Giving Compass' Take:

• A new report entitled The Paradox of Choice: How school choice divides New York City elementary schools shows that many students choose schools other than their assigned public school, but where they go is determined by race and class status. 

• How can school choice policies better encourage integration? Are the patterns in New York City also seen in other school choice regimes? 

• Learn how school choice impacts gentrification and integration. 

In New York City, a surprising number of elementary school students opt-out of their neighborhood schools — but who travels, where they go, and who stays put, is tangled in race, class, and gentrification.

Those are some of the findings in a report released Wednesday by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. For the first time, researchers used a decade of student- and school-level enrollment data to track where kindergartners go to school, and where they live.

The report challenges the argument that city schools are segregated because neighborhoods are. In fact, 40 percent of kindergartners last year did not go to the school they are zoned for, instead attending charter schools, gifted programs, other special programs, or just regular schools that aren’t assigned to their address. That’s up from 28 percent in the 2007-08 school year.

But the findings show that families experience that “explosion” of choice differently depending on whether they are black or white, middle-class or affluent.

Here’s what we learned from the report, “The Paradox of Choice: How school choice divides New York City elementary schools.”

One idea behind letting families choose schools beyond their neighborhood is that they might wind up sending their children to school with classmates from different backgrounds. But if New York City students were to stay put, schools would actually be slightly less segregated than they are today by some measures, according to the report.

Read the full article about how school choice differs for black and white families by Christina Veiga at Chalkbeat.