New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has come up short on school desegregation but his initiative on restorative justice looks promising. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times just ran a piece highlighting the failure of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the school chancellor Richard Carranza to make any meaningful headway desegregating New York City’s schools. Carranza certainly talked the talk. He came into office boasting “No, we will not wait to integrate our schools, we will not wait to dismantle the segregated systems we have!” Now he says that only Jesus Christ himself could pull off such a task: “If I integrated the system, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to walk on water”.
In fairness to de Blasio and Carranza, desegregating schools is an incredibly difficult task at which few succeed. Racial segregation remains a serious problem across the country and there are no easy answers. I have suggested in previous posts that the government would be better off tackling various forms of discrimination that promote housing segregation. Since most schools are local, removing the artificial barriers minorities face in moving to neighborhoods with the best schools would go a long way toward reducing school segregation.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that de Blasio and Carranza handled the desegregation issue well. De Blasio began by leading an ill-fated attempt to get rid of the admissions test for New York City’s highly desirable selective public schools. Asian Americans do particularly well on these tests and Carranza stoked their fears that he was playing racial politics by pitting Asians against everyone else. Carranza clumsily said that he did not “buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions to these schools,” as if Asian Americans were seeking some sort of monopoly rather than simply studying hard for the tests.
Fortunately, there is more than one way to help minority students thrive, and de Blasio is on a much better track with regard to reforming student discipline. There is a huge problem with racial disparities in the discipline of students and with schools calling in the police. According to the Washington Post: “The Civil Rights Data Collection, which contains detailed information for the 2015-2016 school year on more than 96,000 public schools, offers more evidence that certain young people — including black, Hispanic male and American Indian students — face harsher discipline than their white counterparts . . . Black students accounted for 15 percent of the student body in the 2015-2016 school year but 31 percent of arrests.”
There is a robust debate about whether these disparities are driven by implicit bias against minorities or by higher incidents of serious misbehavior by minorities. But even if it is the latter that doesn’t mean that suspending or arresting so many minority students is a good idea. And here is where de Blasio deserves real credit.
This past June, de Blasio announced that starting this September new rules will limit arrests for low-level offenses. This represents a move away from Giuliani era “zero tolerance” policies. Calling in the police should be a last resort. While it may seem like common sense to summon police to arrest a violent student, common sense also means that there are many shades of violent behavior and zero-tolerance policies are too blunt to deal with those shades. Here, for example, is the story of 17-year-old Paola Mena: “[she] said being arrested after a fight outside of her Bronx middle school several years ago was one of the worst experiences of her life. Paola said she was sticking up for a friend who had been bullied when she got into a verbal fight with another student. Paola said the other girl spat on her, and Paola tried to throw a punch that didn’t land. A few moments later, she remembered being grabbed from behind by police officers and taken to the local precinct, where she said she was handcuffed to a chair. ‘Ever since that day, walking through the halls in school, I felt really ashamed,’ said Paola, who was 14 at the time of her arrest. ‘Everyone knew what happened, everyone saw me being dragged by people who were twice my size.’”
De Blasio wants fewer arrests and a greater reliance on restorative justice. Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice programs seek to repair relations and end discord between youthful offenders and their victims. Obviously, such an approach is not appropriate for truly serious physical violence or for weapons violations and the new rules have exceptions for such incidents. But restorative justice is a far better approach to incidents such as one involving Paola.
Restorative justice is not a panacea. It is a relatively new program so research on its overall effectiveness is still emerging. However, the early evidence in Los Angeles, which budgets more than $10 million annually for restorative justice, indicates that if schools devote sufficient resources to the restorative justice programs they can reduce suspensions and truancy without creating discipline problems. According to a recent EdSource article:
“Because their use in the school setting is so new, there is scant research on the long-term effectiveness of restorative practices. But officials in districts that have devoted significant resources to them say they’ve led directly to fewer suspensions and better school climates. ‘We have seen a drastic reduction in suspensions and [restorative justice] is a big reason for it,’ said Deborah Brandy, Los Angeles Unified [School District’s] director of district operations, which oversees restorative justice programs. ‘We’ve also seen a reduction in truancy rates…and it goes beyond the data. Parents feel more welcome at their school sites; students remarked (in climate surveys) that their teachers seem more caring.’
It is a shame that de Blasio hasn’t been able to come up with a way to desegregate the New York School system. Nevertheless, to his credit, he is trying a number of different ways to help minority students. The move towards fewer arrests and suspensions in favor of restorative justice seems promising.
