That is how many parents, students, and educators packed the auditorium at the Washington Irving Campus off Union Square this week to watch Nikole Hannah-Jones question New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels about the most segregated big-city school system in America. I was one of them. Nikole set the terms before she sat down: "While they said it's a conversation, it's really about to be an interrogation."

Kamar laughed. Nikole did not.

I went in hoping for two things. I wanted Nikole to move the conversation past the question that has followed her since her September New York Times Magazine essay — whether she made the right choice for her own daughter — and onto the system that forces families into that choice in the first place. She did that, and did it with discipline. I also wanted the chancellor who was hired, in no small part, because of his record on integration to tell us what he intends to do with the power he now holds.

He did not. By the end of the night the education reporter sitting with me leaned over and asked whether I thought he would keep his job. Judging by the groans, jeers, and snickers that met his answers, she was not the only one wondering.

New York does not lack a plan. It lacks the will to carry one out.

In 2017 the de Blasio administration convened the School Diversity Advisory Group: civil rights leaders, scholars, educators, students, and parents, co-chaired by Hazel Dukes of the NAACP, José Calderón of the Hispanic Federation, and Maya Wiley.

Over the next two years the group held more than 40 meetings, two day-long retreats, and town halls with over 800 New Yorkers in every borough. In 2019 it produced two reports, Making the Grade and Making the Grade II, with 67 recommendations. They were not subtle:

The second report explained why. Only a quarter of Black and Latino applicants met a common attendance screen, compared with 61 percent of Asian applicants and 37 percent of white applicants. Black children were 24 percent of kindergartners and 8 percent of kindergarten G&T offers. Screens and G&T, the report said flatly, are "part of New York City's legacy of opposition to school integration."

Nikole's summary of what happened next was precise: the DOE adopted the recommendations that measured the problem, like new diversity metrics and reporting, and left alone the ones that would have changed it, like ending screens and G&T.

Seven years on, fewer than 2 percent of the city's schools resemble the city's demographics, and at nearly half of them Black and Hispanic students are more than 90 percent of enrollment. Black and Hispanic children are 66 percent of the system and 16 percent of the five citywide gifted schools. Stuyvesant admitted three Black students to a class of 777.

So Nikole asked the obvious question. Why not just adopt the recommendations?

The chancellor's answer took several minutes. The report came out a year before the pandemic. Enrollment has declined. The number of screened middle schools has fallen from 196 to 80. Some 30,000 students sit in schools with fewer than 200 kids. He has launched working groups in five of the city's 32 districts and hopes to reach all 32 within three years. "I don't believe the best way to integrate schools is by large proclamations," he said. "You have an organized resistance against that."

Nikole had anticipated these responses. "Study is the way that we just delay until people move on to something else," she said. "These issues have been studied."

On paper, Kamar Samuels is the right person to meet this moment.

He has done this work. As superintendent in Manhattan's District 3 and Brooklyn's District 13, he declined to bring middle school screens back after the pandemic, replaced Gifted & Talented tracks with a schoolwide International Baccalaureate model, and led school mergers that were fought bitterly and then worked.

He believes, from experience, that a mandate handed down from on high produces organized resistance that ends the conversation before it starts. Anyone who has tried to change a school system (I have) knows that pushback is real and that process matters. The notion that "integration must be done with communities and not done to them" has some weight to it.

And he has said the right things. A week before classes started in September, at a New York Law School breakfast, he told a room of lawyers and professors that he was "the first chancellor to come in and speak directly to school integration" and that he would be taking concrete steps to make it happen under his leadership. Seven weeks later, asked by 800 people what those steps are, he told them to stay tuned.

Nikole went straight to the place where that philosophy breaks down: mayoral control. Zohran Mamdani campaigned on ending mayoral control of the schools. In office he asked Albany to extend it, and Samuels told the room Tuesday that he had urged the mayor to do so. Why? Because, in his words, "if you want to do big things" — like putting universal 2-K in every corner of the Bronx next year — "you cannot necessarily go and ask every single individual district what their needs are."

Then came the other half. "If you are going to take things away or change things," he said, "you need to first make sure that you go to communities."

Nikole named it: the administration has control over the system when it wants control, and when it does not want responsibility, it says the community must decide. Samuels conceded the point. "That's fair," he said.

It is more than fair. It is the whole game. Universal child care gets a mandate. Equal access to the same public schools gets a working group. And as Nikole put it, the current system is already doing segregation and inequality to communities. No one convened a working group before deciding that 72 percent of Black students would attend unscreened schools while most white students attend screened ones.

Here is what I kept coming back to. If community conversation is the chancellor's method, Tuesday was the conversation. Eight hundred people showed up, on a school night, to talk about this. They asked him direct questions. He answered with platitudes, and when pressed for a timeline, he offered "stay tuned" and "you will be seeing it soon." The community talked back — in groans and jeers and a shouted "What's your timeline?" — hopefully loud enough to be heard at City Hall.

