The NYC Department of Education Has Not Provided Librarians To 87% of Harlem Schools, Says the NY POST

Just a few weeks ago NYC Chancellor Carmen Farina was tooting her horn over a "new policy" of integration, wasn't she?

Diversity in Admissions in New York City Will Bring Integration to the City's Public Schools....or Not

New York City Department of Education Chancellor Carmen Farina Unveils a New Plan: Integration

I guess the "new policy" does not include Harlem.

Betsy Combier

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DOE fails to provide Harlem schools with librarians: activists

NYPOST, Sue Edelman, August 4, 2017

School librarians are all but ­extinct in Harlem.

The Department of Education has failed to provide librarians at 87 percent of Harlem schools that are legally required to staff them, according to a group of activists.

State education law mandates that schools serving kids in grades seven to 12 must have a librarian on staff to develop research skills.

“In a secondary school with an enrollment of more than 700 but less than 1,000 pupils, a certified school library media specialist shall devote the entire school day to school library work,” the law states. For schools with less than 700 kids, a part-time librarian is required.

The Harlem Council of Elders, a community advocacy group, said that requirement goes all but ignored in their schools — and that 10,000 mostly black and Latino students are suffering for it.

“This is crucial for their education,” said Diane Tinsley of Community Education Council 5. “They don’t have this fundamental skill — how to research. This is something kids in other areas know how to do because they have those resources.”

Citing DOE data, CEC 5 found that 40 of the 46 schools in five Harlem districts that qualified for librarian staffing didn’t have one.

In District 4, not a single school requiring the presence of a librarian staffed one.

Tinsley said Harlem students are receiving diplomas but end up lost at the collegiate level without some of the skills that a librarian could help to impart.

“They jump into college without these basic skills,” she said. “A lot of them end up taking remedial classes and having to use up their financial aid to do so. It’s a serious problem and no one seems to want to do anything about it.”

The DOE suggested Friday that there’s a shortage of certified librarians to staff city schools.

“While there are challenges in identifying and hiring library media specialists in New York City and across the state, we’ll continue our investments in libraries and students’ reading skills,” said DOE spokesman Will Mantell.

Mantell said that the DOE would be placing “reading coaches” in District 5 and 6 elementary schools but did not cite any imminent plans for the secondary school librarian drought.

The Harlem Council of Elders blasted the lack of a specific plan and said that their patience is wearing thin.

“This discriminatory practice is shameful, illegal, and must end immediately,” the group said.

Some of New York City Schools are The Most Segregated in the United States.

All you have to do is read the first sentence in the Chalkbeat article posted below, to know whether the Mayor and Chancellor of NYC have succeeded in their mandate to provide a free and appropriate public school education to kids in the New York City school district. They have failed. ,,,,,,at least to the most vulnerable, the poor, and black/hispanic/other children. New York City schools are the most segregated in the United States.

Shame on both of you. Do something big, now. Make a difference.

Betsy Combier
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NYC middle schools, pre-Ks meet diversity targets — and more high schools join initiative to spur integration

By Christina Veiga         @CVEIGA         CVEIGA@CHALKBEAT.ORG    

New York City middle schools participating in an admissions program designed to encourage integration met their targets in making offers to incoming students, Chalkbeat has learned.

Additionally, two more high schools will join the Diversity in Admissions pilot, bringing the total to 21 participating schools — still a tiny fraction of the roughly 1,800 schools across the city.

This is the third school year that principals could apply to the program, which allows schools to set aside a percentage of seats for students who meet certain criteria, such as qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, which is often used as a measure of poverty. In some schools, only a sliver of seats are set aside; at others, it’s more than half.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña have come under increasing pressure to spur integration in city schools, which are some of the most segregated in the country. While the education department has been eager to tout the Diversity in Admissions program, many activists have criticized the approach as piecemeal, calling instead for wider-scale approaches. The city has promised a broader plan by June, and the chancellor recently hinted that changes to high school admissions could be a part of the proposal.

The four middle schools in the diversity program all met — or surpassed — their set-aside targets in making offers to incoming students, according to data provided by the education department. However, it’s not guaranteed that all students who are offered admission will actually enroll.

Two of the participating middle schools are in Brooklyn’s District 15, where parents and Councilman Brad Lander have called for enrollment changes. At M.S. 839, 42 percent of offers went to students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. At the Math & Science Exploratory School, 30 percent of offers did.

