Testimony to the City Council Education Committee on the NYC Department of Education’s Admissions Processes and the Path to Achieving a Less Segregated NYC School System

Comptroller Lander: Good afternoon, Chair Joseph and members of the City Council Education Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today on the status of the NYC Department of Education’s (DOE) admissions policies. I am joined by my colleague, our Chief Equity Officer in the Office of Comptroller, Sadye Campoamor, who previously served as Executive Director for Family and Community Empowerment at DOE and was a member of the District 15 Diversity Plan Working Group. 

Public education is both the foundation of our democracy, a place where young people learn how to be active members of our diverse society, and also a microcosm of its shortcomings, since the patterns of our segregated and unequal world reproduce themselves in and through our schools. Here in the 3rd most segregated City in the nation, we see every day how far we still have to go towards an inclusive, multiracial democracy where young people of all backgrounds have the opportunity and support to thrive. Nowhere is that more true than in our schools. 

While admissions is the topic of this hearing, and an important lever for change, I want to make clear on the outset that admissions it is in no way the only tool we must deploy to achieve equitable and excellent public schools. As the students of IntegrateNYC taught us, school integration will only be successful if we work to achieve all 5R’s of Integration: Race in enrollment, Real Relationships, Resources, Representation, and Restorative Practices. More on this later. 

As a City Councilmember, I began working on confronting school segregation in 2014, on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, when the UCLA Civil Rights Project reported that New York has the most segregated schools in the nation. After an extensive Council hearing, along with Councilmembers Ritchie Torres and Inez Barron, I sponsored the School Diversity Accountability Act, which required the DOE to start tracking and reporting on school segregation and called on the DOE to take action to address it.   

Nearly three years later – after persistent organizing by students through IntegrateNYC and Teens Take Charge, and ongoing advocacy by the Alliance for School Integration and Desegregation, which we initially convened in the City Council cafeteria – in the spring 2017, the DOE finally announced their commitment to supporting learning environments that reflected the diversity of New York City and launched the School Diversity Advisory Group. The commitment declared: “We believe all students benefit from diverse and inclusive schools and classrooms, where all families and school staff are supported and welcomed.”  

As part of its plan, the DOE offered resources to community school districts to examine segregation in their schools, to conduct deep engagement with student, families, and educators, and develop plans to integrate their schools. As the City Council Member for District 15, working together with the D15 Community Education Council, ASID, Appleseed, IntegrateNYC, and Parents for Middle School Equity, my Council office petitioned DOE to make District 15 the first to under a diversity planning process. We then engaged in a year-long community engagement process that created the “D15 Diversity Plan.” 

The D15 Community School District-based planning process was grounded in family and community engagement with the goal of fostering more diverse learning environments for D15 middle schoolers. District 15 is a diverse district, including Sunset Park, Red Hook, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Windsor Terrace and Kensington. However, at that time, 10 out of the 11 middle schools in the district were screened schools, resulting in highly segregated learning environments. Despite the district’s overall diversity, three of the middle schools were overwhelmingly white, while others were nearly entirely black and Latino.     

The planning process was anchored by a 16-member working group, which held 4 public workshops, and dozens of community conversations and meetings. The proposed recommendations included: 

• The removal of all middle school screens, while maintaining family choice through ranking preferences. 
• Creation of an admissions priority for students who qualify as low-income, English Language Learners (ELLs) or Students in Temporary Housing for 52% of all seats at all D15 middle schools—a threshold that mirrored the overall representation of these students across the district. 
• Detailed proposals for achieving this transition, including an equity team in every D15 school, professional development for teachers, and support for each school, so that the plan is not just about moving bodies around, but about everything that needs to happen after to support all students in getting an excellent education.   

In September 2018 the Mayor and Chancellor approved the D15 Diversity Plan and nearly all of its 60 recommendations. In the fall of 2019, a far more integrated set of 6th graders reported to our middle schools. According to a report by the MIT School of Economics, “Integrating New York City Schools: The Role of Admissions Criteria and Family preferences” from 2015-2021 economic segregation in D15 middle schools declined by 27%, and racial segregation in D15 middle schools declined by 14%. 

