New York Times
August 22, 2007
On Education
By JOSEPH BERGER
WHITE PLAINS
For 18 years, this city of 55,000 has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn.
But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one in White Plains, are also based explicitly on race. And there are fears that should a court turn down White Plains’s plan in the future, white families may abandon some of the neighborhood schools. That is not a fear restricted to White Plains, as dozens of other cities are having to reconsider similar plans.
“The demographics in some of the schools might change dramatically, and I don’t know how parents in those schools would feel about the demographics,” is the discreetly worded warning from Laurette Young, who administers the White Plains plan.
As in most cities, housing in White Plains, the Westchester County seat that has sprouted skyscrapers among its suburban patches, is identifiable by race. The southern end is dappled with tree-shaded homes inhabited mostly by white families, while the northwest has housing projects populated by black families and aging apartments crowded with Latinos.
Under a strict neighborhood zoning plan, children of those northwestern black and Hispanic families would be assigned to the Post Road School, but so would children from adjoining middle-class white enclaves, and it is not clear how many would attend if they were reduced to a tiny minority.
Conversely, school officials believe the south end’s Ridgeway School would be stripped of the ethnic palette that residents have long prized.
In 1989, White Plains, tired of perennially gerrymandering for racial balance, began a “controlled choice” plan that essentially jettisoned neighborhood zones and required each school to have the same proportions of blacks, Hispanics and “others,” a term that includes whites and Asians. The plan allowed for a discrepancy among schools of only 5 percent. Similar plans had been adopted in Cambridge and Fall River, Mass., and copied by Milwaukee, San Jose, Calif., and dozens of other cities.
White Plains’s plan takes pains to give parents genuine choices. In January and February, parents of entering kindergartners visit elementary schools and rank their top three picks. A family will get first choice, which 90 percent of families do, unless the number of applicants of that child’s race exceeds certain caps, which at a school with 100 kindergartners might be 13 blacks, 46 Hispanics, and 41 “others.”
Should that happen, a lottery is held for all students in that racial group, with assigned numbers on colored slips of paper picked out of a basket at a public meeting. Remaining kindergartners get second choice or, rarely, third.
Buses are provided for students living more than half a mile from school. The plan also balances assignments at the two campuses of the middle school.
As a result of the plan, enrollment at each elementary school is roughly 45 percent Hispanic, 17 percent black, and 37 percent other. Officials say the plan works because transparent rules are enforced without favoritism. No school is more overcrowded or receives more dollars. All groups share the burdens and benefits of integration, though the unspoken assumption is that white parents will send their children to public schools only up to a murky “tipping point.”
“Over the history of the plan, no school has emerged as most desirable or least desirable, so no racial group is disadvantaged by not getting into that school,” said Saul Yanofsky, a former superintendent who spearheaded efforts to draw up the plan.
While the plan would not work in many cities — either because they have too few whites or schools too geographically spread out — in White Plains it has, by most accounts, been a success. Although enrollment has grown to more than 7,000 largely as a result of a Latino influx, schools have retained roughly the same number, if not the proportions, of whites and blacks that they had in 1989. That is not the usual urban pattern.
Achievement levels in the schools are comparable. At Ridgeway, 76 percent of fourth graders passed the state’s English test in 2005; in Post Road, 67 percent did. At the end of the line, the high school, with 17 Advanced Placement courses, gets top graduates into Harvard and Yale.
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