 targeted admissions criteria that draw from across the district) for 25 years. The graduation takes place at 6 p.m. on a Friday evening, so all the families can attend, including those who can’t get off work. Instead of choosing a few students to speak, each class does a joyful dance/spoken-word performance that explores a theme they’ve been working on. The principal’s speech mentions every student by name, and you can tell they’ve been seen for who they are.
Surrounded by beaming families that really reflect our city, amid the joy of graduation, you can feel the bright promise not just of integrated public education, but of inclusive multiracial democracy. Most parents would be delighted to have their child graduate from a school like this.
On top of the educational benefits they offer, there’s good evidence that attending a diverse school can help reduce racial bias, that students who attend integrated schools are more likely to seek out integrated settings later in life, and that diversity results in more productive, effective, and creative teams.
It will take the hard work of principals, teachers, students, and families to achieve what the young leaders of IntegrateNYC, knowing that just moving bodies around is not enough by itself, call the “5 Rs of real integration.” But what we’re doing in the District 15 middle schools starting this fall offers the possibility of expanding opportunity to 10,000 middle school students over the next four years. I’m already looking forward to the eighth grade graduations in June of 2022.
There are lessons in how we made this decision as well. After parents and students pushed for change, the Department of Education put the resources forward for a nine-month community planning process, with dozens of meetings across the district.
We did not ask whether we would integrate; it was clear from the start that this was the goal. But we did take families’ concerns seriously: not just white parents’ anxiety about whether we would lose something we felt entitled to, but also Latino parents’ worries about whether this was just another effort to gentrify their neighborhood and black parents’ concern that this would send their child to a school where they would face racial animus from teachers. Through that process, we gained the collective courage to do something bolder than we first thought possible.
Instead of a false choice of mandate vs. engagement, protest vs. backlash, elusive sweeping change vs. small pilot program, we have the opportunity to build a feedback loop that moves from insistent organizing through participatory planning to implementation with integrity — and then insist on taking the next step, even bolder than the one before. (And indeed this week, building in part on the District 15 work, the School Diversity Advisory Group appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio put forth a bold agenda to eliminate gifted and talented programs that result in segregation.)
If we do this in the middle schools of 10 more community school districts, we will have 100,000 more New York City public school students in integrated schools: 10% less segregated.
That will be no excuse to stop marching to desegregate the other 90%. Quite the opposite: It will be a powerful cohort to keep marching with.