The planning firm WXY Studio is currently working with D15 Superintendent Rafael Alvarez and the D15 CED on a multi-pronged evaluation of the D15 Diversity Plan, which will examine multiple data sets with a student-centered lens, including surveys, focus groups in every middle school, and a review of data. While the full findings will not be available until the spring, feedback from the focus groups so far indicate: 

• Many families and staff celebrate the values of the plan and the work to integrate D15 middle schools. 
• Many families and staff named that the admissions process without screens has decreased stress for students. 
• Transportation has been a major challenge in the implementation of the plan. 
• The loss of Title I funds from schools that previously had 60% low-income students and have dropped just below that threshold is a harmful consequence, and a needless one, since the district is serving just as many low-income students, but they are now more evenly spread across its schools. 
• Some parents/caregivers desire support around building out inclusive PTAs. 
• Thoughtful implementation of the diversity plan takes resources, support, alignment, collective feedback and review, and oversight. 

I look forward to reviewing the full results when they come out this spring. While there remains much to learn and improve, the D15 Diversity Plan is a model of authentic DOE engagement with families, school staff, and community to create public policy that is sustainable, and can affect both admissions and school culture over time.  

In response to both this successful process and broader advocacy, in 2019 the Council passed Local Law 225, sponsored by Councilmember Rivera, which mandated the establishment of District Diversity Working Groups in all 32 Community School Districts within 5 years. During the 2019-2020 school year, DOE began this process with 5 additional districts, with more planned. 

At that time, as had been the case in District 15, many middle schools in districts across the city used screened admissions processes. According to DOE, 196 (41%) of the 478 middle schools used some screens, and 112 (23%) of them were fully screened. In District 1, 2, 3, and 13, the overwhelming majority of middle schools were fully screened. Commonly used screens included attendance, lateness, test scores, behavioral assessments, report card grades and auditions.  

Many of the screens selected for parental resources and behaviors, rather than the abilities of the kids – are 9-year-olds really responsible for getting themselves to school on time? But even with those that are supposed to identify something about aptitude or ability, do we really believe that our best path to shared educational success is to sort kids for life, based on their 4th grade marks and standardized test scores? Screened middle-school admissions functioned largely to maintain segregated school settings and perpetuate the notion that some schools are “good schools” – those that have screened to select “good students” – while other schools – the ones with the majority of kids – are not. 

The pandemic paused the district diversity planning processes, and in some cases shifted much of the narrative around our public schools. Anyone who listened to the School Colors Season 2 podcast, focusing on District 28, heard many of the challenges.  

At the same time, though, the pandemic simultaneously put a pause on screening. Without kids in the classrooms for so much of the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, it was rightly deemed inappropriate to use data from those pandemic school years for admissions screening purposes. The pandemic policy remained in place until this fall, when Chancellor Banks announced a new admissions policy allowing districts to choose whether to restore or discontinue screens.  

Source: NYC Department of Education 

The data from the choices that districts made is significant. For the 2023-24 admissions cycle, 12 school districts (more than one-third of the total), including District 1, 2, 3, and 13 (where the majority of middle schools were previously fully screened) have chosen to continue the complete removal of middle-school screens. Of the 478 middle schools citywide, there are now a total of 59 (12%) screened middle schools programs, down from 196 (40%) before the pandemic. 

Principals from Manhattan District 3 petitioned to keep the removal of school screens and wrote “ranking and sorting our students goes against a celebration of the rich diversities and races our students bring with them.” District 2 eliminated middle-school screens, but introduced additional advanced math and science classes, showing it is possible to eliminate barriers while still offering a range of options to support academic excellence. Many families and educators indicated that they believe students will benefit academically and emotionally – especially important given the mental health challenges elevated by the pandemic – from integrated schools. 

Given this dramatic transition, New York City has a real opportunity to move forward – but it will not happen successfully without support. Eliminating screens is an important first step to less segregated schools, but it must be accompanied by the resources and collective attention to the 5Rs or real integration, and the broader supports necessary to help all kids learn and thrive.   

We recommend expanding the equity audit and review process underway in D15 to the broader set of schools and districts that have eliminated screens, in order to understand what’s working, what needs improvement, and what supports must be put in place for success. 

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Chief Equity Officer, Sadye Campoamor: Thank you Comptroller Lander for allowing me to join you. I want to acknowledge Education Chair Joseph along with Education Committee members and the Council. Thank you for all you do.  

Good Afternoon, my name is Sadye Campoamor and I serve as Chief Equity Officer at the Office of the NYC Comptroller. I am a proud New York City Public School graduate and current public-school parent. I also served at the NYCDOE for 8 years most recently as the Executive Director for Family & Community Empowerment where I supported and led the DOE’s efforts in School Diversity and Integration.  

