“Educational Redlining” Denies New York Kids Access to Better Schools, Keeps Empire State the “Epicenter” of Segregated Public Education
Public school attendance zones in NYC, Albany, Buffalo and other areas eerily mirror racist housing lines used to deny mortgages to neighborhoods with more people of color, according to a new analysis by education watchdog Available to All
First-ever look at NY’s policies urges reforms; calls on NYS Board of Regents to immediately study every enrollment zone to identify those that mirror or nearly mirror racist redlining maps
Many public school attendance zones in New York City and across the state are virtually identical to housing “redlining” maps once used to discriminate against neighborhoods with more people of color and are preventing children from attending better schools even if they’re nearby, a landmark new report issued today says.
The report, “And Stay Out! How New York’s educational redlining blocks middle-class and lower-income kids from accessing the best public schools in their own backyards,” is the first-ever comparison of Empire State school district attendance zones and the racist “redlines” created by the feds in the 1930s and finally outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The report was released by Available to All (ATA), a non-partisan watchdog that defends equal access to public schools for all families regardless of their income or ZIP code. The full report can be found at https://availabletoall.org/report-and-stay-out/
“Attendance zones in the five boroughs and across New York State are doing the same work of the racist redlining maps in the 1930s, denying crucial government services—this time high quality education—to kids based on where their parents can afford to live,” said Available to All Founder and President Tim DeRoche.
“Parents have been arrested for trying to buck New York’s system. That’s just wrong and it’s because residential assignment doesn’t look out for the best interests of kids,” DeRoche said.
“And Stay Out!” graphically details the overlap in neighborhoods in all five New York City boroughs, Westchester, Albany, Buffalo, Schenectady, Jamestown and Niagara Falls, and notes where children on one side of the line are denied access to better schools in neighboring zones even when seats are available.
“If denying kids access to a better public school merely because of their address doesn’t violate New York State’s commitment to equal opportunity, nothing does. And the saddest part is that it’s no accident,” DeRoche said. “These attendance zone lines are official policy, and they separate the haves from the have-nots.”
“Government policy makers call it residential assignment. We call it educational redlining,” the report says.
“New York’s public schools are extremely segregated because children are assigned to schools based on their address. New York has one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country. It is a tragic irony for a state that prides itself on fighting for equity, fairness and opportunity for historically oppressed populations,” the report says.
“Voters inthe state of New York are some of the most progressive in the country. Democrats, the party of social and racial justice, control the state Legislature, the courts, and the Governor’s Mansion. In Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, New York City just inaugurated its most progressive mayor in its 401-year history,” the report says.
“And the teacher’s unions, one of the loudest advocates for anti-racism and educational equity in the public square, have outsized influence in every aspect of New York’s educational policy making, from the Capitol to the vast majority of the local school boards. But New York State’s public schools are the most segregated, by race and income, in the entire country,” the report says.
“And Stay Out!” shows how public school attendance zones overlap with the maps used for those same neighborhoods in the 1930s by the federal Homeowners’ Loan Corporation or HOLC. HOLC drew maps of hundreds of American cities, designating certain neighborhoods at “desirable,” “best,” “declining,” or “hazardous.”
Areas with more people of color, shaded red or yellow on these maps, were ineligible for government housing assistance and/or private loans.
According to a Federal Reserve history of redlining, “The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) began redlining at the very beginning of its operations in 1934, as FHA staff concluded that no loan could be economically sound if the property was located in a neighborhood that was or could become populated by Black people (emphasis added), as property values might decline over the life of the 15- to 20-year loans they were attempting to standardize.”
The Federal Reserve site notes the concerns about the “negative impact” of “infiltration of inharmonious racial groups” on credit risk. “To limit that risk, it recommended restrictive covenants that prohibit `the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.’ For the next few decades, the FHA generally favored loans on new construction in suburban areas rather than urban areas with older housing stocks or Black residents.”
“The core belief driving our work is so simple yet it may sound radical to New York policy makers,” says DeRoche. “Even the best and most coveted public schools should be open and accessible to all New York families.”
The report calls on the state Board of Regents, Education Commissioner Betty Rosa, and the State Education Department to immediately undertake a comprehensive study of every enrollment zone to identify those that mirror or nearly mirror the HOLC’s insidious redlining boundaries, so the public can see exactly where the racist practice has been replicated in New York’s public schools, and issue a public report by December 1.
In addition, And Get Out! offers a simple set of reforms for remedying New York’s exclusionary school assignment system and protecting all families’ rights, including:
- Require every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for kids who live outside the zone or district. If the school receives a surplus of applications for these seats, the school should be required to hold a lottery to determine which applicants will be allowed to enroll, with the lottery results verified by an independent third party.
- Decriminalize address sharing, a common practice in K-12 education that is selectively enforced. Many states maintain systems of threatening, fining, prosecuting, and even jailing parents who make efforts (such as using a relative’s address) to become eligible as residents.
- Require every public school to provide an equal opportunity for enrollment to any child who lives within a three-mile radius of the school. Such a reform would eliminate the power of the district to engage in educational redlining, drawing exclusionary maps and turning away students who live on the wrong side of an arbitrary line.
Available to All (ATA) is a nonpartisan education watchdog group working to ensure that public schools are equally accessible to all kids, no matter their race, address, economic background, or learning challenges. ATA advocates for the thousands of American kids who are turned away from public schools every year. ATA works to document and expose unfair or illegal enrollment practices in the public schools, supports parents, and advocates for reforms.
It takes its name from the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Ed, in which Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that public schools must be “available to all on equal terms.”
DeRoche is the author of A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools (Redtail Press, 2020), which showed how the attendance zonesof many elite public schools across the country mirror the racist redlining maps of the 1930s.
Available to All’s previous work includes educational redlining in Los Angeles and Missouri, a 50-state report on the laws that govern public school enrollment called The Broken Promise of Brown v. Board of Ed, as well as a report on the prosecution of parents for using someone else’s address to access a high-quality public school, titled When Good Parents Go to Jail.
Visit AvailabletoAll.org to learn more.
