New York’s new schools chancellor wants to talk about how the nation’s largest school system is clustering the poorest children (mostly black and brown) in one set of classrooms, and the richest children (mostly white) in another set — and failing to live up to its progressive ideals.

He says his ideas go farther than finding ways to admit more black and Hispanic students to the city’s most elite high schools, a proposal he and Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled in June.

But, as the first full school year of Carranza’s tenure begins, the question is whether he will venture beyond what he calls “a values conversation” to effect large-scale citywide change.

If Carranza lives up to his vow to take on segregation, he will go up against powerful forces that have kept alive the historic paradox of New York City education: In one of the nation’s most diverse and politically progressive cities, the schools are among the most segregated in the country.

Since the 1960s, research has shown that poor and nonwhite students perform better in integrated schools. In the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, years of integration in the ensuing decades coincided with shrinking achievement gaps between black and white children.

Some of that progress has been lost in recent years, as judges lifted desegregation orders. Yet in cities from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Dallas, efforts to close the yawning achievement gap have led officials to experiment with programs aimed at giving more students access to the best schools.

In New York, racial separation in the city’s schools has persisted, driven not just by residential housing patterns, but by policies designed to keep white and middle-class families from fleeing public schools. In-the-know parents can take advantage of school choice and gifted and talented programs. Some of the city’s best schools admit only students with good academic track records, keeping those schools overwhelmingly white and Asian in a city where two-thirds of students are black or Hispanic.

In order to succeed, Carranza will need the full backing of de Blasio, who during his first term did not make integration a priority.

Before Carranza was hired in March, he had never run a school district even approaching the size of New York City, with its 1.1 million students. He had been the mayor’s second choice, after the first backed out on live television. His short stint running the Houston schools did not suggest he would be a firebrand on the issue of segregation.

Carranza said he was surprised by what he found in New York. “I’m coming to a blue city in a blue state thinking, ‘Wow, this is really progressive,'” he said in August. But once in office, he found “a system of segregation that is baked into the system and is just kind of accepted.”

Even before Carranza’s arrival, disparate parts of the system had announced desegregation initiatives — changes to some school zone lines on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and in Brooklyn, and an effort to set aside seats for low-income and low-performing students at a handful of high-performing middle and high schools.

Ritchie Torres, a City Council member representing the central Bronx, where the schools are some of the city’s most segregated and lowest-performing, called Carranza’s blunt talk “refreshing.” But, like other advocates, Torres wants more.

He wants the city to consider busing across neighborhoods, with or without the acquiescence of white parents. He also wants the city to set a deadline, within a year, for all 32 community districts in the system to adopt an integration plan.

Carranza said he is not comfortable with deadlines or ultimatums — he wants to change hearts and minds. Or, as he puts it, he hopes to create “the space for the organic conversation, the organic understanding, the hard conversations, to happen.”

He plans to unveil a broader agenda in December, but needs more time to study the system, he said. “I have to remind folks I’ve been here four months.”

Nearly half of city elementary schools have student populations that are 90 percent black and Latino, according to the New School. While much of that segregation is driven by housing patterns, school zoning lines and parental choice also play major roles. An analysis by the City Council found that 14 of the 32 districts have enough residential diversity to meaningfully integrate schools — but only if key policies change.

Carranza said he is not concerned if he scares the 15 percent of New York City public school parents who are white, or the quarter who are middle-class and affluent. “The narrative around, ‘We need to bring certain groups of kids back into the school system, or not allow certain groups of kids to leave the school system,’ is a really problematic perspective,” he said. “Because it assumes that certain groups of kids add value, and certain groups of kids don’t.”

The mayor has not echoed the chancellor’s rhetoric on segregation, and his office did not respond to a list of questions about busing, school zone changes and other specific desegregation tools. Instead, in a statement, a spokeswoman for de Blasio said, “The mayor and chancellor share the same commitment to social justice. As we’ve proven in New York City, leadership and strong community engagement are making real progress toward achieving school diversity.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Dana Goldstein © 2018 The New York Times