Miriam:
9/8/2017 Choosing a School for My Daug hter in a
Segregated City- The New York Times
https://nyti.nns/1TXcq5c ;
Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City
How one school became a battleground over which children benefit from a
separate and unequal system.
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES JUNE 9, 2016 In the spring of 2014, when our daughter,
Najya, was turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our toughest
decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income,
heavily black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brownstones in central
Brooklyn. The nearby public schools are named after people intended to evoke
black uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent black nationalist in the 192 os,
and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, but the schools are
a disturbing reflection of New York City's stark racial and socioeconomic
divisions. In one of the most diverse cities in the world, the children who
attend these schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates - and I
mean, in most cases, every single one - are black and Latino, and nearly every
student is poor. Not surprisingly, the test scores of most of BedStuy's schools
reflect the marginalization of their students.
I didn't know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or white, who sent
their children to one of these schools. They had managed to secure seats in the
more diverse and economically advantaged magnet schools or gifted-and-talented
programs outside our area, or opted to pay hefty tuition to progressive but
largely white private institutions. I knew this because from the moment we
arrived in New York with our-year-old, we had many conversations about where
we would, should and definitely should not send our daughter to school when
the time came.
My husband, Faraji, and I wanted to send our daughter to public school.
Faraji, the oldest child in a military family, went to public schools that
served
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Army bases both in America and abroad. As a result, he had a highly unusual
experience for a black American child: He never attended a segregated public
school a day of his life. He can now walk into any room and instantly start a
conversation with the people there, whether they are young mothers gathered at
a housing-project tenants' meeting or executives eating from small plates at a
ritzy cocktail reception.
I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white
from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income
school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don't recall it being
bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade class, though
there may have been more. That summer, my morn and dad enrolled my older
sister and me in the school district's voluntary desegregation program, which
allowed some black kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more
well off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three decades
after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate
schools for black and white children were unconstitutional, and near the
height of desegregation in this country. My parents chose one of the whitest,
richest schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us.
Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning across town to
the "best" public school my town had to offer, Kingsley Elementary, where I
was among the tiny number of working-class children and the even tinier number
of black children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our parents
on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else's
neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the
bell rang.
I remember those years as emotionally and socially fraught, but also as
academically stimulating and world-expanding. Aside from the rigorous classes
and quality instruction I received, this was the first time I'd shared dinners
in the homes of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers and scientists. My
mom was a probation officer, and my dad drove a bus, and most of my family
members on both sides worked in factories or meatpacking plants or did other
manual labor. I understood, even then, in a way both intuitive and defensive,
that my school friends' parents weren't better than my neighborhood friends'
parents, who
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worked hard every day at hourly jobs. But this exposure helped me imagine
possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered before.
It's hard to say where any one person would have ended up if a single
circumstance were different; our life trajectories are shaped by so many
external and internal factors. But I have no doubt my parents' decision to
pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my
getting from there to here - staff writer for The New York Times Magazine -
more likely.
Integration was transformative for my husband and me. Yet the idea of placing
our daughter in one of the small number of integrated schools troubled me.
These schools are disproportionately white and serve the middle and upper
middle classes, with a smattering of poor black and Latino students to create
"diversity."
In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the more than one million
public-school students, half of them are clustered in just 11 percent of the
schools, which not coincidentally include many of the city's top performers.
Part of what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside from the
academics, is that they have some students of color, but not too many. This
carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white parents to
boast that their children's public schools look like the United Nations, comes
at a steep cost for the rest of the city's black and Latino children.
The New York City public-school system is 41 percent Latino, 27 percent black
and 16 percent Asian. Three-quarters of all students are low-income. In 2014,
the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles,
released a report showing that New York City public schools are among the most
segregated in the country. Black and Latino children here have become
increasingly isolated, with 85 percent of black students and 75 percent of
Latino students attending "intensely" segregated schools - schools that are
less than 10 percent white.
This is not just New York's problem. I've spent much of my career as a reporter
chronicling rampant school segregation in every region of the country, and the
ways that segregated schools harm black and Latino children. One study
published in 2009 in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management showed that
the
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according to the United States Department of Education's Office for Civil
Rights.
