Six months before the COVID-19 pandemic prompted mass school closures nationwide, a K-12 district in Brooklyn became the vanguard of a citywide, nationally watched push to combat "segregation" through scrapping selective admissions criteria and instituting the algorithmic lottery system of "controlled choice." Meaning, families would rank their choices for middle school, and the Department of Education (DOE) would feed those preferences into a complicated sorting process through which government can better control the racial and socioeconomic distribution among the schools.
These admissions changes, which affected incoming middle schoolers the year my eldest daughter was entering sixth grade in that very same district, was prematurely declared a success upon arrival by the progressive Democrats who had pushed them through. It was "the white flight that wasn't," declared the Daily News headline on a 2019 op-ed co-bylined by the relevant city councilman (now comptroller for the whole city) Brad Lander, and equity activists Nyah Berg and David Tipson from the advocacy group New York Appleseed. "New data reveal that Brooklyn school integration is working."
