Segregation persists in Long Island schools

We previously looked at the ways in which Long Island children are underserved in their schools. If you missed that post, you can read it here.

Some of this information might be unsurprising, but we want to make sure all our readers are on the same page as we dig into the “Teacher Diversity in Long Island’s Public Schools” study.

First, how diverse is the student population on Long Island?

Assuming that we can “average” out the total school student population and distribute in an “even” manner, the pie chart looks fairly inclusive. All students would be exposed to classmates or schoolmates of different race and ethnicity.

But society does not function the same way as mathematical formulas. Societal structures distribute us differently.

Which is how we end up with this:

Look at the stacked column chart on the left. That is the same data as the pie chart we showed earlier, except we are presenting it in a different format so that comparisons are easier. It represents what the mix of races and ethnicities would be if all racial groups cohabitated evenly across Long Island. Then look to the right above at the ‘Most White’ and ‘Least White’ schools on Long Island. That’s the student body mix that actually exists here, showing how segregated the region is and the lack of diversity within districts here.

The study goes into detail on the methodology, page 25 of this link here, but the key phrase from it is this:

Differences between “less White” and “more White” schools indicate segregation. The larger the differences, the more segregation there is.

For those of our readers who have been paying attention to race and segregation on Long Island, none of this is surprising. We can feel you itching to jump onto our comments to say, in one way or another, “We’re rolling our eyes at you right now.”

But it is important for us to resurface this data again to ensure that all our readers – even those unfamiliar with the Long Island Index’s past work – are on the same page.