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UFT joins call to place renewed focus on school diversity

News Stories
Jonathan Fickies

Mulgrew, flanked by Council members Ritchie Torres (left foreground), Brad Lander, and Inez Barron, calls for more diverse schools. At far right is David Jones of the Community Service Society.

New York City Council members, joined by NAACP representatives, advocates, parent leaders and the UFT, aunched a campaign to increase school diversity and credit multiple measures of student success at a press conference in the City Hall rotunda on Oct. 22.

Stung by a recent study that named New York one of the most segregated school systems in the nation, Council members are introducing a bill to require the Department of Education to report annually on the racial and socioeconomic mix in every school and district, including in magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, and charter schools.

The Council members are also asking the DOE to make diversity a priority in school admissions policies and formally recognize the benefits of educating students from many walks of life together.

Following the lead of a UFT task force, the group is calling on the state Legislature to expand admissions to the specialized high schools beyond a single test. Students from a broader mix of incomes and cultures will be brought in by including student grades, participation in honors courses and other measures, and aligning the test more closely with the city curriculum, they said.

“We applaud the efforts of the Council,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at the kickoff event. “The use of multiple measures will help us identify many more hardworking, talented students and give them a fair shot at elite schools.”

Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan, for example, admitted 963 new students this year; of those, just seven were African American and 21 were Latino, said Jennifer Parker of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund.

David Jones, the head of the Community Service Society, said that while the state Legislature would have to rule on any changes to admissions at Stuyvesant, Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Technical HS, the mayor and the Council could revise admissions policies to another five selective high schools “at the stroke of a pen.”

Single-test admissions to those five schools were imposed unilaterally by the Bloomberg administration and could be reversed unilaterally, Jones said.

“I am truly excited,” Jones said, that “after 10 years when this issue of diversity in the schools was really sort of off the radar screen of the political leadership, to see it move forward so rapidly with this new Council and administration.”

The Council plans to hold hearings on school diversity in November.