What Choice? Unpacking How School Choice Leads to School Segregation

For our culminating graduate work for the Art+Education program in Spring 2022, we focused our energies on how we could make a critical intervention into school segregation in New York City, one of the most racially segregated school systems in the United States. In particular, through our research we became invested in exploding the myth that School Choice creates a fair and equitable high school education in New York City. Rather, we understand that the policy of School Choice exacerbates segregation and contributes to deep inequities across the many high schools in NYC. This seemingly colorblind policy is steeped in the values of neoliberal racial capitalism and does not adequately serve the students of NYC.

Motivated by our research, we began developing a connection with the youth-led activist organization IntegrateNYC. Through this organizational partnership, we thought about how we might be able to uplift the perspectives of student activists who have the greatest stake in advocating for a better and more just school system. By leaning about IntegrateNYC’s expertise and direct experiences within the system, and contributing our skill set as artists and educators, we developed a workshop series implementing the artist-activist process of visual mapping that serves to visualize some of the harms of School Choice and segregation on youth.

We turned our research into a toolkit for activists, educators, and youth. This toolkit offers background history and context on the connections between School Choice and segregation in NYC, as well as a workshop series implementing the artist-activist process of counter-mapping. Through these activities, our goal is to help participants visualize some of the impacts of School Choice and segregation.

You can download the toolkit from this website:

https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/unpackingschoolsegregation

As pre-service artist educators, we are invested in building towards a more liberatory and just future for the students of New York City. We envision a future in which students and families have equitable access to opportunity and a reliably strong public school system. We hope that participants who utilize this toolkit can help us grow an archive of activist counter-maps that together tell a powerful collective story which can be used to advocate for change.