MONDAY: Gotham's schools are worst in the nation again!

MONDAY, MAY 27, 2024

Except for the fact that they aren't: As usual, the headline was highly dramatic.

Indeed, so was the opening paragraph! We refer to the recent piece by Errol Louis for New York Magazine, which made the same old (bungled) claim about the New York City Public Schools. 

It's the nation's largest school system! Dramatic headline included, Louis' report started like this:

Why Are New York City Schools Still So Segregated?

The 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools, came and went in New York with little official notice. Perhaps our leaders were embarrassed by the fact that our city has been cited for more than a decade as having the nation’s most racially segregated schools and has done little or nothing to implement dozens of reasonable proposals to move in the direction of integration.

“We have the outline, we have the blueprint. Integration is feasible. It’s within our reach,” says Nyah Berg, the executive director of New York Appleseed, a nonprofit organization that advocates for integrated schools around the state. I recently sat down with Berg and Matt Gonzales, who works at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, a division of NYU’s graduate school of education. They are part of a growing movement of young researchers and advocates who are fed up with New York’s delays and dissembling on diversity.

In one way, the highlighted claim is accurate. 

It's true! For more than a decade, journalists have been advancing the dramatic claim that New York City is guilty of "having the nation’s most racially segregated schools."

Just as Louis does in his recent piece, these journalists have supported this eye-catching claim by linking to lengthy reports about "New York" from UCLA's Civil Rights Project. 

(In his opening paragraph, Louis links to the most recent of these lengthy reports, a report which appeared in 2021. That lengthy report was an update of UCLA's earlier effort, which appeared in 2014.)

These lengthy reports from UCLA have been relentlessly bungled in a remarkable number of ways. But just for the record, here's the first thing a reader saw if she clicked the link Louis provided—the link he provided in his opening paragraph in support of his dramatic claim:

Report Shows School Segregation in New York Remains Worst in Nation

A new report from the Civil Rights Project finds that New York retains its place as the most segregated state for black students, and second most segregated for Latino students, trailing only California. ...

Sad! Quite literally, that's the first thing a reader (or an editor) saw if she clicked the link Louis provided in support of his dramatic representation. Let's spell this problem out in the simplest way possible:

As everyone presumably knows, two different jurisdictions go by the name "New York." On the one hand, there's New York City—but there's also New York State. 

Right from the first sentence in the source to which Louis links, we see that the Civil Right Project is specifically referring to New York State when it clumsily says that school segregation in "New York" remains the "worst in the nation."

Specifically, the source report says that New York is "the most segregated state for black students." It then says that New York is "second most segregated for Latino students, trailing only California."

California is a state! Plainly, we're being told, accurately or otherwise, that school segregation is worst, among the fifty states, in the state of New York—in the large jurisdiction known as New York State. 

At this early point, we'll offer an obvious bit of advice to the academics at UCLA's Civil Rights Project. Our advice would be this:

If you're going to make dramatic claims about "New York," you need to be clear about which "New York" you mean! For our money, an editor at the Civil Rights Project should have amended the headline we've posted, making the headline say something like this:

Report Shows School Segregation in New York State Remains Worst in Nation

That might seem like an improbable claim. But at least that headline would have said which "New York" was under discussion.

Don't worry! Our journalists, being human, could almost surely find a way to misparaphrase that headline too! But one of the astonishing problems with UCLA's reports involves the persistent way the reports make references to "New York" without clearly stating which "New York" they mean.

Do they mean New York City, or are they referring to New York State? It's amazing to see the way these academics have helped create that sort of confusion through at least their last two giant reports.

Having said that, riddle us this:

Is it really true that New York State is the worst state in the nation when it comes to "school segregation?" That claim may seem surprising.

The claim turns on the extremely peculiar way the Civil Rights Project defines "school segregation." We'll try to explain that matter below. For now, we'll only tell you this:

If your fifth grader attends a school with the student population shown below, UCLA would tell you that your child was attending a "segregated school:"

Hypothetical Public School A:
White kids: 25%
Black kids: 25%
Hispanic kids: 25%
Asian-American kids: 25%

Actually, no—we aren't making that up! Under UCLA's definition of "school segregation," a child consigned to a hellhole like that is attending a "segregated school!"

