For years, New York City tried to be a cultural melting pot where people of different backgrounds live and work side by side. A “gorgeous mosaic,” as the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, liked to call it.

Reality, though, is more complicated — particularly when it comes to schools. New York City public schools are among the most racially segregated in the country, according to a widely cited 2014 study.

The city’s response to that study has been to try to integrate schools, largely by changing zoning and admission rules. Some white public school parents are resisting, leading to dramatic headlines about racism.

Another, lesser-known reaction is also under way.

“Rather than pushing for integration, some black parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are choosing an alternative: schools explicitly designed for black children,” my colleague Eliza Shapiro writes:

Children of any race may apply to an Afrocentric school, though they are overwhelmingly black. Some have sizable numbers of Hispanic students … but the schools typically have few or no white applicants … The schools are run and staffed mostly by people of color, and tend to have high graduation rates and standardized test scores at or above the city average.

Many parents at these schools said their children were marginalized at integrated schools. One told Ms. Shapiro:

“Even if integrated education worked perfectly — and our society spent the past 60-plus years trying — it’s still not giving black children the kind of education necessary to create the solutions our communities need.”

Ms. Shapiro told me, “The debate on how to deal with the segregated city schools has been focused on white support, and opposition, to it. That is incomplete if it doesn’t take into account what black and Hispanic families want, since they make up a majority of city schools.”

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