All Hail Diversity! NYC Schools To Give Priority To Predominantly Black And Hispanic Kids

White kids will have to rely on white privilege.

A diversity drive is spreading across the city as 78 schools in 14 of the city’s 32 community districts now boast plans that will give admission priority to predominantly black and Hispanic kids — and more schools will soon follow, a Post analysis found.

The patchwork of plans, while still limited in scope — the city has 1,800 schools — amounts to the biggest de-segregation movement in Big Apple schools since the late-1950s Civil Rights era, when there was an abortive program to bus black kids from Bedford-Stuyvesant and East Harlem to white areas in Queens, a top scholar said.

“I cannot think of any other time where there have been such efforts to try to alter the racial or ethnic makeup of New York City schools,” said Stephan Brumberg, a professor emeritus of education history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

A landmark 2014 UCLA study found NYC public schools the nation’s most racially segregated, with black and Latino students concentrated in public schools with less than 10 percent white enrollment.

Citywide, the current racial breakdown of NYC’s public-school students is 41 percent Hispanic, 26 percent black, 16 percent Asian, 15 percent white, and 2 percent “mixed.”

Last year, 49 schools were on board the city Department of Education’s “Diversity in Admissions” pilot initiative, offering a variety of pre-K to high-school seats to English-language learners and kids from low-income families, in the child-welfare system, or with parents in jail.

The DOE could not say Friday how last year’s offers affected enrollment in the school year that starts Wednesday, saying the data won’t be finalized until fall.

This year, another 29 schools have joined the initiative, with admission policies affecting kids entering schools in 2019-20.

New schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has embraced diversity efforts more aggressively than Mayor de Blasio, who hired him.

Within two months on the job, Carranza green-lighted a controversial plan in District 3 on the Upper West Side to reserve 25 percent of seats in 16 middle schools for low-income students with low test scores and grades. Carranza fueled the fire when he retweeted a news headline that blasted “white, wealthy parents” who were angry that their kids might be shut out of the best schools.

Carranza is now poised to approve a far more ambitious plan that has divided parents in Brooklyn’s District 15, including affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope. It will eliminate all academic-based admission criteria at 16 middle schools — and reserve 52 percent of seats for low-income, English-learning and homeless applicants.

Some Park Slope parents have told The Post the schools should keep some admission criteria, but fear speaking up lest they be painted as a “racist from 1950s Alabama,” as one mom put it.

Other parents have pushed for the plan. Lauren Gropp Lowry, a white stay-at-home mom with a second grader at high-performing PS 321, said the current system lets schools cherry-pick kids.

“It’s further sorting and segregating our children in a city that’s too segregated,” she said. “The highest performers end up at just a few schools, and that breeds a sense of entitlement in children and parents. But the highest-performing students are not always the hardest working.”

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via Weasel Zippers

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