Two high schools will join the Diversity in Admissions program for the 2017-18 enrollment cycle: Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design in Brooklyn, and Academy for Careers in Television and Film in Queens. Both will set aside 63 percent of seats for students who qualify for free lunch — a higher threshold of need. Currently, 83 percent of students at Williamsburg High School qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (rates for only free lunch were not immediately available). Only about 50 percent of students at Academy for Careers in Television and Film qualify for free lunch, according to Principal Edgar Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said he has seen the school’s population slowly change since it opened almost a decade ago. Television and Film was a Title I school when it launched, meaning enough students were poor to qualify for additional federal funding. The school has since lost that status, and Rodriguez said joining the Diversity in Admission pilot will help preserve economic diversity.

“We work very hard, in the four years we have students with us, to provide them a space that gives them a sense of the real world,” he said. “The school is already diverse as it is, and I think ensuring the diversity continues, and that it’s sustained over time and deepened, just enhances that experience overall.”

The education department also shared offer information for nine pre-K sites in the Diversity in Admissions program.

Most pre-Ks in the diversity program met their offer targets, except for the Castle Bridge School in Washington Heights. The school aimed to make 10 percent of offers to students who have incarcerated parents, but the school wasn’t able to make any offers based on the students who applied and priority status given to other students.

A recent report by The Century Foundation found that the city’s pre-Ks are more segregated than kindergarten classrooms. Testifying recently at a state budget hearing, Fariña seemed to chalk that up to parent choice.

“I, as a parent, am not going to be running to another part [of the city]. So it’s a matter [of] applying,” she said. “This is parent choice — the same way you can go to private school, parochial school, charter school, you can go to any pre-K.”

Confronting Segregation in New York City Schools

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDMAY 15, 2017

Despite its polychromatic diversity, New York City has one of most deeply segregated school systems in the nation. When asked about this last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio dodged by saying that the schools are a reflection of historical housing patterns, and, “We cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City.”

Segregation in the city’s schools cannot be dismissed as an unsolvable problem. And though housing plays a role, decades-old educational policies have reinforced inequality and placed many low-income black and brown children on the road to second-class citizenship.

The Times’s Elizabeth A. Harris and Ford Fessenden made that clear last week in “The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools,” an investigation of how a school choice initiative actually traps many low-income children in an inferior system-within-a-system.

Created during the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s choice system frees eighth graders who once would have attended their neighborhood high schools to apply anywhere in the city. But many of the most desirable high schools seem to have washed their hands of all but the best-prepared students by basing admission on auditions, or scores on a one-day, high-stakes test, or top performance on statewide exams, or portfolios of middle school work. Others apply vague entrance criteria that leave a room for arbitrariness.

By eighth grade, however, many low-income black and Hispanic children who have spent their early grades confined to failing schools — and passed through similarly poor middle schools — have already fallen too far behind in the competition for the high schools that could prepare them for college.

In some cases, for example, middle school students may not have taken courses necessary for entry and may not have the work samples to submit because teachers were unaware that they were supposed to preserve them. And low-income children who might qualify for admission are often defeated by a byzantine application process that wealthier parents navigate with paid consultants.

The choice system was constructed not for the poor, but to keep white middle-class families invested in the public schools. Even some who supported the strategy 20 years ago, though, now recognize that it promotes class segregation and presents enormous obstacles to vulnerable families. As The Times article points out, the racial isolation of black and Hispanic students is just as great in high school as in elementary schools, evidence that the choice system is failing.

Eric Nadelstern, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, who served as the deputy schools chancellor during the Bloomberg years, believes that efforts to retain the middle class at the expense of the poor were a critical mistake that reinforced racial isolation.

He recently proposed that the city get rid of the school entrance requirement system in favor of one that allows children to apply to any school in any area, with all admissions decided by lotteries. Others favor a less extreme version of this idea, under which schools would expand diversity — and promote upward mobility — by accepting children with a broader range of academic preparation.

Beyond that, critics argue that Mr. de Blasio should take a more urgent approach to remaking schools that continue to fail low-income black and Latino students. That means strengthening the teacher corps where possible and replacing it where necessary.

These changes are unlikely, with a mayor who is running for office and eager to keep the peace with both the teachers union and middle-class voters. But none of this alters the fundamental truth that New York City’s school choice system is tilted toward the wealthy and offers no real choice for the poor.

Half a century after integrating a New Orleans school, Ruby Bridges says America is headed in the wrong direction

‘I have hidden my legal status for 11 years’: A disillusioned high school senior speaks out

Racial Disparities Start in Pre-Kindergarten Says the Century Foundation in a New Report

Racial segregation in New York City is rampant. In some places you cannot see it immediately, but it is there. Kids who are African-American or Hispanic, kids with parents who do not speak English well, and families who live in predominantly minority neighborhoods do not get the Gifted and Talented Programs nor the service providers for special needs that the white and Asian populations in NYC get.

