Diversity Still Matters: School-Level Racial Diversity, Poverty and Performance of New York City Public Schools

Author

Byunghwa Kim, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

2-2023

Document Type

Capstone Project

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

David T. Humphries

Subject Categories

Liberal Studies | Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education | Social Statistics | Urban Studies and Planning

Keywords

Diversity, Race, Public Education, New York City, Education, School

Abstract

During the last few decades, schools in New York City (NYC) have experienced great demographic changes due to the massive influx of various ethnic and racial groups. Although the race and ethnicity makeup of NYC is 42% white, 29% Hispanic or Latino, 24% Black or African American and 14% Asian, 74% of Black and Hispanic students attend a school with less than 10 percent white students, while 34% of white students attend a school with more than half white peers. Also, more than 60% of Hispanic and Black students are attending schools where more than 75% of peer students experience poverty compared to their white counterparts around 20 %. Such severe school segregation and economic gap could be due to various social problems, including strengthening economic stratification of students, low academic achievement of students of color, a loss of opportunity to receive better education and racial conflict. This project aims to identify the effects of racial segregation of NYC education and concentrated poverty in the schools on student academic performance. Calculating an R score in order to display the results of the project statistically, the conclusion of this project displays that there is a strong correlation between poverty and school level performance, and the percent of white students in school has the second strongest impact on school-level performance. Finally, the high racial representative school – Black students and Hispanic students accounting for more than 90% – shows the worst performance compared to the schools with low and medium level racial representations. This project also takes the form of an TISTORY – a digital platform that blends text with a variety of visual content – in order to provide a comprehensive, multi-media account of the effects of racial segregation of NYC education and concentrated poverty on student academic performance.

Comments

Online component: https://byunghwakim.tistory.com/1

Recommended Citation

Kim, Byunghwa, "Diversity Still Matters: School-Level Racial Diversity, Poverty and Performance of New York City Public Schools" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5190