Research stretching back 5o years
9
SEE MY OPTIONS
ARTI CLES REMAINING
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federal poverty standards. But what went on inside the school was unlike what
goes on in most schools serving the city's poorest children. This was in large
part because of the efforts of a remarkable principal, Roberta Davenport. She
grew up in Farragut, and her younger siblings attended P.S. 307. She became
principal five decades later in 2003, to a low-performing school. Davenport
commuted from Connecticut, but her car was usually the first one in the
parking lot each morning, often because she worked so late into the night
that, exhausted, she would sleep at a friend's nearby instead of making the
long drive home. Soft of voice but steely in character, she rejected the spare
educational orthodoxy often reserved for poor black and brown children that
strips away everything that makes school joyous in order to focus solely on
improving test scores. These children from the projects learned Mandarin, took
violin lessons and played chess. Thanks to her hard work, the school had
recently received money from a federal magnet grant, which funded a science,
engineering and technology program aimed at drawing middle-class children from
outside its attendance zone.
Faraji and I walked the bright halls of P.S. 307, taking in the reptiles in the
science room and the students learning piano during music class. The walls
were papered with the precocious musings of elementary children. While touring
the schools, Faraji later told me, he started feeling guilty about his
instinct to keep Najya out of them. Were these children, he asked himself,
worthy of any less than his own child? "These are kids who look like you," he
told me. "Kids like the ones you grew up with. I was being very selfish about
it, thinking: I am going to get mine for my child, and that's it. And I am
ashamed of that."
When it was time to submit our school choices to the city, we put down all
four of the schools we visited. In May 2014, we learned Najya had gotten into
our first choice, P.S. 307. We were excited but also nervous. I'd be lying if
I said I didn't feel pulled in the way other parents with options feel pulled.
I had moments when I couldn't ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for
fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter. I worried - I worry still -
about whether I made the right decision for our little girl. But I knew I made
the just one.
For many white Americans, millions of black and Latino children attending
segregated schools may seem like a throwback to another era, a problem we
solved
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a school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to make up for
Najya anything the school was lacking.
As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into
parochial schools, or one of the "good" public schools, or even private
schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps
to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down,
before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is
nothing harder than navigating our nation's racial legacy in this country, and
the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same
time. Faraji couldn't believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the
type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we
would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. "Are
we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?"
he asked. "Are we putting her at a disadvantage?"
At the heart of Faraji's concern was a fear that grips black families like
ours. We each came from working-class roots, fought our way into the middle
class and had no family wealth or safety net to fall back on. Faraji believed
that our gains were too tenuous to risk putting our child in anything but a
top-notch school. And he was right to be worried. In 2014, the Brookings
Institution found that black children are particularly vulnerable to downward
mobility - nearly seven of 10 black children born into middle-income families
don't maintain that income level as adults. There was no margin for error, and
we had to use our relative status to fight to give Najya every advantage.
Hadn't we worked hard, he asked, frustration building in his voice, precisely
so that she would not have to go to the types of schools that trapped so many
black children?
Eventually I persuaded him to visit a few schools with me. Before work, we
peered into the classrooms of three neighborhood schools, and a fourth, Public
School 307, located in the Vinegar Hill section of Brooklyn, near the East
River waterfront and a few miles from our home. P.S. 307's attendance zone was
drawn snugly around five of the 10 buildings that make up the Farragut Houses,
a publichousing project with 3,200 residents across from the Brooklyn Navy
Yard. The school's population was 91 percent black and Latino. Nine of 10
students met
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long ago. And legally, we did. In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark
Brown v. Board of Education ruling, striking down laws that forced black and
white children to attend separate schools. But while Brown v. Board targeted
segregation by state law, we have proved largely unwilling to address
segregation that is maintained by other means, resulting from the nation's
long and racist history.