This racial divide from pre-k up the line through high school prevents minority children from getting into the specialized high schools. This is the cancer which will not be fixed by changing the test, the SSHAT. The systemic discrimination must be addressed head on, and all the politicians who ask us to read their lips are doing nothing about it but talking. Action is needed, without retaliation.

I'm not sure that the NYC Department of Education knows how to do this:

The Wide-spread Racial Disparities At the NYC Department of Education and Harlem Public Schools v Charter Schools

We have not seen either Carmen, Mike, or Bill doing anything to stop these disparities.

UFT President Mike Mulgrew, Chancellor Carmen Farina, and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio

Betsy Combier
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At Little Star of Broome Street Early Childhood Center in Manhattan, which is operated by the Chinese-American Planning Council, 80 percent of the students are Asian, said Mary Cheng, the early childhood program director. CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Racial Segregation in New York Schools Starts With Pre-K, Report Finds

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

SEPT. 20, 2016

LINK

From elementary through high school, New York City children tend to go to school with others similar to themselves, in one of the country’s most racially segregated systems.

Turns out that racial segregation is an issue in prekindergarten, too.

A report by the Century Foundation, a public policy research group, which will be released on Tuesday, found that in 2014-15, the first year of the major prekindergarten expansion pushed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, prekindergarten classrooms tended to be more racially homogeneous than even the city’s public kindergartens.

In half of all prekindergarten classrooms, over 70 percent of students belonged to a single racial or ethnic group, despite the fact that the overall program was diverse, with no racial or ethnic majority. In one out of every six pre-K classrooms, more than 90 percent of the students were of the same race or ethnicity. In kindergarten, that is true in one out of every eight classrooms.

“As much as we struggle with segregation in K-12 schools, early education is really behind,” said Halley Potter, a fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of the report.

So how did this segregation come about? Ms. Potter found that prekindergarten classrooms in charter schools and regular district schools had levels of diversity similar to that found in their kindergartens.

But 60 percent of prekindergarten students that year were enrolled at community-based organizations, and those classrooms tended to be more racially homogeneous than public kindergartens.

Among community-based pre-K centers, there are two main types. One is funded by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and typically serves students from low-income families. Those sites also often provide child care beyond the universal prekindergarten day, which lasts for six hour and 20 minutes.

Seats at other kinds of community-based sites also tend to go to particular groups. Some organizations give priority to children who were previously enrolled as 3-year-olds, in programs their parents may have paid for, or who might have siblings enrolled at the center. They may give priority to children who speak a particular language, or to those whose families receive social services from the organization. In many cases, they have established relationships within particular communities.

Administration for Children’s Services classrooms were more likely to have a majority of black or Hispanic students, the report found. Prekindergarten programs in other community-based organizations were more likely to have a heavily white or Asian student population.

At Little Star of Broome Street Early Childhood Center in Manhattan, which is operated by the Chinese-American Planning Council, for example, 80 percent of the students are Asian, said Mary Cheng, the early childhood program director; parents tend to find out about the center by word of mouth. She said a more diverse student body would be beneficial not just for the children in her care, but also for their families.

“To be accepting and tolerant of each other, you have to be a mixture,” Ms. Cheng said. “To learn that there are things that are similar” across cultures, she added, “that’s something really important for kids to learn, and for adults.”

Ms. Potter says emphasis on racial diversity needs to be built into the application process.

“What we see here is a reflection of the research around school choice,” she said. “That is, if it’s just choice, without diversity really built into the design of the program, it tends to have the effect of increasing segregation in schools and classrooms.”

“These pre-K centers did not appear from scratch, most already existed,” she continued, and they came with established enrollment patterns.

Josh Wallack, deputy chancellor of strategy and policy at the city’s Education Department, said that during the first year of universal pre-K expansion, there were different application processes for district schools and community-based organizations. In subsequent years, however — this is Year 3 — there was a single, unified application for the whole system, which Mr. Wallack said might have an impact on classroom diversity.

“Prior to that, early learning centers had to do their own recruitment, and tended to reach out in their immediate surroundings,” he said. The new system “put them on the same playing field as district schools, part of a citywide application process.”

He added that classroom diversity “ is a priority for the Department of Education and this administration, because we believe children in diverse classrooms learn from each other, and learn better.”

There have been small-scale efforts in recent years to address the city’s enormous segregation issue. For example, the Education Department has begun allowing individual schools to mold admissions policies that would create a more diverse student body, by doing things like setting aside seats for students who are learning English. A couple of districts are also discussing ways of creating more socioeconomically balanced schools in their areas. But critics have called these efforts too incremental for such a far-reaching and entrenched problem.