Below, we'll run you through the way that works. For now, let's briefly be fair.

Briefly, let's be fair! The first paragraph at the source to which Louis links mentions New York City too. 

That said, can anyone here play this game? Here you see that overview paragraph, now presented in full:

Report Shows School Segregation in New York Remains Worst in Nation

A new report from the Civil Rights Project finds that New York retains its place as the most segregated state for black students, and second most segregated for Latino students, trailing only California. The report also makes clear that New York is experiencing an acceleration of demographic changes outlined in the earlier 2014 report. White students are no longer the state’s majority group as they were in 2010. the proportion of Asian students increasing sharply to more than 17% in 2018, and Latino students becoming the largest racial/ethnic group, from 35% in 1990 to 41% in 2018. Conversely, there has been a significant decline in the black student population. The new research also examines the expansion of school choice and charter schools and how they may have contributed to the continued segregation of the city’s schools. The research underscores that many in New York City are engaged in important efforts to integrate schools and there are a significant number of schools showing signs of reduced segregation.

How odd! In his dramatic opening paragraph, Louis says that New York City "has done little or nothing to implement dozens of reasonable proposals to move in the direction of integration." 

As you can see in the highlighted passage, the overview paragraph to which he links seems to say something quite different. 

In our view, that looks like a journalistic bungle. Meanwhile, note the peculiar way UCLA's overview paragraph suddenly stops talking about New York State. Suddenly, it refers instead to "the city," without actually naming the city in question.

In a very high-level report about a very important subject, that is astoundingly bad academic writing. In fairness, everybody makes mistakes, but can anyone here play this game?

In reality, Louis is linking to a report about "New York," city and state, which was released by UCLA in 2021. As noted above, it was the sequel to an earlier report about "New York," city and state, released by UCLA back in 2014.

The full report from 2021 is 92 pages long. All in all, we'd call it bewildering and profoundly unhelpful.

It presents such a wealth of statistical claims that, in the end, it's hard to get clear on what it's actually claiming. What it does plainly do is this:

It keeps repeating such treasured old terms as "segregation" and "segregated schools." It keeps us living in the world of the pre-1954 Deep South, even though it's now the year 2024 and the world, though still highly imperfect, is no longer that world.

Presumably, there are still many things we could improve about our public schools (and about the wider culture zones within which they operate). That may include the way these schools produce, or fail to produce, constructive interaction among their different demographic groups.

That said, we no longer have "segregated schools" in the way we had such schools in that earlier era. Keeping that basic thought in mind, what does UCLA mean when it says that New York State is worst, among the fifty states, in this highly fraught area?

Sadly, the Civil Rights Project means this:

As in the 2014 report, so too in 2021. The writing was less explicit this time around, but again and again the 2021 report seems to say and/or suggest that any school which is "more than 50% percent nonwhite" is a "segregated school."

In the 2014 report, UCLA explicitly stated that definition of "school segregation." The scholars seem to have responded to past criticism of that peculiar definition by fudging their language a bit in the 2021 report.

Still, a wide array of graphics in the 2021 report seem to include such "predominantly nonwhite" schools within the broad rubric of "segregated schools." Meanwhile, on page 52 of the endlessly complex report, this explicit passage occurs, subheading included:

Segregation in NYC Schools
New York City schools have extreme levels of segregation by race/ethnicity. Almost all of the public schools are predominantly nonwhite (94%), and most are intensely segregated (70%), although this percentage has fallen slightly since 2010. The percent of apartheid schools (those with less than 1% white student enrollment) has been declining for the past 30 years, and in the  time frame from 2010 to 2018 has declined more than 10 points to 17%. Nonetheless, the fact remains that 1 in 6 schools in NYC are apartheid schools.

Below that passage, the report includes one of the many graphics which seem to list "predominantly nonwhite" schools as one of the three basic types of "segregated schools."

In the 2021 report, UCLA seems to define three types of "segregated schools." As you can see in the passage we've posted, there are "apartheid schools;" there are "intensely segregated schools;" and there are "predominantly nonwhite schools."

In 2014, predominantly nonwhite schools were explicitly described as being "segregated." In 2021, someone may have forgotten to clean up the language we've posted above, language in which that rubric still seems to be in operation.

