School Integration and the Diffusion Effect
Brooklyn is home to people from all over the world, an incredible mix of ethnicities, races and nationalities. Across New York City, schools have largely remained segregated or quasi-segregated, despite school segregation being illegal by law since the 1960s. Bill de Blasio, the mayor, has been working on a plan to integrate the schools citywide, giving all students access to the same level of education and exposure to different cultures and ways of life. District 15 has a particularly diverse student base, with predominantly white neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Park Slope, and predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods such as Sunset Park. This article focuses on two sixth-grade students in district 15: Angel, a Mexican boy and Sophie, a white girl. Angel has just started at Math & Science Middle School, which was predominantly white but more diverse now due to the policy, and Sophie has just started at Dewey Middle School in Sunset Park, which is mostly Hispanic. They both feel a little uncomfortable at first, but adapt to their environments, especially since there were other students in similar situations to each of them in addition to the previously dominant cultures in each.
The diffusion effect can be used as a lens to view acceptance in the school social group despite cultural differences. If Angel was the only Hispanic student at Math & Science, he would be the lone person choosing B, which would be to collaborate and befriend people of different backgrounds (A being preferring your own). With a properly functioning integration system, there will be enough people of different backgrounds at Math & Science choosing B so that eventually the threshold value will be reached, and it will spread throughout the network and everyone chooses B. The same thing would happen for Sophie at her school. Once everyone in the network of the grade at these schools has chosen “B,” chosen to embrace their classmates of different cultures, they will gain an expanded worldview and be able to learn more than just 6th grade math and English during their time in middle school.