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At a town hall meeting on October 20, Nikole Hannah-Jones peppered Chancellor of New York City Public Schools Kamar Samuels with questions regarding his and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vision for America’s largest public schools system. Among Hannah-Jones’ suggestions for improvement was a plan that had, just the week before, been repealed in San Francisco after 15 years of community dissatisfaction — and disastrous results.
When it came to raising achievement in NYC schools, Hannah-Jones did not ask Samuels to answer for the institutions which, last month, she so publicly accused of failing her daughter during the time when Samuels was Brooklyn District 13’s superintendent. Instead, what she wanted to know was whether Samuels and Mandani would be implementing former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Diversity Task Force recommendations which included getting rid of schools which look at grades or test scores for admissions, and redrawing, or possibly doing away altogether, with residential school zones.
Samuels pointed to Manhattan’s District 3 which, under his stewardship, did get rid of middle school screening, despite his own official poll indicating local families were against the move. Perhaps that’s why now, he’s advocating for soliciting stake-holders’ buy-in instead of dictating top-down policies.
Even before Samuels got there, that same District 3, in 2016, rezoned three elementary schools. The high-performing, majority wealthy 452 was moved into the building then housing PS 191, a low-performing, majority low-income school. PS 191 received a brand new building as a means for enticing more families to attend. At the same time, the highest-performing and wealthiest school of them all, PS 199, had its attendance zone amended to include a portion of students from the Amsterdam Houses, with the rest of the kids from that housing project divided between the newly relocated 452 and 191.
The stated goal was integration, which would, presumably, in and of itself, instantly lead to higher achievement for all children. However, what actually happened is that the ranking driven primarily by test scores at PS 452 slipped 9 percentile points over the past decade, 6 percentile points at 199, and remained “well below” average at 191.
Meanwhile, in Manhattan’s District 1, all elementary schools were unzoned in 1989, allowing any family to apply to any school in the district. The goal was, once again, integration leading to presumed rising achievement. Instead, at PS 19, where 46% of students qualify for free and reduced-price meals, 81% of students are performing at grade level in math and reading. At Earth School, where 62% are FRL, 42% are at grade level in math and 68% in English. At PS 134 the FRL number is 100%. Only a quarter of the students are performing at grade level in either subject.
At all of the schools listed above, as I’ve reported repeatedly, the students whose families could afford to pay for them to prep for the state tests continued to perform well, and those who couldn’t, mostly didn’t.
This would suggest that integration through rezoning or the even more extreme unzoning isn’t the one-size-fits-all-solution for lagging student achievement its supporters insist it is.
And if District 1 and District 3 examples aren’t enough evidence of that, there is San Francisco which, in 2011, replaced its previous system of zoning and federal racial quotas with a citywide choice lottery, with some set-aside priority for students coming from areas with historically low standardized test scores. The goal was integration and raising student achievement. This October 13, San Francisco Unified School District voted to scrap the entire thing and return to a system of residential zones with options to apply to specialized programs across the city. Pretty much what NYC has now with its Gifted & Talented and Dual Language programs.
SFSUD Superintendent Maria Su explained her reasons for the change as “I chose this direction because the current system has not worked equally for everyone. Many families who do not feel confident in their neighborhood school choose to go elsewhere, which leaves those schools with fewer students and fewer resources. At the same time, not all families have had equal access to school choice. The current system often favors families with the time, language access, and resources to navigate a complicated process.”
Which is a polite way of saying that, as it stands, test scores for the neediest students demonstrate them falling further behind, while 30% of San Francisco children in grades kindergarten through 12th grade attend private schools, far exceeding the California state average of around 8% This bluest of blue cities is also ranked No. 1 nationally on that metric.
It would be silly to suggest that there is one magic bullet for fixing everything which ails NYC’s — and America’s — schools. A phenomenal amount of work needs to be done across the board in everything from the science of reading to effective math instruction to improving attendance and teacher quality.
But it is just as silly to suggest, as Nikole Hannah-Jones and others do, that integration via rezoning or unzoning is the obvious and all-encompassing solution. Especially in light of its failure to produce academic success for the lowest-served students not just in NYC, but at other locations, too.
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