Despite the challenges, Ms. Potter, the report’s author, said she was hopeful.

“You have to keep in mind,” she said, “this was the first year of universal pre-K, coming out of a system where most kids were either in private pay or means-tested programs; there weren’t that many seats that were available to kids of all backgrounds. Making that step to universal is huge.”

“I think you need to keep in mind that that’s where we’re moving from,” she added. “Where I’d be disappointed would be if we don’t see any shifting in these patterns.”

Carmen Farina Has Little To Say About The Report on NYS Schools as The Most Segregated In the USA

Carmen Farina

FARINA Responds Broadly On School Segregation, With Few Hints At a Stand

LINK

Chancellor Carmen Fariña responded broadly to concerns that the city’s schools were too segregated, a theme that’s picked up steam as Saturday’s 60th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education ruling has neared.

A statement from Fariña didn’t directly address some of the issues sparked by the milestone, including whether districts are doing enough to mix schools with students based on their socioeconomic status. Nor did it respond to State Education Commissioner John King’s remarks this week that the city school system fosters segregation through selective school admissions and rigid neighborhood enrollment zones.

Fariña did say that she was ”disappointed with the findings” in a recent report finding New York State to have the most segregated schools in the country. And she said the Department of Education supported “integrated, culturally-rich environments” for children to learn.

But she offered few hints about what her position is on the issues raised by King and whether there are any plans to address them.

Here’s the complete statement:

“As we mark the 60th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling, we are disappointed with the findings of the recent UCLA report on segregation in our schools. With a multicultural student body that is 40% Latino, 29% black, 15% Asian, and 15% white, we celebrate the incredible diversity in our schools, and support integrated, culturally-rich environments in which all of our students learn from one another and grow together. We recognize that for our students to achieve success, we must close the achievement gap, not just for high school graduation but for entry into college and careers. This is what we at the Department of Education are committed to delivering.”

UFT President Mike Mulgrew, NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio, NYC Chancellor Carmen Farina

New analysis shows New York state has the country’s most segregated schools

 LINK

New York’s schools are the nation’s most segregated, largely due to school segregation in New York City, according to a new analysis of federal education data that rekindles the longstanding debate over whether creating school diversity should be an explicit goal of the city’s school system.

Though 60 percent of white and Asian students in New York City in 2010-11 attended schools that the researchers call “multiracial,” only 25 percent of black and Latino students did, according to the report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

The report also shows that between 1989 and 2010, the percentage of black and Latino students attending “intensely segregated” schools increased. In 2010-11, 85 percent of the city’s black students attended schools where white students made up 10 percent or less of the student population, up from 78 percent in the 1989-90 school year. Latino students also attended those intensely segregated schools in greater numbers than before: three quarters of them did in 2010-11, up from 66 percent in 1989-90.

While the report includes new data from the 2010-11 school year, its findings about the makeup of city schools aren’t new. Two years ago, the New York Times found that more than half of city schools are 90 percent black or Hispanic—the “intensely segregated” threshold. And another recent Civil Rights Project analysis showed that New York City was one of themost segregated cities for black students.

Researcher Gary Orfield said the numbers illustrate how desegregation has receded as an explicit goal of school districts and city governments. He also took special aim at New York City’s school choice policies as “exacerbating racial isolation.”

“If you don’t have an intention to create diverse schools, they rarely happen,” Orfield said.

Other experts have said that it’s more important to improve the quality of individual schools than to ensure each school has a racial and or socioeconomic mix. The Department of Education’s efforts to boost student performance under Mayor Bloomberg centered on creating new schools, improving other schools individually, and giving students and parents more choices about which schools to attend.

More recently, Chancellor Carmen Fariña indicated that she was supportive of individual schools’ efforts to draw students from different areas to create more diverse schools, like is happening at P.S. 133, but she hasn’t talked about larger enrollment policy changes. De Blasio has also said little about whether he want to see changes to enrollment policies, though he has expressed concern about the relative homogeneity of the city’s nine specialized high schools.

Expanding early education and lengthening the middle school day have been the primary engines he has said the city is using to address the socioeconomic and racial achievement gap.

“When students can integrate the experiences of others into their own personal development, we celebrate. We believe in diverse classrooms in which students interact and grow through personal relationships with those of different backgrounds,” Department of Education spokesman Devon Puglia said in response to the report.

The racial makeup of the city schools has also changed over the period examined in the report. White students make up just 14 percent of the city’s students overall, down from 25 percent in 1989-90, and black students now make up almost 30 percent, down from almost 37 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Latino students has jumped significantly, from 29 percent to 40 percent, as has the proportion of Asian students, from almost 9 percent to 15 percent of students.

