Upper West Side Middle School Diversity Plan Moves Forward

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — The city Department of Education is moving forward with a controversial plan it believes will help desegregate middle schools on the Upper West Side and in South Harlem, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza announced Wednesday.

The plan — which will take effect for students entering 6th grade in 2019 — will reserve 25 percent of seats at District 3 middle schools for low-performing students who qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program, city schools officials said.

"Students benefit from integrated schools, and I applaud the District 3 community on taking this step to integrate their middle schools," Carranza said Wednesday. "I hope what we’re announcing in District 3 will be a model for other districts to integrate schools across the City, and I look forward to working with parents and educators as we implement this plan and strengthen middle schools across the district."

Students that qualify as low-performing must grade no higher than 30 percent on their grade English and math classes and score no higher than 20 percent on state English and math tests, city officials said. The lowest-performing students will be placed in "Group A" and the lower performing students that still qualify will be placed in "Group B," city officials said.

When District 3 middle schools offer students seats for the 2019 school year, 10 percent of the seats must be offered to students in Group A and 15 percent must be offered to students in Group B, city officials said. Individual schools will have autonomy when offering the remaining 75 percent of seats.

Low performing students that do not qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program — a measure of poverty — will not be considered in the plan.

The city Department of Education predicts that 300 families will be affected by the new plan in its first year and that some of the districts highest-performing, but least diverse, schools such as Booker T. Washington will become more integrated.

The school district's Community Education Council — a volunteer body made up of district parents — has been debating the merits of the plan for months. The body's president, Kim Watkins, called the plan a "meaningful change for our schools" in a statement Wednesday, but some members had their reservations about the plan while it was being debated.

Council member Genisha Metcalf delivered strong criticism of the city's plan during a May meeting because it doesn't address inequity in resources. While the plan gives 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."

Many district parents also spoke out against the plan. 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 often: Why change admissions at good schools instead of fixing underperforming schools.

A few parents took the argument further, arguing that mixing low- and high-performing students would result in worse educational outcomes.

The discussion surrounding 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 complainingabout a city plan to desegregate neighborhood middle schools.

Photo by Shutterstock