‘CLASS’ ACTION
Mayor de Blasio and new Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza on Thursday approved a controversial plan to scrap admissions standards in one of the city’s top districts as part of their crusade to diversify student bodies.
Effective immediately, the 11 middle schools in Brooklyn’s District 15 — which spans Park Slope into Sunset Park — must ditch education-based entrance criteria for a weighted lottery system that reserves roughly half of their seats for kids who are low income, homeless or learning English.
In an announcement at Park Slope’s top-ranked MS 51, which de Blasio’s two children attended, the mayor and chancellor said educational standards — like grades, test scores and attendance — are barring underprivileged kids from the area’s best schools.
The current system “presents itself as a system of choice and meritocracy, but it functions as a system for hoarding privilege,” said Councilman Brad Lander, whose own children also graduated from MS 51.
“My family has benefited from that privilege, and we’ve got to honestly look at it and be willing to talk about it.”
District 15 has been cited as an exemplar of a lack of diversity in the city’s top schools. About 81 percent of the district’s white middle-school students attend just three schools there, while 55 percent of the total middle-school enrollment is black or Latino.
De Blasio described the admissions overhaul as a grass-roots effort with wide community support.
“I know there’s been a really extensive, full dialogue in this community and it’s very gratifying to see this kind of democracy playing out,” he said.
But some local parents say that’s not the case and that fears of being tarred as racist in traditionally liberal Park Slope have driven the plans’ critics into a largely impotent “secret resistance.”
“You have to be very careful who you even talk to about this,” said one parent, who didn’t want to give their name or even gender out of fear of being labeled a bigot.
“The entire process was conducted between a small number of progressive groups who all love the plan. But at no point were other stakeholders invited into the conversation in any meaningful way.”
The parent said they don’t think many moms and dads in the district actually understand the plan or its “implications” for their offspring.
“I don’t care what color the kid is who sits next to my kid in class. But I do care if they can read at grade level and if they can do math at grade level,” they said.
“If you draw the short straw, then there is a chance your kid will go to a school where only a quarter of the kids can read at grade level.”
Parents in that position will inevitably just move their kids to private schools, charters and the city’s gifted and talented programs — or just skip town altogether, they said.
But other parents supported the new regime.
“I think it’s really unhealthy for kids to go to a school that’s segre- gated in a city that’s so diverse,” said Kensington resident Tim Dubnau, whose sixth-grader daughter attends MS 51 and whose fourth-grader son is headed to middle school next year.
“The old process was a nightmare, and it’s really stacked against poor people who don’t have time to do the research or leave work to go to all of these conferences. I just think this is a step in the right direction.”
Carranza is now actively prodding other districts to follow District 15’s example by way of grants and support.
The Department of Education will provide $2 million to any district that wants to hash out its own diversity plan, officials said.
That cash will go toward community meetings, external consultants, or any other expense related to diversification, officials said.
The DOE said it expects roughly 10 districts to apply for the funding in the fall.