In Brooklyn’s District 13, a task force has been developing ways for schools to maintain diversity as those proportions change in neighborhoods like Fort Greene. Using weighted student lotteries that would give preference to certain students is a form of “controlled choice,” which the report’s authors say is necessary to make the city’s choice system more equitable.

There are a number of challenges to those efforts, though. One is that they are more easily accomplished in districts like 13, with a racial and socioeconomic mix that doesn’t exist in some parts of the city. The Civil Rights Project’s report notes that white students make up 10 percent or less of students in 19 of the city’s 32 school districts. (That includes District 13, though its residential population is more mixed.)

The report also attributes some of the increase in segregation to the city’s charter schools, many of which often operate in low-income neighborhoods that are among the city’s least diverse. But charter advocates point out that those schools were created explicitly to serve low-income students and are often bound to accept students from specific geographic areas.

“Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center. He said that charter schools that open in mixed-income neighborhoods are often accused of “abandoning their mission” to serve students in low-income areas.

“And when they do serve children in low income areas — neighborhoods which are historically segregated and which have district lines that charters must honor and that were drawn in some instances precisely to segregate,” he added, “they are accused of being too narrow in focus.”

Dr. Martin Luther King's Dream is Still Not A Reality

One sad measure of Dr. King’s dream 

New York State schools named after the civil rights leader have a dismal record of raising achievementComments (2)
BY FRED SMITH / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2013, 4:15 AM
LINK

How do you measure a dream? Today marks the golden anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s visionary speech.

There are many metrics of the current status of African-American young people: school segregation, test scores, graduation rates, college attendance, income levels. The results are mixed.

I looked at a different indicator, one that’s admittedly unscientific but potentially revealing.

Nine New York State public schools that educate third- through eighth-graders honor King by carrying his name . They are located in counties and districts that range from Buffalo to Brooklyn, Rochester to Yonkers and Wyandanch (in Suffolk County) and across the tier of cities that includes Syracuse, Utica and Schenectady.

Taken together, 91% of the children enrolled in these schools are black (67%) or Hispanic (24%); 13% are considered to be limited in English proficiency. About 90% receive free (85%) or reduced-price (5%) lunches.

At these schools, 2,883 students took the statewide English Language Arts exams and 2,921 took the math tests — providing 5,804 test scores. Most students were in grades 3 to 5.

This was to be a pivotal year. The state Education Department called for tests that contained more difficult items, popularly referred to as the Common Core, purportedly to raise learning standards.

State and city officials forecast that the results would nosedive. They assured us that this was necessary to get children on track for college and careers. They’ve insisted the numbers will rise as teachers and students adjust to the material.

But what of the 8- to 10-year-old children whose educations, hopes, formative development and chances for future success are bound up in these wonderfully named schools where circumstance has placed them?

In 2009, when the state exams were discredited for being ridiculously easy, 55% of the heirs to King’s legacy were found to be proficient in reading, as were 71% in math. By last year, with the advent of tougher “more rigorous” exams, the results had fallen to 24% and 31%.

The April results released this month fulfilled the prophecy: 7% and 6% proficiency in reading and math at the nine schools.

The overall 2009, 2012 and 2013 statewide figures show English exam decreases from 77% to 55% to 31% proficiency over the testing periods. In math, the drop is from 86% to 65% to 31%. It’s a precipitous decline any way you slice it — with a sharper falloff in the nine schools.

As for the school in Brooklyn , obviously a limited sample, the percentages of students judged proficient fell 53 points — from 72% to 19% — in English Language Arts and 72 points (86% to 14%) in math between 2009 and this year. Citywide, the corresponding results were 43 points (69% to 26%) and 52 points (82% to 30%)

Another part of this unsettling story is revealed by the increased percentage of students who were at Level 1 in 2009 and now. Level 1 is described as being “well below proficient” on the tests.

This group grew from 2% to 32% and from 3% to 33% of the state test population on the English and math exams. At the nine King schools, the students deemed to be low achievers shot up from 6% to 63% in English Language Arts and from 7% to 68% in math.

King would not have accepted test scores that only confirm the profound inequities that plague poor kids. Nor would he have blamed teachers for the problem. Rather, he would have let his voice ring out about the need for sound education designed to prepare students to lead fulfilling lives and provide a means for overcoming economic injustices.

We honor King in words and monuments. It would be a far better remembrance to take actions to realize his magnificent aspiration.

Smith, a testing specialist and consultant, was an administrative analyst for the New York City public schools. He is a member of Change the Stakes, a parent advocacy group.