Poorer black and Hispanic students in New York City and across the state are being prevented from attending the best public elementary schools thanks to “racist’’ zoning, a new study has found.
New York’s current public-school zones are nearly identical to the infamous government “redlining” used a century ago to discriminate against minority neighborhoods when it came to housing — a system that was eventually deemed unconstitutional, according to the report by the nonpartisan watchdog Available to All.
“These attendance zone lines are official policy, and they separate the haves from the have-nots,” group founder and President Tim DeRoche said of New York’s student-placement system.
“Government policy makers call it residential assignment. We call it educational redlining,” he said.
“Attendance zones in the five boroughs and across New York state are doing the same work of the racist redlining maps in the 1930s, denying crucial government services — this time high-quality education — to kids based on where their parents can afford to live.’’
The report said New York has one of the strictest student assignment systems based on address in the country — a “power driver of inequality” that is a “tragic irony for a state that prides itself on fighting for equity, fairness and opportunity for historically oppressed populations.”
The study highlighted examples of discriminatory “redlining” in the New York City school system:
The report gives similar education red-lining examples in Albany, Buffalo, Jamestown and Niagra Falls.
The findings should be a siren call for new Big Apple democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, other elected leaders, education officials and the teachers’ unions to limit or end educational redlining, the report said.
The study included a quote from Mamdani last year saying, “We have the most segregated public school system in America.”
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But “Mamdani has not yet addressed the elephant in the room: elementary school zones that sort kids into winners and losers when they are just five years old,” said the report, titled “And Stay Out! How New York’s educational redlining blocks middle-class and lower-income kids from accessing the best public schools in their own backyards.”
The report recommends requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students living outside the zone or district and giving equal enrollment opportunity to any child living within three miles of a school.
The study is the first-ever comparison of New York school district attendance zones and the racist “redlines” created by the feds in the 1930s and finally outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
It showed how public-school attendance zones overlap with the maps the infamous federal Homeowners’ Loan Corporation used for those same neighborhoods in the 1930s.
HOLC drew maps of hundreds of American cities, designating certain neighborhoods as “desirable,” “best,” “declining,” or “hazardous.’’
Areas with black residents were shaded red or yellow on these maps and were ineligible for government housing assistance, private loans or mortgages.
A prior 2014 UCLA study by researchers claimed Big Apple schools were the most segregated in the country.
Neither Mamdani’s office nor the city Department of Education responded to Post requests for comment.
