A tough truth that Zohran Mamdani and Nikole Hannah-Jones must reckon with
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a Nikole Hannah-Jones problem. He has publicly agreed with the New York Times essayist that the New York City Department of Education is “the most segregated school system in the United States of America.” And his schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, has promised that “integration” of the schools is one of his main goals. But Mamdani and his team have yet to offer a concrete plan to address the troubling inequalities of the school system.
When Hannah-Jones grilled the chancellor about the lack of action last week, Samuels hedged on the integration goal. He said that the administration is fearful of “pushback that will essentially start to end the conversation.” As one reporter noted, “It was a striking acknowledgment that anticipated pushback is influencing the administration’s thinking.”
But pressure is also mounting on the mayor, from both the left and the right, to do something to address the extremes of inequality in the city’s schools. Although Mamdani and Samuels have convened working groups in five districts to begin talking about potential solutions, Hannah-Jones accused Samuels of “just delaying.”
The hard truth that this exchange reveals is this: Forcibly integrating the schools is impossible for the mayor. Every conceivable option would be illegal because the objective is explicitly race-based in a way the Constitution disallows. It could also prove ruinous for New York families because it would lock children into failing schools they don’t want to attend, and it could be politically catastrophic for the mayor because it would alienate a wide swath of his coalition.
Hannah-Jones ignited a nationwide furor in September with her essay “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The piece documents what happened when she and her husband sent their daughter to P.S. 307, a struggling public school in Brooklyn that serves primarily low-income minority children. Their goal was to fight against the inequality of the “segregated” system and try to elevate the performance of the school by their active engagement. Instead, they found that discipline was lax, work went ungraded and school staff were largely unresponsive. Their daughter emerged with academic deficits that required intensive remediation.
Hannah-Jones describes something real when she calls the schools “segregated.” At P.S. 307, where she sent her daughter, fewer than 10% of the students are white or Asian, and 90% are economically disadvantaged. Less than a mile away is the Emily Warren Roebling School, where 76% of the students are white or Asian and only 12% are economically disadvantaged. At P.S. 307, only 28% of the kids are reading at grade level vs. 90% at Roebling.
This isn’t old-style segregation where kids are explicitly assigned to schools based on their race. But something has gone horribly wrong when virtually all of the Black and brown children in a neighborhood cannot enroll at a nearby high-performing elementary school. It betrays the sacred promise of the public schools that are supposed to be “open to all” and the “Great Equalizer” of opportunity.
Hannah-Jones frames the issue as a trade-off between choice and integration, blaming school divisions on “the city’s so-called ‘school choice’ system.” She’s suggesting, as many have, that the schools would be more demographically mixed if there were no choice at all and every family was forced to attend their assigned, zoned school.
But it is not school choice that is keeping P.S. 307 and the Roebling School separated from each other. What actually divides the two schools is an attendance zone boundary drawn and enforced by the Department of Education. Kids zoned to P.S. 307 are not allowed to cross the line and attend the Roebling School, even though that high-performing school is just blocks away.
As Hannah-Jones points out, there is indeed a choice system layered on top of the strict residential system. Some families that can’t afford to live within the Roebling attendance zone will use the choice system — charters, magnets and gifted-and-talented programs — to seek an escape from the elementary school that they were assigned to based on address. Hannah-Jones is also correct that the DOE offers more choices at the secondary level, so geography matters less for older kids. But, by then, the poor, minority kids from P.S. 307 and similar zoned schools are often so far behind that they can’t qualify for the selective secondary programs, as Hannah-Jones documents so well.
There are typically four potential solutions offered as a path to integration, and none of them are tenable. Let’s look at them one by one.
First, the DOE could, theoretically, assign children to schools based on their race in order to create racially integrated schools. Regardless of whether this would be good policy, it would be illegal. The federal courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for a district to assign kids to public schools based on their race, no matter how pure your intentions are.
Second, the DOE could assign kids to schools based on income level to maximize socioeconomic diversity. While you can’t use race in student assignment, the courts have ruled that you can use a family’s income level. Since race and income are highly correlated, the DOE would aim to make each school representative of the system as a whole: 70% low-income and 30% not. Racial divisions would likely also decrease.
Unfortunately, this approach would require moving hundreds of thousands of children around with buses, a policy that has generated outrage among parents of all races and income levels in the past. Families unhappy with their assignment would likely look to leave the system, exacerbating the enrollment crisis.
