NYC's Segregated Schools Need 'Chief Integration Officer': Report

NEW YORK — New York City's notoriously segregated public school system needs a different kind of CIO — a chief integration officer to oversee diversity efforts, a city task force argues. Creating the new post is among the dozens of recommendations in a sweeping report issued Tuesday by the School Diversity Advisory Group, a panel of more than 40 people tasked with tackling the city's educational segregation problem.

The group recommended that the new chief report directly the Department of Education's chancellor and coordinate school diversity and integration efforts across the agency.

"One of this person’s chief functions would be to break down silos around diversity and integration work in the DOE to increase effectiveness," the report reads.

The office is just one component of a "more ambitious and more realistic" approach to integration that the report outlines with an eye toward eventually making public schools more reflective of the city's demographic makeup.

The wide-ranging recommendations address how diversity is measured, how resources are allocated, how students are taught and the role they should play in school governance.

"The advisory group has hammered out a series of bold recommendations to better integrate schools so that public education in the city can serve its fundamental purposes: promoting social mobility in the economy and social cohesion in our democracy," Rick Kahlenberg, a member of the group's executive committee, said in a statement.

Segregation has bedeviled the city's largest-in-the-nation public school system even as it has seen a record-high graduation rate, improved test scores and the rollout of a universal pre-kindergarten program under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

While the mayor has led a charge to diversify the elite specialized high schools, individual districts have created their own plans for integration — an approach De Blasio has seemingly encouraged with a $2 million grant program to encourage more districts to form such plans.

Nine school districts that have "sufficient demographic diversity" should be required to create their own diversity plans and examine admissions policies that could help them with integration, the report argues.

The nine districts listed in the report include three — Districts 1 and 3 in Manhattan and Brooklyn's District 15 — that have already developed diversity plans.

The advisory group plans to solicit feedback and issue a follow-up report with more recommendations by the end of the school year, the report says.

"We believe strongly that building a diverse and equitable public education system in New York City requires listening to the voices of the people and communities who have been historically left out of the policy-making process," the report reads.

But Noliwe Rooks, a Cornell University professor who authored a book on school segregation and privatization, argued the report could leave integration in the hands of people who have historically resisted it.

"What jumps out is the ways the report urges ‘voluntary integration’ and how it avoids taking seriously the resistance of privileged and white parents to any and all talk of meaningful integration," Rooks said in a statement. "Their resistance is not new, but goes back to the era immediately preceding Brown v. Board when one of the largest civil rights marches was actually against talk of racially integrating schools and reaches to the city’s very recent past."

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio visits a pre-kindergarten class on Staten Island in September 2014. AP Photo/Pool, New York Daily News, Susan Watts)