Exclusive | ‘Racist’ zoning blocks poorer minority students in New York from best public elementary schools: study

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:

• Manhattan: Lillie D. Blake PS 6 on East 81st Street on the posh Upper East Side has only 14% black or Hispanic students, and 90% are proficient in reading on state English exams. Meanwhile, at Robert Roberto Clemente PS 38 a half-mile away on East 102nd Street, 88% of students are black and Latino, while only 41% are proficient in reading.

• Brooklyn: At the Emily Warren Roebling PS 8 on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, 90% of students are proficient in reading, 13% of those enrolled are black and Latino, and 12% are low-income. Just 11 blocks away, at Daniel Hale Williams PS 307, 28% of students are proficient in reading, 84% are black and Latino, and 90% are low-income.

• Staten Island: At Clove Valley PS 35 in Richmondtown, 98% of students read proficiently. Of the students enrolled there, 27% are black and Hispanic, and 42% are low income. By comparison, 30% of students at the PS 78 Stapleton Lighthouse Community School to the east are reading proficiently. Of the students enrolled, 91% are black or Latino, and 94% were low income.

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.”

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.