Nyah Berg, executive director of New York Appleseed, the school-integration advocacy group that co-hosted the night, had said as much before the chancellor took the stage. She has sat through years of what the city likes to call courageous conversations. "Our courageous conversations will go nowhere if we do not couple them with courageous policy," she told the room, "and we have the policy."

The most revealing exchange of the night took three tries.

Samuels said screens needed to be studied to see whether they were working as intended. So Nikole asked him what the intended purpose of a screen is. He talked about rigor and community conversations. She asked again. He talked about report-card grades. She asked a third time. "The purpose," he finally said, "is to create a school with students who are performing at about the same academic levels." A more homogeneous academic population, he added.

He said it, not her. So why, Nikole asked, should a community get to decide that it is entitled to a homogeneous learning community inside a public school system?

His answer was that the system is built on choice, that families "have chosen to segregate" even where screens were removed, and that "it's not as though you're going to remove screens and it's going to suddenly have everybody going everywhere and it's going to be great."

He is right that lifting screens alone does not integrate a school. Nobody serious claims otherwise. The District 15 plan said so in its own text: the removal of screens "does not ensure integration, rather it creates opportunities for access to all schools for all students." That is the point. Access comes first. Researchers who have studied the city attribute roughly half of its middle school segregation to admissions criteria. You cannot build an integrated school on a door that most Black and Latino children are not allowed through.

I know what is on the other side of that door, because I walked through it.

I grew up in El Barrio in the 1970s and 80s, and later in the South Bronx, in an underpaid family in an under-resourced neighborhood with the schools to match. When I was four, a teacher named Ms. Friedlander had to decide which of the children in her class she would recommend for the Talented and Gifted Scholars program in East Harlem. She picked me. That one decision put me on a track to Manhattan East, a screened middle school at the time, and then to the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized exam school. If she had not, I would have gone to Stevenson High School, since closed for poor performance, where roughly three in ten students graduated. Not three in ten who went to college. Three in ten who finished high school.

I will not pretend those schools did not change my life. They did. That is exactly the problem. The system did not lift the schools in my neighborhood; it lifted me out of them and left everyone else behind. The chancellor's description of a screen as a way to gather "students who are performing at about the same academic levels" is a polite way of saying that New York still sorts four-year-olds into the children it will invest in and the children it will not, and that it still asks one teacher's recommendation or one test to do the sorting. I was one of the lucky ones. A city should not run its public schools on luck.

Caitlin Melville, the Bell student reporter who opened the night, told the mirror image of my story. She tested into a rigorous 6-12 school in Queens and went from classrooms full of kids who looked like her to two per room. For high school she chose belonging instead, a school in Brooklyn's Little Caribbean where she found community and where the teacher turnover was so high she never took chemistry. Now a sophomore in college, she said she cannot call it the wrong decision or the right one. "What I can say is I shouldn't have had to make that decision at all." Thirty-five years apart, the same bargain. The system pulled me out of my community and kept her in hers, and it cost both of us, in different ways.

What troubled me about the exchange on Tuesday night was not that the chancellor said the quiet part out loud. It was that, knowing what screens do, he was unwilling to say the system should stop doing it. A chancellor who will not challenge the premise of academic homogeneity in public schools is a chancellor who has made his peace with it.

The chancellor's demand for community process has already been met, in his own city, and it produced a decision rather than a delay.

In the 2017-18 school year, District 15 in Brooklyn — Red Hook and Sunset Park to Park Slope and Carroll Gardens — ran exactly the process Samuels describes, and wrote it all down. A working group of students, parents, teachers, principals, and community organizations led four large public workshops, more than 80 stakeholder meetings including sessions in Spanish and Mandarin, and a districtwide survey.

The survey showed real anxiety about removing screens. The working group recommended removing them anyway, and pairing that with an admissions priority for low-income students, English learners, and students in temporary housing covering 52 percent of seats. In the summer of 2018 the DOE accepted 60 of the plan's 64 recommendations. Start to finish, about 18 months.

In 2024 the district commissioned an independent evaluation from WXY Studio, paid for with a New York State Integration Project grant. The findings:

The district's elementary schools, which the plan did not touch, remain the most segregated in the city. That is the control group. The middle schools changed because the policy changed.

Across Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant learned the same lesson from the other direction. NeQuan McLean, who chairs the Community Education Council in District 16, told the room that in 2017 his district was one of four in the city with no Gifted & Talented program at all, and that parents fought on the steps of City Hall to get one.

Within a year they understood what they had won. One council member had twin boys; one tested into the G&T class and one did not, and the brothers found themselves in a school that gave one of them more than the other, in classes that stopped mixing with each other.

The district has since turned against the program and is working with its superintendent on schoolwide enrichment models instead. "All of our students have gifts and talents," McLean said. A G&T class in a segregated district does not integrate anything. It just builds a smaller segregation inside the larger one.

Nikole asked Samuels why he would not simply take what District 15 did and the advisory group recommended and apply it across the system. His answer was that every district has its own identity and needs its own conversation. District 15 had that conversation in 2018. Districts 3 and 13 had it under Samuels himself.