In the Supreme Court's decision, the justices responded unanimously to a group
of five cases, including that of Linda Brown, a black 8-year-old who was not
allowed to go to her white neighborhood school in Topeka, Kan., but was made to
ride a bus to a black school much farther away. The court determined that
separate schools, even if they had similar resources, were "inherently" - by
their nature - unequal, causing profound damage to the children who attended
them and hobbling their ability to live as full citizens of their country. The
court's decision hinged on sociological research, including a key study by
the psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark, a husband-and-wife
team who gave black children in segregated schools in the North and the South
black and white dolls and asked questions about how they perceived them. Most
students described the white dolls as good and smart and the black dolls as
bad and stupid. (The Clarks also found that segregation hurt white children's
development.) Chief Justice Earl Warren felt so passionate about the issue
that he read the court's opinion aloud: "Does segregation of children in
public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical
facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of
the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it
does." The ruling made clear that because this nation was founded on a racial
caste system, black children would never become equals as long as they were
separated from white children.
In New York City, home to the largest black population in the country, the
decision was celebrated by many liberals as the final strike against school
segregation in the "backward" South. But Kenneth Clark, the first black person
to earn a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University and to hold a
permanent professorship at City College of New York, was quick to dismiss
Northern righteousness on race matters. At a meeting of the Urban League
around the time of the decision, he charged that though New York had no law
requiring
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segregation, it intentionally separated its students by assigning them to
schools based on their race or building schools deep in segregated
neighborhoods. In many cases, Clark said, black children were attending
schools that were worse than those attended by their black counterparts in the
South.
Clark's words shamed proudly progressive white New Yorkers and embarrassed
those overseeing the nation's largest school system. The New York City Board
of Education released a forceful statement promising to integrate its schools:
"Segregated, racially homogeneous schools damage the personality of
minority-group children. These schools decrease their motivation and thus
impair their ability to learn. White children are also damaged. Public
education in a racially homogeneous setting is socially unrealistic and blocks
the attainment of the goals of democratic education, whether this segregation
occurs by law or by fact." The head of the Board of Education undertook an
investigation in 1955 that confirmed the widespread separation of black and
Puerto Rican children in dilapidated buildings with the least-experienced and
least-qualified teachers. Their schools were so overcrowded that some black
children went to school for only part of the day to give others a turn.
The Board of Education appointed a commission to develop a citywide
integration plan. But when school officials took some token steps, they faced a
wave of white opposition. "It was most intense in the white neighborhoods
closest to African-American neighborhoods, because they were the ones most
likely to be affected by desegregation plans," says Thomas Sugrue, a historian
at New York University and the author of "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten
Struggle for Civil Rights in the North." By the mid-'60s, there were few signs
of integration in New York's schools. In fact, the number of segregated
junior-high schools in the city had quadrupled by 1964. That February, civil
rights leaders called for a major one-day boycott of the New York City
schools. Some 460,00o black and Puerto Rican students stayed home to protest
their segregation. It was the largest demonstration for civil rights in the
nation's history. But the boycott upset many white liberals, who thought it
was too aggressive, and as thousands of white families fled to the suburbs,
the integration campaign collapsed.
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Even as New York City was ending its only significant effort to desegregate,
the Supreme Court was expanding the Brown ruling. Beginning in the mid-'6os,
the court handed down a series of decisions that determined that not only did
Brown v. Board allow the use of race to remedy the effects of long-segregated
schools, it also required it. Assigning black students to white schools and
vice versa was necessary to destroy a system built on racism - even if white
families didn't like it. "All things being equal, with no history of
discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest
their homes," the court wrote in its 1971 ruling in Swann v.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which upheld busing to desegregate
schools in Charlotte, N.C. "But all things are not equal in a system that has
been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation.
The remedy for such segregation may be administratively awkward, inconvenient
and even bizarre in some situations, and may impose burdens on some; but all
awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided."
In what would be an extremely rare and fleeting moment in American history, all
three branches of the federal government aligned on the issue. Congress passed
the 1964 Civil Rights Act, pushed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, which
prohibited segregated lunch counters, buses and parks and allowed the
Department of Justice for the first time to sue school districts to force
integration. It also gave the government the power to withhold federal funds
if the districts did not comply. By 1973, 91 percent of black children in the
former Confederate and border states attended school with white children.