Third, the DOE could end school choice programs, forcing kids back to assigned, zoned schools. This seems to be what Hannah-Jones wants. But, as one study showed, sending all kids back to their zoned schools would lead to only a marginal reduction in segregation. That’s because the racial divisions in the schools, especially at the elementary level, are primarily driven by housing patterns and exclusionary attendance maps. My organization, Available to All, published a report earlier this year showing that the kids at P.S. 307 are boxed out of Roebling by a zone map that mirrors the old racist redlining map of the 1930s.
In a world without choice, you’d be pushing back thousands of kids, against their will, into struggling zoned schools like P.S. 307, where Hannah-Jones’ daughter suffered so much harm. It wouldn’t be good for the kids, and it would likely be disastrous for the mayor.
Fourth, the DOE could redraw the zone maps. In a recent New York Times article, Kathryn Hill, the research director at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, floated this option: “If the system really wanted to push integration, they probably would have to redraw community school district boundary lines or school catchment areas.”
The DOE could indeed try to gerrymander the assignment lines in order to increase diversity. But redrawing attendance boundaries usually leads to bitter political battles. Many wealthy families pay a significant financial premium for a specific home precisely because that address guarantees access to a high-performing elementary school. Indeed, many of Mayor Mamdani’s most fervent supporters live in those protected zones that are predominantly white and upper-middle-class.
If Samuels succeeded in overhauling the boundaries, then many of these families could find that their children were reassigned to a struggling school that might be farther from their home, or the makeup of their zoned school might change dramatically overnight. It is likely that many of these families would leave the public schools entirely.
If “integration” is therefore impossible, is the mayor powerless to address the problem? No, he has one other option. It, too, would be politically difficult, but it has the great virtue of being equitable and fair. Contrary to Hannah-Jones’ advice to eliminate choice, the mayor and his team could go in the other direction, looking to New Orleans as a model and abolishing “student assignment” altogether.
After Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public schools transitioned to a system in which children are not assigned to schools at all. Instead, families specify which schools they want their children to attend. If a school is overenrolled, students are chosen by lottery, with some minor preferences for children who live close to the school. In the excellent audio documentary “Where the Schools Went,” journalist Ravi Gupta shows that New Orleans, since making this simple but revolutionary change, has achieved significant growth in reading scores and high school graduation rates. (New Orleans made other changes that have generated more headlines, including moving to almost all charter schools. But it is their experience with abolishing student assignment that is relevant to the inequalities that we see in the DOE.)
This wouldn’t be an easy path in New York City. Families at elite, zoned schools would lose guaranteed access. Mamdani and Samuels (and Hannah-Jones) would have to give up the utopian ideal of integration imposed from the top down. Nor would it guarantee that racial divisions in the schools would disappear overnight. Indeed, racial divisions in the New Orleans schools persist, partially because of residential segregation and partially because of family preferences.
But the appeal of the New Orleans model is obvious: It abolishes the exclusionary lines that have determined the educational fate of millions of children. Suddenly, the kids at struggling P.S. 307 would be free to apply to the nearby Roebling School and would have a chance, via the lottery, at a life-changing primary education. Higher-income families, instead of being re-assigned to a failing school, would retain control over their child’s education and would also have a shot to attend schools like Roebling.
As Michelle Goldberg has observed in the New York Times, true school choice can be stressful for parents. Higher-income families would no longer have the option of simply buying into a good elementary school zone. But the upsides are significant, too. Not least, it would force all New York families, and not simply poor ones, to bear the burden of this hard truth: There simply aren’t enough seats in high-quality schools in New York City, not even close. Faced with that reality, even former critics of charter schools like Goldberg can find themselves “wishing there were more.”
Solutions like these have already been tried on a small scale in New York. In Manhattan, District 1 abolished elementary school zones, and District 15 in Brooklyn transitioned to a lottery-style public school choice system for middle schools with some set-asides for disadvantaged kids. They aren’t perfect, and the results would suggest that such changes aren’t a panacea. But policies like these are more fair than a system based on address, and that’s a huge win for the public schools and for New York families.
There are no easy answers for Mamdani and Samuels. Given the political challenges, perhaps what is most likely is that the mayor will offer up a milquetoast plan that doesn’t solve the core problem but that is dressed up in the language of social justice.
If and when a plan comes, pay attention to the Roebling School and P.S. 307: Will the mayor allow the DOE to continue enforcing, via a discriminatory map, the separation of those two school communities? Or will he consider using his political capital to ensure that the best public elementary schools in New York are equally accessible to all of the city’s children?
