http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/nyregion/racial-segregation-in-new-york-schools-begins-in-pre-k-report-finds.html 2016-09-20 12:05:15 Racial Segregation in New York Schools Begins in Pre-K, Report Finds In the first year of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s expansion, prekindergarten classrooms tended to be more racially homogeneous than even the city’s public kindergartens. === From elementary through high school, children in New York City tend to go to school with others similar to themselves, within one of the most intensely racially segregated systems in the country. Turns out that racial segregation is an issue in prekindergarten, too. A In half of all pre-K classrooms, more than 70 percent of students belonged to a single racial or ethnic group, despite the fact that “As much as we struggle with segregation in K-12 schools, early education is really behind,” said Halley Potter, a fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of the report. So how did this segregation come about? Ms. Potter found that pre-K classrooms in But 60 percent of pre-K students that year were enrolled at community-based organizations, and those classrooms tended to be more racially homogeneous than public kindergartens. Among community-based pre-K centers, there are two main types. One is funded by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and typically serves students from low-income families. Those sites also often provide child care beyond the universal prekindergarten day, which lasts for six hour and 20 minutes. Seats at other kinds of community-based sites also tend to go to particular groups. Some organizations give priority to children who were previously enrolled as 3-year-olds, in programs their parents may have paid for, or who might have siblings enrolled at the center. They may give priority to children who speak a particular language, or to those whose families receive social services from the organization. In many cases, they have established relationships within particular communities. Administration for Children’s Services classrooms were more likely to have a majority of black or Hispanic students, the report found. Pre-K programs in other community-based organizations were more likely to have a heavily white or Asian student population. At “To be accepting and tolerant of each other, you have to be a mixture,” Ms. Cheng said. “To learn that there are things that are similar” across cultures, she added, “that’s something really important for kids to learn, and for adults.” Ms. Potter says emphasis on racial diversity needs to be built into the application process. “What we see here is a reflection of the research around school choice,” she said. “That is, if it’s just choice, without diversity really built into the design of the program, it tends to have the effect of increasing segregation in schools and classrooms.” “These pre-K centers did not appear from scratch, most already existed,” she continued, and they came with established enrollment patterns. Josh Wallack, deputy chancellor of strategy and policy at the city’s ”Prior to that, early learning centers had to do their own recruitment, and tended to reach out in their immediate surroundings," he said. The new system “put them on the same playing field as district schools, part of a citywide application process.” Mr. Wallack said “diversity in classrooms is a priority for the There have been Despite the challenges, Ms. Potter, the report’s author, said she was hopeful. “You have to keep in mind,” she explained, “this was the first year of universal pre-K, coming out of a system where most kids were either in private pay or means-tested programs; there weren’t that many seats that were available to kids of all backgrounds. Making that step to universal is huge.” “I think you need to keep in mind that that’s where we’re moving from,” she continued. “Where I’d be disappointed would be if we don’t see any shifting in these patterns.”