But while Northern congressmen embraced efforts to force integration in the
South, some balked at efforts to desegregate their own schools. They tucked a
passage into the 1964 Civil Rights Act aiming to limit school desegregation in
the North by prohibiting school systems from assigning students to schools in
order to integrate them unless ordered to do so by a court. Because Northern
officials often practiced segregation without the cover of law, it was far
less likely that judges would find them in violation of the Constitution.
Not long after, the nation began its retreat from integration. Richard Nixon
was elected president in 1968, with the help of a coalition of white voters who
opposed integration in housing and schools. He appointed four conservative
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justices to the Supreme Court and set the stage for a profound legal shift.
Since 1974, when the Milliken v. Bradley decision struck down a lower court's
order for a metro-area-wide desegregation program between nearly all-black
Detroit city schools and the white suburbs surrounding the city, a series of
major Supreme Court rulings on school desegregation have limited the reach of
Brown.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he promoted the notion that using
race to integrate schools was just as bad as using race to segregate them. He
urged the nation to focus on improving segregated schools by holding them to
strict standards, a tacit return to the "separate but equal" doctrine that was
roundly rejected in Brown. His administration emphasized that busing and other
desegregation programs discriminated against white students. Reagan eliminated
federal dollars earmarked to help desegregation and pushed to end hundreds of
school-desegregation court orders.
Yet this was the very period when the benefits of integration were becoming
most apparent. By 1988, a year after Faraji and I entered middle school, school
integration in the United States had reached its peak and the achievement gap
between black and white students was at its lowest point since the government
began collecting data. The difference in black and white reading scores fell to
half what it was in 1971, according to data from the National Center for
Education Statistics. (As schools have since resegregated, the test-score gap
has only grown.) The improvements for black children did not come at the cost
of white children. As black test scores rose, so did white ones.
Decades of studies have affirmed integration's power. A 2010 study released by
the Century Foundation found that when children in public housing in
Montgomery County, Md., enrolled in middle-class schools, the differences
between their scores and those of their wealthier classmates decreased by half
in math and a third in reading, and they pulled significantly ahead of their
counterparts in poor schools. In fact, integration changes the entire
trajectory of black students' lives. A 2015 longitudinal study by the
economist Rucker Johnson at the University of California, Berkeley, followed
black adults who had attended desegregated schools and showed that these
adults, when compared with their counterparts or even their own siblings in
segregated schools, were less likely to be
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poor, suffer health problems and go to jail, and more likely to go to college
and reside in integrated neighborhoods. They even lived longer. Critically,
these benefits were passed on to their children, while the children of adults
who went to segregated schools were more likely to perform poorly in school or
drop out.
But integration as a constitutional mandate, as justice for black and Latino
children, as a moral righting of past wrongs, is no longer our country's stated
goal. The Supreme Court has effectively sided with Reagan, requiring strict
legal colorblindness even if it leaves segregation intact, and even striking
down desegregation programs that ensured integration for thousands of black
students if a single white child did not get into her school of choice. The
most recent example was a 2007 case that came to be known as Parents Involved.
White parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, challenged voluntary
integration programs, claiming the districts discriminated against white
children by considering race as a factor in apportioning students among
schools in order to keep them racially balanced. Five conservative justices
struck down these integration plans. In 1968, the court ruled in Green v.
County School Board of New Kent County that we should no longer look across a
city and see a " 'white' school and a 'Negro' school, but just schools." In
2007, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were
told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their
skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of
demonstrating that we should allow this once again - even for very different
reasons. ... The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop
discriminating on the basis of race."
Legally and culturally, we've come to accept segregation once again. Today,
across the country, black children are more segregated than they have been at
any point in nearly half a century. Except for a few remaining court-ordered
desegregation programs, intentional integration almost never occurs unless it's
in the interests of white students. This is even the case in New York City,
under the stewardship of Mayor de Blasio, who campaigned by highlighting the
city's racial and economic inequality. De Blasio and his schools chancellor,
Carmen Farina, have acknowledged that they don't believe their job is to force
school integration. "I want to see diversity in schools organically," Farina
said at a town-hall meeting in Lower Manhattan in February. "I don't want to
see mandates." The shift in
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language that trades the word "integration" for "diversity" is critical. Here
in this city, as in many, diversity functions as a boutique offering for the
children of the privileged but does little to ensure quality education for
poor black and Latino children.
