternative to the status quo. So we set about breaking down assumptions by asking tons of questions and trying to collect and present the reality, based on actual data.

We worked hard to collect information from the community and to present what we learned clearly. We collaborated with local researchers to develop a survey that would yield as reliable results as possible (while acknowledging it was not a scientific study), and circulated a petition on paper and electronically in the district's predominant languages. Our Learning Lab Proposal was designed to elicit even more information in a structured and facilitated format.