On January 1st, a new mayor will take control of New York City public schools. But he or she won’t start with a blank slate. “Equity Means All, Not Some,” the Center for New York City Affairs’ new policy report, not only frames a post-pandemic agenda for City schools; it grounds that work in a review of how the past two mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, have tried to move the schools forward.

Here are 12 graphs drawn from that report that crystallize our findings.

Student enrollment has only grown by seven percent, or about 78,000 students, since 2007-08, but the number of schools and Pre-K programs under the purview of the City Department of Education (DOE) has doubled. Just counting K-12 schools, the system has grown by more than 50 percent since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002, despite the closing or merging of 244 schools under his administration and that of his successor, Bill de Blasio.

With this expansion of school options came fundamental changes in how students are assigned to schools. Choice-based admissions have expanded at all school levels. Half of all elementary schools now accept at least some of their students by lottery, language preferences, or the Gifted and Talented test. Almost 20 percent of middle schools are now entirely screened. High school applicants must navigate a complex and competitive ranking process among more than 700 high school programs that use admissions methods ranging from entirely unscreened to highly selective screens based on 7th grade test scores, grades, and attendance. The daunting complexity of this system appears to be a major factor in why schools with only academic screens or audition programs tend to serve far fewer students in poverty, Black and Latinx students, and English Language Learners than the average high school citywide.

All of the achievement metrics we can see over both mayoral administrations show improved outcomes for the average student. Chronic absenteeism fell from 31 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2018. And the share of students graduating with at least a Regents diploma has more than doubled in the last 15 years, from 30 to 77 percent.

But a diploma does not always translate into readiness for college-level coursework. The most recent statistics available show that only 47 percent of students at the highest-poverty schools graduate without needing to take remedial courses at City University of New York (CUNY) schools. While this is up from eight percent in 2007, it still is less than half the college readiness rate at schools that serve less than 30 percent low-income students.

Standardized State exams in reading and math reveal similarly large gaps between groups of schools, as well as the challenges of effective comparisons over time. Each time the State altered its grade-level standards -- in 2010 to raise the scores required to establish student proficiency, and again in 2013 when new “Common Core”-based tests were introduced -- the percentage of students deemed proficient plummeted. What’s more, the gaps between schools serving the highest and lowest shares of Black and Latinx students, which had been narrowing prior to 2010, were cleaved apart each time the standards changed. That gap still remains unacceptably wide.

Aside from these metrics, which show uneven progress, the only other school outcomes we can look back on across both mayoral administrations are found in the annual School Survey, which was first taken in 2006-07. From the few questions that have been asked consistently since the survey began, we can see that teachers have become more trusting of their principals, and parents are more likely to report that they are satisfied with their child’s education, safety, and engagement at school. These figures did not vary significantly when we broke them down by race/ethnicity concentrations or income levels.

But these metrics do not paint a complete picture of the quality of a school or the system as a whole. In the last few years, the City Council has passed several local laws requiring the DOE to publish annual data reports on issues that student and parent advocates have raised as essential to equity and meaningful school integration.

From these data, we learn that the racial/ethnic diversity of our students is not at all reflected in their teachers’ demographics. Further, only 75 percent of teachers at the highest-poverty schools have more than three years’ experience, compared to 84 percent of teachers at the lowest-poverty schools.

Only 23 percent of traditional public schools received their full Fair Student Funding allocation in 2018-19, resulting in an average budget gap of $491,000 for each school. Although funds from the American Rescue Plan are now expected to fill those gaps, large disparities in funding will still exist because of the ability of some Parent-Teacher Associations to far outraise others.

There is one guidance counselor or social worker for every 208 students at the highest-poverty schools, less than a third the ratio at the lowest-poverty schools. But the highest-poverty schools offer just a quarter of the Advanced Placement courses that the lowest-poverty schools offer, and schools that serve predominantly Black and Latinx students have half the number of sports teams on their campuses, on average.

Students at middle and high schools with more than 70 percent low-income students are three times more likely to have an incident with school safety than students at schools with less than 30 percent low-income students. They were twice as likely to be arrested and restrained with metal handcuffs than students at low-poverty schools. For “child in crisis” calls, when a student is in emotional distress, Black students are more likely to be restrained with handcuffs than any other race/ethnicity group, and almost half of all Black students involved in these incidents were under age 12.

Over the past two mayoral administrations, there has been no shortage of policies and programs to increase equity in New York City schools. From systemwide restructuring to targeted community-based programs, both the Bloomberg and the de Blasio administrations invested considerable funding and energy in improving schools. And yet, our schools remain some of the most segregated in the nation while children in poverty and of color face persistent unconscionable barriers to a high-quality education.

Nicole Mader, the co-author with Tom Liam Lynch of “Equity Means All, Not Some,” is a senior research fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. She is a Ph.D. candidate in public and urban policy at The Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at The New School.