It is a great honor to be here today. These issues are not only of significant professional importance but also informed by my personal and lived experience as student in segregated schools, and now as a parent.  

I come before you today to reiterate what the Comptroller shared, that this is not a call for moving children of color into predominantly white spaces, as we know this has caused harm, and reinforces mental models that perpetuate both interpersonal, and internalized racism. Nor is this a call to replace or devalue much needed affinity spaces.  

As a member of the D15 Diversity Plan’s Working Group I recall being enlightened and educated by student activists from the group IntegrateNYC. Their 5R framework, later adopted by the Mayor and Chancellor in 2019 offered the NYCDOE a chance to depart from old habits of 20th century “desegregation” and instead offered us all an invitation to do 21st century, “Real Integration.”  

So what are the 5Rs? 

Representation – asks us to look at the racial representation of the educators and all school staff in the building and the impact that has on school culture and academic achievement. In New York City close to 80% of the teaching staff self-identify as white women when nearly 85% of all NYC Public School students are of color.  

Resources – asks us to fund schools equitably. It also requires that we take an expansive view of what it means to be a “equitably resourced school.” Access to internships, PTA funding, and social capital that leads to upwards mobility. I want to applaud the hard work of the FSF Task Force, the Mayor and the Chancellor for adding additional weights to the FSF formula, as it puts into practice centering our most institutionally marginalized students.  

Restorative Practices – asks us to re-think our approach and relationship to school discipline. And who gets suspended. It also interrogates the notion of safety, and that restorative approaches are explicitly embedded in all integration planning. 

Real Relationships – invites school communities to dig deeper with one another. I was born in El Salvador and am from the Nahua People. I had never heard my country, nor this group of indigenous people mentioned once. At best, this can make students feel how I felt: invisible, and at worst a sense of shame about who they are. BYC Outward Bound Schools have a wonderful model called “CREW” that embeds this time of relationship building into every school day that we can all learn from. 

Last, but not least – Race in Enrollment, which speaks to student demographics in schools. Across the City, 77% of Black and Latinx students attend schools that are less than 10% white. And according to a Standford University study “the average Black student in New York City had a poverty rate 22 percentage points higher than that of the average white student.” 

Concentrations of poverty are associated with endemic violence, higher levels of stress, and many other disadvantages. This coupled with racial isolation are the conditions that conspire to make segregation so pernicious. 

Before I go, I wanted to share a few key ingredients that made our D15 Working Group successful. As you continue to encourage the DOE to follow through with their mandate under the “Local Law in relation to district diversity working groups.” I believe in harnessing and improving on successful strategies is mission critical to achieving our shared goals: 

This work takes resources to reduce barriers for participation such as: 

1. Shared anti-racist and DEI training for all working group members to ensure a student-centered equity lens is front and center 

1. Providing childcare 

1. Meals if you are meeting during dinner 

1. Translation & interpretation so all can truly participate 

1. Transportation 

1. Student voice paired with Youth/Adult practices so that young people can meaningfully participate, are heard and feel valued.  

1. Make data visually accessible, transparent, and digestible for all to interact with.  

These community-driven processes are not a destination, nor are they a one size fits all model. Instead, they are a participatory mechanism to foster a more integrated school system that does more than just moves bodies and recreates harm from the past, but critically examines our admissions policies from an equity lens. 

We have educational models to draw from right now, in: Integrated Co Teaching (ICT) classes, School-wide enrichment, Community Schools, School Re-design and building utilization, performance-based assessment schools and more!  

The invitation today, is for us to keep going as if our multiracial democracy depends on it. Because it does. 

Thank you for the opportunity to come before you. This is generational work I am a proud to be a small part of it alongside you all.  

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Comptroller Lander: One final note. While community-led processes like the one in District 15 can make real progress, while district- and school-level engagement is critical, while I am grateful that the Chancellor has supported the community-driven integration model, and while I am genuinely encouraged by the number of schools and districts that chose to eliminate middle-school screens this year … still, the commitment to ending school segregation cannot be left up to individual districts or schools. It is a collective obligation. 

The UCLA Civil Rights Project’s 2021 report found that New York’s schools remain the most segregated in the country. As we were reminded by Dr. King’s words last week, “Justice too long delayed, is justice denied.” What we are learning from the work we have done thus far must help us improve and strengthen our practice, and find the courage to move forward more broadly. This work is up to all of us, and all our students deserve it. 

Thank you. 

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