Is the Fight for School Integration Still Worthwhile for African Americans?

But perhaps the most consequential feature of Black segregated schools in the United States is that they are mostly high-poverty schools. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a staggering 72.4 percent of Black eighth graders attend a high-poverty school, compared with only 31.3 percent of white students, subjecting a mind-boggling number of Black students to the well-known adverse effects of concentrated poverty.16 Concentrations of poverty are associated with higher levels of endemic violence, higher levels of stress, less exposure to the cultural capital needed for upward mobility, and many other disadvantages.

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She got into one of NYC’s top high schools. Four years later, she wishes she hadn’t

“I started to slowly realize that a lot of these kids had kind of been sheltered from other races of people to the point where they didn’t really know how to be racially sensitive,” said Yarde, 17, who graduated Monday. “It seemed like kids were either automatically intimidated by me, or they immediately undermined me.”

Wint attended Stuyvesant when she was a student in the late 2000s but left the school her junior year, a decision she attributes to the overt racism she experienced there.

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The burden on elite high schools: They must change their cultures to welcome students of all backgrounds

Over the course of our meetings, many students lamented the lack of diversity at our schools, specifically with regard to black and Latino students. They shared that the lack of representation at their schools created environments that bred racism and other forms of prejudice both inside and outside the classroom.


This atmosphere does not foster the inclusivity and diversity that all New York City public high schools ought to embody, and inhibits underrepresented students from experiencing their education as equals. While the paucity of black and Latino and Latina students at the specialized schools is certainly reflective of larger, systemic flaws in equitable access to New York’s education system, their absence also prevents white and Asian students at those schools from receiving an education that lives up to the spirit of Brown vs.

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