PROSPECT HEIGHTS — Only two public schools in all of New York match the overall racial breakdown of city students themselves, an analysis by an education news site has found — and one of them is in the neighborhood.
During the 2014-2015 school year, the International High School at Prospect Heights — a specialized school for recently immigrated students — reflected the overall demographics of 1,800 public and charter schools within five percentage points, a report from Chalkbeat New York found.
The site found that the school, located within the Prospect Heights campus on Classon Avenue, included 38.9 percent Hispanic, 29 percent black, 18.4 percent Asian and 13.3 percent white students in the 2014-2015 academic year.
Among public school students overall last year, the breakdown was 40.4 percent Hispanic, 27.8 percent black, 15.3 percent Asian and 14.7 white.
The analysis was the result of a question poised to Chalkbeat from a reader asking which public schools most “closely reflect the racial and economic diversity of New York City,” the report said.
The other school found to be most closely aligned with the demographic breakdown of last year’s school population was P.S. 97 in the Pelham Gardens section of the Bronx.
The lack of diversity in city schools is not a new issue. In an analysis of the 2013-2014 school year, DNAinfo New York found that more than half of the city’s public schools have 90 percent or more black and Latino students. At the same time, half of the city’s white students attend just 7 percent of schools and half of Asian students in New York attend 6 percent of schools, the report found.
The below map shows the demographic breakdown of each school in the city in 2013-2014. Click through to see how diverse (or not) your kid’s public school is:
