WEEK 12: CONNECTING WORDS

• Find out an piece of news where an academic topic is developed on the Internet and underline all the formal expressions you can see.

Why Are New York’s Schools Segregated? It’s Not as Simple as Housing

When asked about school segregation in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that schools are segregated because neighborhoods are: “We cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City.”

Now, as a debate about plans to integrate middle schools has engulfed one Manhattan district, a report released on Wednesdayundermines that notion. It found that a full 40 percent of New York City kindergartners do not attend the nearby school to which they are assigned. That’s a vast stream of 27,000 5-year-olds funneling through the city each day. 

While parents of all races choose to send their children out of their zones, the overall pattern of their choices may make schools more segregated. It also concentrates the effects of poverty at zoned schools, the schools to which children are assigned based on where they live.

“I don’t think anyone realized that number was so big,” said Nicole Mader, the lead author of the paper, which was conducted by the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. “If 40 percent of elementary school students aren’t going to school where they live, how can residential segregation be the only factor driving school segregation?”

[The new schools chancellor has jumped into the segregation debate. Here’s what he has to say about it.]

The schools they pick, the study found, tend to share two main features: They had fewer poor students than the zoned schools the families were leaving, and they had higher test scores.

As students move from lower-income schools to higher-income schools, the study found, they also tend to move toward the city’s economic heart, tracking the subway lines from East New York to Crown Heights, or from Harlem to the Upper West Side. The students who leave are then replaced by children from lower-income neighborhoods.

• Browse the Net and find a reliable classification of linking devices and uploadit to your blog.

• Tell us what you've done this week to improve your English

This week I have done some exercises and read some articles. I have watched the film "The Untouchables" for the second time since the first time I watched it was with French subtitles, and this second was with English subtitles. 

Nassira Dahmani