"The moral vision behind Brown v. Board of Education is dead," Ritchie Torres,
a city councilman who represents the Bronx and has been pushing the city to
address school segregation, told me. Integration, he says, is seen as
"something that would be nice to have but not something we need to create a
more equitable society. At the same time, we have an intensely segregated
school system that is denying a generation of kids of color a fighting chance
at a decent life."
Najya, of course, had no idea about any of this. She just knew she loved P.S.
307, waking up each morning excited to head to her pre-K class, where her two
best friends were a little black girl named Imani from Farragut and a little
white boy named Sam, one of a handful of white pre-K students at the school,
with whom we car-pooled from our neighborhood. Four excellent teachers, all of
them of color, guided Najya and her classmates with a professionalism and
affection that belied the school's dismal test scores. Faraji and I threw
ourselves into the school, joining the parent-teacher association and the
school's leadership team, attending assemblies and chaperoning field trips. We
found ourselves relieved at how well things were going. Internally, I started
to exhale.
But in the spring of 2015, as Najya's first year was nearing its end, we read
in the news that another elementary school, P.S. 8, less than a mile from P.S.
307 in affluent Brooklyn Heights, was plagued by overcrowding. Some students
zoned for that school might be rerouted to ours. This made geographic sense.
P.S. 8's zone was expansive, stretching across Brooklyn Heights under the
Manhattan bridge to the Dumbo neighborhood and Vinegar Hill, the neighborhood
around P.S. 307. P.S. 8's lines were drawn when most of the development there
consisted of factories and warehouses. But gentrification overtook Dumbo,
which hugs the East River and provides breathtaking views of the skyline and a
quick commute to Manhattan. The largely upper-middle-class and white and Asian
children living directly across the street from P.S. 307 were zoned to the
heavily white P.S. 8.
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To accommodate the surging population, P.S. 8 had turned its drama and dance
rooms into general classrooms and cut its pre-K, but it still had to place up
to 28 kids in each class. Meanwhile, P.S. 307 sat at the center of the
neighborhood population boom, half empty. Its attendance zone included only
the Farragut Houses and was one of the tiniest in the city. Because Farragut
residents were aging, with dwindling numbers of school-age children, P.S. 307
was underenrolled.
In early spring 2015, the city's Department of Education sent out notices
telling 5o families that had applied to kindergarten at P.S. 8 that their
children would be placed on the waiting list and instead guaranteed admission
to P.S. 307. Distraught parents dashed off letters to school administrators
and to their elected officials. They pleaded their case to the press. "We
bought a home here, and one of the main reasons was because it was known that
kindergarten admissions [at P.S. 8] were pretty much guaranteed," one parent
told The New York Post, adding that he wouldn't send his child to P.S. 307.
Another parent whose twins had secured coveted spots made the objections to
P.S. 307 more plain: "I would be concerned about safety," he said. "I don't
hear good things about that school."
That May, as I sat at a meeting that P.S. 8 parents arranged with school
officials, I was struck by the sheer power these parents had drawn into that
auditorium. This meeting about the overcrowding at P.S. 8, which involved 5o
children in a system of more than one million, had summoned a state senator, a
state assemblywoman, a City Council member, the city comptroller and the staff
members of several other elected officials. It had rarely been clearer to me
how segregation and integration, at their core, are about power and who gets
access to it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967: "I cannot
see how the Negro will totally be liberated from the crushing weight of poor
education, squalid housing and economic strangulation until he is integrated,
with power, into every level of American life."
As the politicians looked on, two white fathers gave an impassioned PowerPoint
presentation in which they asked the Department of Education to place more
children into already-teeming classrooms rather than send kids zoned to P.S. 8
to P.S. 307. Another speaker, whose child had been wait-listed, choked up
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as he talked about having to break it to his kindergarten-age son that he would
not be able to go to school with the children with whom he'd shared play dates
and Sunday dinners. "We haven't told him yet" that he didn't get into P.S. 8,
the father said, as eyes in the crowd grew misty. "We hope to never have to
tell him."
