How white is too white? At the Academy of Arts and Letters, a small K-8 school in Brooklyn founded in 2006 to educate a community of “diverse individuals,” that question is being put to the test.
The school — along with six others in New York City — is part of a newEducation Department initiative aimed at maintaining a racial and socioeconomic balance at schools in fast-gentrifying neighborhoods. For the first time the department is allowing a group of principals to set aside a percentage of seats for low-income families, English-language learners or students engaged with the child welfare system as a means of creating greater diversity within their schools.
Read the entire story on The New York Times website. To learn more about Sean Reardon's work, see this Q&A with him about segregation, a GSE news release about the widening of the achievement gap based on income, his study of resegregation in public schools, his 2013 Times op-ed “No rich child left behind,” a story about his work on how race and class affect where people live, and his research on dual-language programs.