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School Choice and Integration in NYC

  • Alvin Johnson/JM Kaplan Auditorium 66 West 12th Street New York, NY, 10011 United States (map)

Forty percent of New York City kindergartners take advantage of school choice to enroll in schools other than their zoned neighborhood school. What does this mean for the children who choose, and what does it mean for the schools they leave behind?

Senior research fellow Nicole Mader of the New School's Center for New York City Affairs will present her research findings, based on student-level zone assignment data for 700,000 pupils over 10 years.

School choice has allowed thousands of children to leave low-performing schools for higher performing schools, often outside their neighborhoods. But it has also resulted in higher concentrations of poverty and shrinking enrollments and budgets in the schools they leave behind, making it ever hard for those schools to serve their neighborhoods well.

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion including:

  • NYS Board of Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa
  • New School Professor Maya Wiley, co-chair of the city's school diversity working group
  • Dennis Morgan, PTA president of PS 180 in Harlem and a member of the Community Education Council for District 3.
  • Allison Roda, author of Inequity in Gifted and Talented Programs: Parental Choices about Status, School Opportunity, and Second-Generation Segregation.
  • Ujju Aggarwal, New School professor and author of the forthcoming book The Color of Choice: Raced Rights and the Structure of Citizenship

Clara Hemphill, director of education policy and editor of InsideSchools, will moderate.