Today we’ll find out what happened when a school district in Brooklyn embarked on an ambitious effort to better integrate its middle schools. We’ll also hear about a ruling rejecting a city attempt to ban foie gras.
It’s been five years since District 15 in Brooklyn adopted a plan to better integrate its high schools, which were then among the most homogenous in the city. I asked Troy Closson, who covers training for the Metro office, to assess how the plan worked.
District 15 in Brooklyn stopped selective admissions and began giving each child a lottery number. What happened;
Before the pandemic, a handful of districts in New York City were thinking about disparities among schools in their districts and how they might address them through desegregation. In District 15, where this debate had been going on for several years, parents decided to go further than anywhere else in the city, eliminating selective admissions for middle schools and setting high goals for the percentage of disadvantaged students each school would enroll.
At the time, there was a lot of support for District 15. But there was also concern that when districts try to secede, they run the risk of disaffected families, and especially middle-class families, leaving the school system.
Five years later, enrollment declines in District 15 are below citywide averages. Their schools are much less segregated than they used to be.
What worked in District 15? Was it that school officials made everything but race a priority? How did they do this?
They came up with a plan to focus on students who are homeless, English learners, or from low-income families — and they felt those were the disadvantaged students they wanted to focus on. They did not explicitly focus on race.
Many of the white and middle-class students in the area were enrolled in just three high schools. One of them was the school where Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his kids when he was mayor — and where 30 percent of the kids came from low-income families.
In other schools, that number was over 95 percent. The plan was really about redistributing those students so they weren’t in two or three specific schools.
But the change was not uniform. There are two schools in high poverty areas of Sunset Park. How is the new system playing out there?
Many immigrant families attending these schools wanted to stay, according to the inspector. They wanted to be closer to home. Sometimes an eighth grader can be the babysitter for a third grader, so it’s helpful to be around. The foreman says this is a piece.
Another consideration is that higher-income families from other parts of the district probably don’t rank these two schools high on their lists, so they don’t get placed there.
Where were the parents in all this and was their involvement different from parental involvement in other areas?
District 15 is largely a progressive part of Brooklyn, so many parents, including many white parents, questioned the makeup of their schools and believed it was time to do more to integrate.
In other areas of the city, there was more pushback.
In District 28 in Queens, which runs from Forest Hills and Rego Park in Jamaica, there was a similar effort to free schools before the pandemic, but it sparked a huge pushback from a wide range of parents. Some white and Asian families worried that their children would not have the same opportunity for success if changes were made to admissions. Some black and Hispanic families asked why their children had to cross the middle of the district to go to a good school — why the school down the street couldn’t be a good school.
In District 15, the most important factor going on was arguably the parents’ market. You had parents who were not just interested in the concept of segregation, but were willing to change the way they chose schools.
This comes amid a lawsuit challenging selective pay — the system that District 15 struck down.
Yes. Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks’ approach to desegregation has been to leave it up to local districts to lead if they want.
The lawsuit essentially argues that it is the responsibility of the city and state to handle desegregation. The plaintiffs argue that Black and Latino students have been excluded from selective pathways in the school system in violation of their constitutional rights.
It’s an interesting case because before the pandemic there was a lot of momentum around desegregation. Teenagers gathered on the steps of the City Hall. De Blasio announced a plan to phase out the elementary gifted and talented program.
Under Mayor Adams, many of these debates have subsided. But the lawsuit has the potential to restart that debate and force the Adams administration into the conversation.
Weather
Expect sunny skies with temperatures in the low 90s. In the evening, temperatures are expected to drop into the mid-70s.
ALTERNATIVE PARKING
Valid until July 4th (Independence Day).
New York breaking news
Judge says city has no authority to ban foie gras
New York’s foie gras ban — which never went into effect — was struck down by a judge who upheld the state agriculture commissioner’s authority to override local laws that unduly restrict upstate farming.
The foie gras retail ban was approved by the City Council in 2019 and signed into law by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Foie gras, made from the fat livers of ducks and geese, is considered by many to be a delicacy and is an expensive item in restaurants that serve it. Animal rights advocates say it is the product of inhumane treatment.
The state Department of Agriculture ruled in 2020 that the city’s ban violated a state law that said local governments could not enact laws covering agricultural activities in designated agricultural areas.
Agriculture Commissioner Richard Ball found that the city’s law unfairly fell on two upstate duck farms that produce nearly all the foie gras in the United States — and are located in designated agricultural zones. The two farms said in 2020 that they could not survive the ban.
The city took Ball and the agriculture department to court.
Last week, Judge Richard Platkin of state Superior Court in Albany said Ball had “reasonably and reasonably” found that the city’s law amounted to an “order” to the two foie gras producers “to cease an agricultural practice in rural areas to which many of the city’s residents are opposed.”
Platkin said the city had “no authority to directly order” the two producers to “restructure their agricultural practices.”
A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said it is reviewing the decision “and determining next steps.”
“We believe the city has the authority to enforce this local law, which is solely for the purpose of prohibiting the sale of foie gras in the city,” he said. “The law in no way restricts or regulates upstate farms.”
The decision was Platkin’s second involving the city’s ban. In 2023, he dismissed Ball’s determination as “arbitrary and capricious”. But the judge sent the matter back to the agriculture department, asking it to make a new decision after finding that the reading of the legislative record had been limited to “two short excerpts from a record of several thousand pages.”
The new ruling, issued last December, prompted the city to file the case that Platkin decided last week.
METROPOLITAN calendar
Confusion
Dear Diary:
A flock of large wooden letters next to the garbage
on thirtieth street near penn station, he mused
as I passed, there were not many but
turned back thinking I might find her there.
A little guilty about cleaning up for the day
I hurriedly tried to cut her off
together with a lowercase l, two a, a broken and two u, one for an inverted n
— but not e or r. All day at work I was upset
return to the scene, but all cleared out
because, right off the curb, that lipogram p
— I found out about her so-called haax!—
and when I got home I carved the broken ones
a to a smaller r — and now I have her
in anagrams: “nervous”, “unreal”, “laurin” us.
— David Stanford Burr
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Submit submissions here and Read more Metropolitan Diary here.
