City Unveils Third Upper West Side Middle School Diversity Plan

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — The city Department of Education presented another alternate plan to increase diversity at Upper West Side middle schools on Wednesday night, but again was met by mixed response from neighborhood parents.

The city's new plan — its third proposal in two weeks — reserves 25 percent of seats in each district middle school for underperforming students that qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, DOE officials said Wednesday. Of those qualifying students, those with the lowest state test scores and lowest elementary school grades would receive priority.

The plan shares similarities with two plans presented during a May 16 CEC meeting.

The city's first alternate plan reserves 25 percent of seats in each district middle school for students coming from elementary schools with high economic needs that have low test scores. The second plan proposes reserving 25 percent of seats for students based on an evaluation that considers both test scores and report cards.

In a simulation performed by applying the new policies to last year's admissions numbers, each plan showed a net increase in students matching with their preferred middle schools, DOE officials said Tuesday.

But parents and members of the Community Education Council still appeared skeptical of the DOE plans. The council's treasurer Lucas Liu said that the city's new plan would leave underperforming students who don't qualify for free or reduced lunch "basically out of luck." Liu said that he's in favor of a bolder plan than those presented by the city, because if the current plans don't do enough the city will have to repeat the process.

"There's going to be more heated debate, more anxiety and more frustration," Liu said.

Council member Genisha Metcalf delivered the strongest criticism against the city's plan because it doesn't do anything to address inequity in resources. While the plan may give students from low-performing elementary schools the opportunity to get into a better middle school, it doesn't do anything to improve the district's worst schools — all of which are located in Harlem.

"Equity is providing all schools with equal opportunity and equal access to resources," Metcalf said. " Equity is not taking a few students from the highest need schools and sending the message that we have to shuffle kids out of their community to get a highly sought after education."

District 3 Superintendent Ilene Altschul said that the city is looking into improving resources for the district's lowest performing schools, and that the current admissions plan is not related to the issue of those inequities. The plans do not force any students to leave their communities, but instead provides an opportunity to do so that is currently unavailable, Altschul said.

During Tuesday night's meeting several district principals spoke in favor of implementing the city's plans. Brian Zager, principal of Lafayette Academy on West 93rd Street, attempted to assuage the fears of parents who believed that mixing low- and high-performing students would result in negative outcomes. Zager said that his school's French dual language program brings together students of all backgrounds, which has resulted in higher performance at the school.

Charles DeBerry, the principal of PS 76 in Harlem, said that while the plan isn't perfect it should still be passed.

"To not do anything would be a tremendous error on our part," DeBerry said Tuesday. "I don't think we have the perfect plan — there are pieces that need to be worked out — but if we continue to decide to try to find a perfect plan we will never get anywhere."

DeBerry said that his experience attending the first integrated school in North Carolina was greatly beneficial to his life.

District parents were less convinced of the plan's merits. While some parents did praise the DOE's efforts to correct district-wide segregation, others worried that the plan would negatively affect the students it claims to help.

The main argument among opponents of the plan was: Why change admissions at good school's instead of fixing the underperforming schools.

A few parents took the argument further, arguing that mixing low- and high-performing students would result in worse educational outcomes. Instead, these parents claimed, teachers would see more success teaching homogenous groups of students.

The DOE's middle school plan made headlines in late April when new schools Chancellor Richard Carranza sent a tweet criticizing the school district's "wealthy white Manhattan parents." Carranza retweeted an article by RawStory with the headline "WATCH: Wealthy white Manhattan parents angrily rant against plan to bring more black kids to their schools." The tweet was liked and retweeted thousands of times, but it didn't earn the chancellor any good will on the Upper West Side.

The article featured video from a Spectrum NY 1 News article about a recent meeting of Community Education Council 3 — a parent-led group that helps dictate school policy on the Upper West Side and in parts of Harlem — that featured some white parents complaining about a city plan to desegregate neighborhood middle schools.

Tuesday night's meeting of the Community Education Council for District 3 was the 26th public meeting dedicated to the issue of altering the district's middle school applications to allow underperforming schools the option of attending high-performing schools. The eventual plan is expected to take affect by the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year.

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