The city has had this conversation since 1954. The program for Tuesday's event put two New York Times headlines side by side on its cover: "City's Schools Open a Major Campaign to Spur Integration," from 1956, and "N.Y.C. Leaders Want Integrated Schools. Advocates Want a Plan," from this month.

"Every single administration in this city tells us why they cannot integrate these schools," Nikole said. "There is always a reason. And the people who keep getting told they have to wait for the right time are the people who need public schools the most."

Underneath every argument for going slow is a fear about who will leave if the city goes fast. Nikole dragged that fear into the light.

She put it to the chancellor directly: what she heard in his answers was a worry that if the city enforced equal access to its schools, white and middle-class parents would exit the system. He said that was not what he said. Then he said that without the right conversation "you will see a level of pushback that will essentially start to end the conversation."

So Nikole told him who is actually leaving. The largest enrollment decline of any group in New York City public schools has been Black families. One in three Black children in the city now attends a charter school. Homeschooling among Black families is rising.

David Kirkland's new report for Forward Ed finds that a Black student in New York has a one-in-twenty chance of landing in a public school of concentrated advantage, and a one-in-two chance of landing in a school of concentrated disadvantage.

"We already have a system where the inequality is causing exit," she said. "We should be less worried about equality causing exit and more about inequality."

The chancellor's response was that enrollment decline is driven mostly by families leaving the city and by falling birth rates, and that the fastest-growing population in the system is students with disabilities in District 75. Both facts may be true. Neither answers the question. Black parents are not leaving for Westchester. They are leaving for the charter school down the block, because the public school down the block was never made to serve their children and the screened school across the district was never made to admit them.

A chancellor's attention should go to the kids who need public schools the most. On Tuesday, his went to the families who need them least.

The chancellor made exactly one concrete commitment all night, and a student extracted it.

Clarke Greene, a senior at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, told him she had spent kindergarten through eighth grade in private school and understood what it means to choose between her cultural and educational competencies as a Black student. Her 13-year-old sister is in eighth grade and wants to follow her to Bard. How, she asked, could she trust that her sister would have a different experience than she had?

Samuels told her to stay tuned. Greene asked whether the plan would arrive before or after her sister graduates.

"We're going to make sure that it's before she graduates," he said.

Hold him to it. Greene's sister graduates high school in 2031. That is the only deadline this administration has put on the record.

To his credit, Samuels stayed engaged in the conversation. He told the room to "expect and accept nonclosure," promised to come back and sit with Nikole again once there is a plan to discuss, and said, "We've got to do a part two." Nikole's reply: "Oh, you're a brave man." When part two happens, I will be there.

Nikole posted her own account on Friday, and she put the stakes in the mayor's language. Mamdani ran on the working class. "You cannot claim to advocate for the working class in this city," she wrote, "and maintain a school system that caters to the wealthiest families by giving them near-exclusive access to elite public schools while Black and Latino children languish in schools with fewer experienced teachers, fewer teachers certified in their area of instruction, fewer advanced courses and less rigorous instruction." She also read the room the way I did: ten months in, the fight for equal access to a quality education in this city "has been reinvigorated."

If you want to join it, start at schoolintegration.nyc.

None of it would have happened without the two organizations that put the night together. The Bell trains New York City public high school students, most of them from communities the press ignores, as audio journalists; its students report and publish stories on the schools they attend, and its Youth Journalism Coalition pushed through the City Council bill requiring the DOE to support student newspapers. Student reporters from The Bell emceed the evening and asked some of its sharpest questions.

New York Appleseed is the city's leading advocate for integrated schools; it helped shape the District 15 plan and the state's integration grant program, and its executive director, Nyah Berg, served on Mamdani's education transition committee. Both deserve your attention and, if you can manage it, your support.

The full video of the conversation is here. Watch it yourself. Do not take my word for how it went, or Nikole's, or the chancellor's. Then ask the question the room kept asking, the one New York has been asking since 1956: if not now, when?

Also worth your time this week:

New Jersey’s long fight reaches the appeals court. Judges heard arguments this week in the state’s school segregation lawsuit, much of it about enrollment data and whether the state is violating its own constitution. This is the case to watch in the Northeast.

Hannah-Jones vs. the Chancellor. Nikole Hannah-Jones pressed NYC Chancellor Kamar Samuels on integration at a town hall that got combative. The answers say a lot about the administration. So do the evasions. Hellgate summed it up this way: Nikole Hannah-Jones Ritually Humiliated the NYC Schools Chancellor. Ouch!

Dismissed, but not desegregated. The Justice Department keeps winning dismissals of desegregation orders, even in districts where segregation hasn’t gone away.

The pace of release. Four more Alabama districts are out from under federal oversight. So are Camden Fairview and Harmony Grove in south Arkansas.

What METCO did. New research follows Boston students who were bused to suburban schools and looks at what happened to them, including whether they finished college.

Closer to home. Act on Mass makes the case for confronting racial segregation in Massachusetts public schools.

San Francisco ends its lottery. The SFUSD board voted to drop its controversial lottery enrollment system and move to neighborhood schools.

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