Building Diverse Schools in Changing Neighborhoods

New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks says most parents don't care that much about school integration. What they really want, he says, is a good school, close to home. Moreover, he says, if integration means sending a handful of Black and brown kids to a mostly white school, it doesn’t do anything to help the kids left behind.

He’s right on both counts. But a different type of integration is possible today than the kind Banks experienced as a child when he, like many of his peers across the country, was bused from his mostly Black neighborhood to a racially mixed school. Today, reasonably well-off newcomers of all races are moving into historically Black and Latino working-class neighborhoods. That raises the potential for more economically and racially mixed schools — a type of integration that doesn’t marginalize low-income Black and Latino children or force them to travel long distances and that may strengthen schools in the neighborhoods where they live.

To be sure, gentrification — the influx of wealthier people into neighborhoods that have been neglected for generations — can bring disruption and conflict. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, long a center of Black political power and artistic life, longtime Black residents told me they feel a sense of loss as white newcomers buy up stately Victorian townhouses, complain to the police about the noise from innocent neighborhood barbeques, and patronize new white-owned restaurants.

Still, as I discovered researching my new book, “A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City,” parents of different races and income levels sometimes discover they have a shared interest — good local schools — and learn to work through their differences to build a community of mutual respect and trust that helps all children succeed. It’s not easy, but Brighter Choice Community School in Bed-Stuy, the subject of my book, shows it can be done.

In my visits to hundreds of schools as a journalist and then parent advocate with the nonprofit InsideSchools in the past 25 years, I’ve learned how devilishly difficult it is for high-poverty schools to reach all children, even when they have effective teachers and adequate resources. Homelessness and health problems like chronic asthma can contribute to poor attendance, dragging down the academic performance not only of the children who miss school, but also of those who attend regularly. That's because teachers tend to slow the pace of instruction to let kids who are behind catch up. There’s strong evidence that low-income children do better when they attend schools that serve a mix of children from different family incomes.

Citywide, school choice — which has increasingly been the norm since the Bloomberg administration, as families select which schools are best for their children, including hundreds of new small district schools, charters and special programs — tends to exacerbate the impact of poverty by encouraging parents with the most time and resources to seek out other options. That often leaves neighborhood schools with declining enrollments and high concentrations of the neediest children. Indeed, middle-class Black families often send their children to private schools or to public schools, including charters, outside their neighborhoods, draining the local schools of the parents who could advocate for better education for all.

Brighter Choice, a tiny, district-run neighborhood elementary school that also accepts children outside its attendance zone, has begun to reverse that exodus. Fabayo McIntosh, who founded the school in 2008, introduced imaginative lessons that would spark children’s curiosity, not the scripted curriculum that’s typical of high-poverty schools. She recruited teachers who shared her vision and families whose children had attended a popular Afrocentric nursery school called Little Sun People, on which Brighter Choice was modeled. With classes in African dance and drumming, she sought to build children’s pride in their African-American heritage. She invited neighborhood toddlers and their parents for weekly read-alouds called “Tiny Tots” — a valuable recruitment tool. The new school wasn’t perfect. But parents decided to take a chance on a welcoming school that offered the promise of a progressive education. 

In time, the school began to attract middle-class and professional Black parents, including some who were new to the neighborhood. Many had attended private schools or mostly white public schools themselves and wanted something else for their own children: a school, in their own neighborhood, where Black and brown children did not feel isolated, where all children learned tolerance and mutual understanding. 

Few of these parents had racial integration as a goal; they simply wanted a school that would nurture their children. But the school became more racially integrated as a few white, Asian, and multiracial families, attracted by the school’s warm sense of community and its commitment to social justice, began to enroll their children.

The shift may seem minor, but it’s significant. The school’s enrollment, 94% Black and Latino in 2018, was 83% Black and Latino, 2% Asian, 10% white, and 5% multiracial in 2022. The proportion of children poor enough to qualify for free lunch declined from 85% to 62% over the same period. The school today serves children of lawyers and journalists, restaurant workers and maintenance men. Despite its growing popularity, Brighter Choice is unlikely to “tip” and become a school that only serves well-off families because it guarantees admission to all who live in its attendance zone, which includes public housing developments, rent-regulated apartments and homeless shelters.

Brighter Choice remains a work in progress. Academic achievement, as measured by test scores, is below average. While chronic absenteeism — the proportion of children who miss more than a month of school — declined from a staggering 45% in 2018, it was still an alarming 39% in 2022. The disruptions of COVID have left their mark. Still, parents give the school top marks on the city’s annual school surveys. Enrollments, which have declined citywide in recent years, have remained steady at Brighter Choice, with about 300 children. The school has waitlists for its pre-kindergarten classes.     

Parents at Brighter Choice have, in their own small way, redefined what a “good” school means. Academic achievement matters to them, but teaching children how to get along with one another, and how to be moral beings, is crucial too. Parents praise the school’s inclusive culture, which has built spaces for families of different backgrounds to get to know one another. Jeremy Daniel, principal since 2018, teaches kids to skateboard every Saturday, turning the playground into a resource for the whole community. The school takes care to value and recognize the contributions of all parents, like the homeless mothers who chaperoned a trip to the aquarium, or the Spanish-speaking mothers who brought their favorite dishes to the Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. 

When disagreements arise, the school provides a forum to address them. For example, a dispute over recess took on racial overtones: a white father wanted children to go outside to play even on cold days, while some Black and Latino parents, whose children didn’t have warm overcoats, preferred they stay inside. Parents worked out a compromise that included collecting extra warm clothes for the children who needed them. Parents work for the common good, not just what’s best for their own children.

Other schools are undergoing similar changes. At InsideSchools, I led a team of researchers that visited 80 formerly high-poverty schools (about 10% of the city’s 800 elementary schools) which now serve a mix of different races and family incomes. We discovered they have many features in common: an effective principal who is not afraid to welcome the often-demanding middle-class families, teachers who adopt a challenging project based-curriculum (rather than scripted lessons), and parents who put in the hard work to build a community where all children feel they belong.

It’s easy to say every New York City neighborhood deserves a good school, but in the real world, that can’t happen until we address the segregation and concentrated poverty that is the legacy of redlining, disinvestment and rapidly rising inequality.

The economic integration that contributes to school success is impossible in large swaths of the city — like the South Bronx or East New York. But it is possible in changing neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, where elegant townhouses abut public housing projects and rich and poor live next to one another. Brighter Choice is on its way to creating a just school in an unequal city.