The meeting was emotional and at times angry, with parents shouting out their
anxieties about safety and low test scores at P.S. 307. But the concerns they
voiced may have also masked something else. While suburban parents, who are
mostly white, say they are selecting schools based on test scores, the racial
makeup of a school actually plays a larger role in their school decisions,
according to a 2009 study published in The American Journal of Education. Amy
Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University's
Teachers College, found the same thing when she studied how white parents
choose schools in New York City. "In a post-racial era, we don't have to say
it's about race or the color of the kids in the building," Wells told me. "We
can concentrate poverty and kids of color and then fail to provide the
resources to support and sustain those schools, and then we can see a school
full of black kids and then say, 'Oh, look at their test scores.' It's all
very tidy now, this whole system."
I left that meeting upset about how P.S. 307 had been characterized, but I
didn't give it much thought again until the end of summer, when Najya was about
to start kindergarten. I heard that the community education council was
holding a meeting to discuss a potential rezoning of P.S. 8 and P.S. 307. The
council, an elected group that oversees 28 public schools in District 13,
including P.S. 8 and P.S. 307, is responsible for approving zoning decisions.
School was still out for the summer, and almost no P.S. 307 parents knew plans
were underway that could affect them. At the meeting, two men from the school
system's Office of District Planning projected a rezoning map onto a screen.
The plan would split the P.S. 8 zone roughly in half, divided by the Brooklyn
Bridge. It would turn P.S. 8 into the exclusive neighborhood school for
Brooklyn Heights and reroute Dumbo and Vinegar Hill students to P.S. 307. A
tall, white man with brown hair that flopped over his forehead said he was
from Concord Village, a complex that should have fallen on the 307 side of the
line. He thanked the council for producing a plan that reflected his
neighbors' concerns by keeping his complex in the P.S. 8 zone. It became clear
that while parents in Farragut, Dumbo and Vinegar Hill had not
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even known about the rezoning plan, some residents had organized and lobbied to
influence how the lines were drawn.
The officials presented the rezoning plan, which would affect incoming
kindergartners, as beneficial to everyone. If the children in the part of the
zone newly assigned to P.S. 307 enrolled at the school, P.S. 8's overcrowding
would be relieved at least temporarily. And P.S. 307, the officials'
presentation showed, would fill its empty seats with white children and give
all the school's students that most elusive thing: integration.
It was hard not to be skeptical about the department's plan. New York, like
many deeply segregated cities, has a terrible track record of maintaining
racial balance in formerly underenrolled segregated schools once white
families come in. Schools like P.S. 321 in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood
and the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene tend to go through a brief
period of transitional integration, in which significant numbers of white
students enroll, and then the numbers of Latino and black students dwindle. In
fact, that's exactly what happened at P.S. 8.
A decade ago, P.S. 8 was P.S. 307's mirror image. Predominantly filled with
low-income black and Latino students from surrounding neighborhoods, P.S. 8,
with its low test scores and low enrollment, languished amid a community of
affluence because white parents in the neighborhood refused to send their
children there. A group of parents worked hard with school administrators to
turn the school around, writing grants to start programs for art and other
enrichment activities. Then more white and Asian parents started to enroll
their children. One of them was David Goldsmith, who later became president
of the community education council tasked with considering the rezoning of
P.S. 8 and P.S. 307. Goldsmith is white and, at the time, lived in Vinegar
Hill with his Filipino wife and their daughter.
As P.S. 8 improved, more and more white families from Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo
and Vinegar Hill enrolled their children, and the classrooms in the lower
grades became majority white. The whitening of the school had unintended
consequences. Some of the black and Latino parents whose children had been in
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the school from the beginning felt as if they were being marginalized. The
white parents were able to raise large sums at fund-raisers and could be
dismissive of the much smaller fund-raising efforts that had come before.
