The Schott Foundation for Public Education has released a new report showing that Black and Hispanic students in New York are concentrated in the city’s lowest performing schools. The authors contend that inequitable distribution of educational resources in the New York City public schools needs to be addressed.
The report, A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, examines test scores of students at 500 middle schools across the city. Scores on these tests determine which students are admitted to the top high schools in the city. The results show test scores within regions and in particular schools roughly correlate to race and poverty level. Black students are four times as likely as Asian or White students to be enrolled in the poorest performing schools.
In the preface to the report, John D. Jackson, president and CEO of the Schott Foundation, writes: “It is alarming that in the largest school system in the United States the right to an opportunity to learn is undeniably distributed by race, ethnicity and neighborhood. This unequal distribution of opportunity by race and neighborhood occurs with such regularity in New York that reasonable people can no longer ignore the role that state and city policies and practices play in institutionalizing the resulting disparate outcomes, nor the role played by the lack of federal intervention requiring New York to protect students from them.”
The full report or an executive summary can be downloaded here.