That said, directly below that passage from page 52, the reader sees one of the many graphics in which "predominantly nonwhite schools" still seem to be listed as one of the three basic types of "segregated schools." For better or worse, this is the way the academics at UCLA seem to think about this (very important) state of affairs.

Does it make sense to say that a school which is predominantly nonwhite is thereby "segregated?" By that reckoning, Hypothetical Public School A (see above) would in fact be a "segregated school." 

By UCLA's apparent reckoning, this second hypothetical school would also be a "segregated school:"

Hypothetical Public School B:
White kids: 48%
Black kids: 30%
Hispanic kids: 20%
Asian-American kids: 2%

By UCLA's apparent reckoning, that school would be "segregated" too. Its student population is predominantly nonwhite!

What sorts of problems actually afflict our nation's public schools? In a rational world, that would seem to be an important question.

That would be in a rational world. In our world, our journalists and our academics frequently seem to lack the tools—or the level of actual interest—which would be required to let us address that important question.

In his recent report, Louis became the latest journalist to think that UCLA was talking about New York City when the report to which he linked was plainly referring to New York State. 

Can anyone here play this game? Plainy, our journalists frequently can't.

(For the record, UCLA has never claimed that New York City is "worst in the nation" in this area. Given the peculiar frameworks with which it operates, no such claim would be possible.)

For its part, UCLA produced its latest bewildering report in 2021. By our lights, the academics at the Civil Rights Project seem to be living in the past. They seem to want to say that we're still living in Mississippi in the year 1935.

They seem to love the sound of the word "segregation." They seem to thrill to the surprising claim that the state of New York is maintaining a large volume of "segregated schools." 

They seem capable of noticing or caring about little else. The basic problems of American schooling, including possible problems of racial distribution, go unaddressed as they continue to pump their old-world presentations to waves of hapless journalists.

Final points:

First, why does the state of New York have so many "segregated schools?"

The answer is fairly simple. The state's nonwhite population is heavily concentrated downstate, in New York City and its metropolitan area. Upstate, the rest of New York State is much more heavily white.

In a large state whose large population is distributed that way, there's no obvious way to produce schools which exhibit some perfect form of "racial balance." Inevitably, the downstate schools will be heavily nonwhite. The upstate schools will be the opposite.

That's why New York State is worst among the fifty states, as judged by UCLA's cockeyed reckoning. As for the New York City Public Schools, this was the breakdown of its massive student population, as reported on page 52 of the 2021 UCLA report:

Student population, New York City Public Schools
Hispanic kids: 40.6%
Black kids: 25.1% 
Asian-American kids 16.6%
White kids: 15.1%

At that time, 85% of New York City's public school students were "nonwhite." Given that student population, it will be hard to create a lot of schools which aren't "predominantly nonwhite," even if you feel, for whatever reason, that some such distributive nirvana is necessary.

In our view, these reports from UCLA's Civil Rights Project rank among the most incompetent academic reports we've ever seen. Through their statistical complexity and their peculiar taxonomies, they create maddening amounts of confusion, even as they carelessly trumpet deeply important, deeply fraught terms from the nation's past.

In the present day, no one's schools are "segregated" in the way the public schools of many states once were. At UCLA, they seem to cling to that deeply fraught but pleasing term, creating waves of confusion and misdirection as they do.

As for New York Magazine, there seems to be an endless supply of journalists and news orgs who are prepared to misinterpret the dramatic (and ambiguous) claim found in the ambiguous headlines which routinely top UCLA's reports. The whole thing starts with UCLA's persistent, ridiculous failure to say which "New York" it's talking about—city or state.

There are many problems with our public schools and with the overall "education" of American kids. In our view, UCLA's peculiar reports do nothing to help us focus on areas where improvement could be sought. That includes the general area of (constructive attempts at creating) racial interaction.

Welcome to The Planet of the Humans! We humans are good at building tall buildings (and the like). We're much less skilled at virtually everything else. 

It's maddening to try to fight your way through the reports about "New York" from the Civil Rights Project. We think of what the later Wittgenstein said, in a different context:

It's like you have to repair a broken spider's web using your bare hands. 

Such matters seem to outstrip our fundamental skill levels. Welcome to the planet of the present-day upper-end humans, modern public school style!