Photo Courtesy of Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
The City plans to adopt 62 of the SDAG’s 67 recommendations, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza announced.
By Forum Staff
The City will adopt the “vast majority” of the preliminary recommendations made by the School Diversity Advisory Group, a group of students, educators, parents, advocates and researchers appointed in 2017 to advise the administration on policies to advance school diversity and integration, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza announced on Monday.
The City Department of Education plans to adopt 62 of the 67 recommendations as written or with minor changes to ensure effective implementation.
According to the administration, the SDAG was established in June 2017 as part of the DOE’s first citywide diversity plan, “Equity and Excellence for All: Diversity in New York City Public Schools,” and is comprised of more than 40 members, including local and national experts on school diversity, parents, teachers, advocates, students and other community leaders. Beginning in late 2017, the SDAG and its subcommittees held nearly 40 meetings to facilitate research and discussion of a number of key policy areas related to diversity. The SDAG hosted eight public town halls across the five boroughs and two specifically for youth, in order to collect quantitative and qualitative data from communities on the issues important to them, DOE noted.
The SDAG released its preliminary report in February and intends to release a final report in the coming weeks. The preliminary report laid out the history, data and key issues surrounding school diversity and integration in New York City, as well as an initial set of 67 recommendations on school enrollment, budget priorities, restorative justice practices, staff diversity, culturally responsive curriculum and diversity metrics and goals, among other topics. De Blasio and Carranza met with the SDAG on May 13 to discuss the initial report.
Of the 62 recommendations the DOE will adopt, 40 will be adopted outright from the report. The DOE made changes to the other 22 adopted recommendations to ensure effective implementation; for example, the DOE is tweaking the recommendation “invest in growing and strengthening high-performing schools outside Manhattan” to “invest in growing and strengthening high-performing schools in communities with historic underinvestment.” The DOE will continue to identify the resources necessary to implement these recommendations over the coming months, Carranza said.
According to the administration, key adopted recommendations include:
• Add metrics to the School Quality Report related to diversity and integration;
• Create a General Assembly with representatives from every high school to develop a citywide student agenda and vote on key issues;
• Require all schools to monitor student discipline practices and develop a plan to reduce any disparities in how students are disciplined;
• Create new diversity targets for Diversity in Admissions pilots based on the specific circumstances of each school community;
• Expand Community Schools initiative and other models that connect schools to community-based organizations;
• Adopt a common definition of Culturally Relevant Education that will inform and shape work across the DOE;
• Create partnerships with institutions of higher education to ensure CRE is an essential component of all pre-service teacher training efforts;
• Strongly support and encourage the nine districts with sufficient demographic diversity of population to develop diversity and integration plans (Districts 1, 2, 3, 13, 15, 22, 27, 28, 31).
