Racial demographics in NYC's public schools

Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom:

Only one in seven of the million-plus students enrolled in the city’s public schools is white. Blacks are over a third of the total, and Hispanics nearly 40%, with Asians making up another seventh. Minority kids are thus 85% of the city’s public-school population. Inevitably, majority-white schools are rare.

Enrolling minority students in majority-white schools would require a massive city-to-suburbia busing program, and many students would need to travel a great many miles to avoid “segregating” the schools in the closest suburbs, which tend to have a substantial minority presence already. Here is the mind-boggling fact: to bring white enrollments up to 50% in the New York City schools, it would be necessary to bus nearly 400,000 students out of the city each day, and fill their seats with about 400,00 whites from suburbia.

Furthermore, the experience of large-scale mandatory busing programs in cities like Boston and Denver suggests that its most important long-term result would be to drive families who could either move beyond the reach of busing or afford private or parochial tuition out of the system. Finding majority political support for such a scheme is so wildly unlikely that is hard to believe that anyone truly takes the idea seriously.

A serious plan to increase the number of majority-white schools would require that we explore other possibilities.The most dramatic demographic change affecting the city’s schools in the past three decades has been the explosive growth of the Latino student body. Lowering the national immigration quota and cracking down on illegal immigration would reduce the number of Hispanic youngsters in the schools. Since the shortage of white pupils is the heart of the problem, we could experiment with policies designed to bring white families with school-age children back into the city. A $1,000 a month rent subsidy for whites who would promise to send their kids to P.S. 98, for example, would likely find a significant number of takers. Or how about evicting current occupants of rent-controlled apartments and replacing them with newcomers who agreed to these conditions?

Such schemes are admittedly far-fetched, though no more far-fetched than a massive new busing scheme.

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