Letter from Inside City Hall
Teens Take Charge leaders take action to demand integrated high schools
June 26, 2019
To Whom It Should Concern,
Today, Teens Take Charge is conducting a non-violent sit-in at City Hall to protest the inaction on the part of our adult leaders to address the crisis of segregation in New York City’s 480 public high schools. Though we have been encouraged by recent signs of progress, we want to make sure everyone knows that we will not stop fighting for this cause until change is made.
Teens Take Charge is a diverse, student-led coalition with active members from 34 high schools and has been advocating for integrated and equitable schools for more than two years. In this letter, we want to make clear the problem we are fighting to address, our past efforts to do so, and why we are choosing to take action today.
The Problem:
New York City celebrates the diversity of its people and promises that this diversity will be reflected in its high schools through an open-choice high school process. This has never been true. The open-choice process has translated into the most well-resourced schools being “open” only to students who meet the requirements of various admissions screens. Most often, these are students who come from privileged backgrounds. This broken system produces extreme segregation.
While segregation in specialized high schools has grabbed headlines, we are also advocating for enrollment changes at the other 480 public high schools in the system, which educate 95% of students.
More than 50,000 students attend high schools where fewer than one in four students have passed middle school state exams. These schools are collectively 92% Black or Hispanic and 88% economically disadvantaged. Put simply, students at these segregated, high-poverty schools do not have access to nearly the same opportunities that their peers in more affluent schools have. Students in these schools are being failed by a system that is set up to advantage privileged students at every turn.
Mayor de Blasio was sworn into office on January 1, 2014. He campaigned on a promise to end the “tale of two cities.” During his first year in office, the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a report naming New York City’s public schools among the most segregated in the nation. The report illuminated a tale of two school systems and prompted legislation from the City Council calling for action from the Department of Education to integrate schools. Despite this push, our education leaders have not had the courage to confront this crisis with the urgency it demands. Five years later, we find ourselves in the same place: waiting.
Our Efforts:
In January 2018, Teens Take Charge members voted to take on the issue of segregated high school enrollment. We spent three months researching the problem, studying data, and working with policy experts to develop our Enrollment Equity Plan, which we first presented at the Brooklyn Public Library to a crowd of 300 students, teachers, parents, policymakers, and community leaders on March 29, 2018.
On May 17, 2018, the 64th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board, we formally presented our plan at Tweed Courthouse to a room of more than 40 top education policymakers, including leaders from the NYC Department of Education, the City Council, the State Legislature, and the School Diversity Advisory Group.
We participated in seven School Diversity Advisory Group town halls — including two youth town halls — to advocate for strong action to integrate high schools.
We did not stop there. We testified before the City Council and the State Assembly. We had meetings about this issue with dozens of NYC DOE officials.
On December 3, 2018, we held another packed community event at the Brooklyn Public Library that featured testimony from 17 students calling for action to integrate high schools. More than 350 people, including several deputy chancellors and City Council members, attended.
Because our efforts did not produce policy change to high school enrollment, we officially launched our Enrollment Equity Campaign on February 14, 2019, and issued a deadline of June 26, 2019, for the mayor to approve a high school integration plan.
Since the campaign launch, we have presented our plan to members of the City Council, including Education Chair Mark Treyger. We have met multiple times with the mayor’s Senior Education Advisor Brandon Cardet-Hernandez. We have spoken directly to Mayor de Blasio three times on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and urged him to take immediate action to integrate high schools. We have published op-eds and have been featured in two dozen local, regional, and national media stories about this issue. We have spoken about school segregation at national and international education conferences.
On May 17, 2019, the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board, we held an accountability meeting at City Hall with 15 top policymakers, including NYC DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza and First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. The adults made commitments to continue meeting with us but did not commit to the bold action we asked them to take to integrate high schools.
In response, on June 6, 2019, an estimated 400 students and adult allies representing approximately 100 public schools took the steps of the Tweed Courthouse to demand immediate action to integrate high schools.
Today is the deadline: June 26, 2019.
While we are encouraged by the progress of the School Diversity Advisory Group and the administration’s support of initiatives that seek to address symptoms of segregation and educational inequity, our deadline to accept a plan that would integrate all 480 high schools has not been met.
Why We Are Sitting In:
Throughout our campaign, we have been committed to the social change philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., which involves six steps: Information Gathering, Education, Personal Commitment, Negotiation, Direct Action, and Reconciliation. We have come to direct action, not because we do not wish to negotiate — we do, and we have. We have come to direct action because we have not seen enough urgency from our adult leaders to address the crisis of segregation in our schools. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” King also famously stated that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We understand and respect that the mayor and chancellor are waiting for recommendations on enrollment changes from the School Diversity Advisory Group. We have and will continue to advocate for bold action from that group, and for their ultimate recommendations to be adopted swiftly. In the meantime, we will continue to build broad support for integration among our peers and will continue to apply public, outside pressure.
When we set our campaign deadline, we committed to holding the administration accountable if our deadline was not met. Today, we are doing just that.
Sincerely,
The Students of Teens Take Charge
