Week 3 Assignment #2 Diversity News

Gloria Wade Gabb

Week 3 Assignment #3

Diversity News

Clause 4 of New York’s Diversity policy entitled “Equity and Excellence for All: Diversity in New York City’s Public Schools” speaks to expanding diversity in admission pilots. Summarized below, is an educational news article from the Chalkbeat that demonstrates how two schools, through their pilot admission, made considerable steps towards diversification.

In the news article entitled “It’s Not About Quotas: The Real Story Behind How Two Brooklyn Schools Have Begun to Diversify”, the authors Greenberg, O’Reilly and Quester (2016), reported on two incidences of schools not serving the minority students living in their respective communities.  Though both schools have made prior commitments to be diverse and inclusive they failed to deliver on such, having been affected greatly by gentrification. Increasing populations of affluent parents have moved into the diverse communities and clustered in a relatively small number of schools, leaving very few seats available for anyone else. According to the news article, due to the “blind” lottery admission systems in place, affluent families dominated the applicant pools.

With the implementation of a pilot program for school admission mandated by the New York City Department of Education, the schools were afforded an opportunity to increase the chances of admission for disadvantaged applicants in school-choice systems.  This was done by reserving a certain percentage of seats for those priority applicant groups in a lottery. If they don’t gain acceptance through an initial lottery, the priority applicants will have a second chance in the general lottery open to all applicants. 

By limiting the disproportionate clustering of more affluent applicants at the schools, the pilot program presented one way to ameliorate segregation in schools, thereby boosting diversity. Having a more diverse student and subsequent parent body will further enhance recruitment efforts and foster an increasingly inviting school culture. Schools will become more representative of the communities they were meant to serve. While we still have a very long way to go in establishment diversification in schools, the pilot is a modest first step.  All schools should come on board and make similar changes to their admission systems.