Then, Goldsmith says, the new parents started seeking to separate their
children from their poorer classmates. "There were kids in the school that
were really high-risk kids, kids who were homeless, living in temporary
shelters, you know, poverty can be really brutal," Goldsmith says. "The school
was really committed to helping all children, but we had white middle-class
parents saying, 'I don't want my child in the same class with the kid who has
emotional issues.' "
The parents who had helped build P.S. 8, black, Latino, white and Asian,
feared they were losing something important, a truly diverse school that
nurtured its neediest students, where families held equal value no matter the
size of their paychecks. They asked for a plan to help the school maintain its
black and Latino population by setting aside a percentage of seats for
low-income children, but they didn't get approval.
P.S. 8's transformation to a school where only one in four students are black
or Latino and only 14 percent are low-income began during the administration of
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, known for its indifference toward efforts to
integrate schools. But integration advocates say that they've also been deeply
disappointed by the de Blasio administration's stance on the issue. In October
2014, after the release of the U.C.L.A. study pointing to the extreme
segregation in the city's schools, and nearly a year after de Blasio was
elected, Councilmen Ritchie Torres and Brad Lander moved to force the
administration to address segregation, introducing what became the School
Diversity Accountability Act, which would require the Department of Education
to release school-segregation figures and report what it was doing to
alleviate the problem. "It was always right in front of our faces," says
Lander, a representative from Brooklyn, whose own children attend heavily
white public schools. "Then the U.C.L.A. report hit, and the segregation in
the city became urgent."
The same month that Lander and Torres introduced the bill, Farina, the schools
chancellor, took questions at a town-hall-style meeting for area schools held
at P.S. 307. A group of four women, two white, two black, walked to the
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microphone to address Farina. They said that they were parents in heavily
gentrified Park Slope, and that Farina's administration had been ignoring their
calls to help their school retain its diminishing black and Latino populations
by implementing a policy to set aside seats for low-income children. Farina, a
diminutive woman with a no-nonsense attitude, responded by acknowledging that
there "are no easy answers" to the problem of segregation, and warned that
there were "federal guidelines" limiting "what we can do around diversity."
What Farina was referring to is unclear. While the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling
in Parents Involved tossed out integration plans that took into account the
race of individual students, the court has never taken issue with using
students' socioeconomic status for creating or preserving integration, which
is what these parents were seeking. In addition, the Obama administration
released guidelines in 2011 that explicitly outlined the ways school systems
could legally use race to integrate schools. Those include drawing a school's
attendance zone around black and white neighborhoods.
At another town-hall meeting in Manhattan last October, Farina said, "You
don't need to have diversity within one building." Instead, she suggested that
poor students in segregated schools could be pen pals and share resources with
students in wealthier, integrated public schools. "We adopt schools from
China, Korea or wherever," Farina told the room of parents. "Why not in our
own neighborhoods?" Integration advocates lambasted her for what they
considered a callous portrayal of integration as nothing more than a cultural
exchange. "Farina's silly pen-pal comment shows how desensitized we've
become," Torres told me. "It could be that the political establishment is
willfully blind to the impact of racial segregation and has led themselves to
believe that we can close the achievement gap without desegregating our school
system. At worst it's a lie; at best it's a delusion." He continued, "The
scandal is not that we are failing to achieve diversity. The scandal is we are
not even trying."
Farina would only talk to me for 15 minutes by phone. She told me in May that
her pen-pal comments had been taken out of context. "If you hear any of my
public speeches, this has always been a priority of mine," she said.
"Diversity of all types has always been a priority." She went on to talk about
the city's special programs for autistic students and about how Japanese
students have benefited from the
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expansion of dual-language programs. But Asian-American students are already
the group most integrated with white students. When pressed about integration
specifically for black and Latino students, Farina said the city has been
working to support schools that are seeking more diversity and mentioned a
socioeconomic integration pilot program at seven schools. "I do believe New
York City is making strides. It is a major focus going forward."
On May 30, four days after our interview, the Department of Education said in
an article in The Daily News that it was starting a voluntary systemwide
"Diversity in Admissions" program and would be requesting proposals from
principals. In 2014, several principals said they had submitted integration
proposals and had not gotten any response from Farina.
The announcement of the new initiative caught both principals and parents by
surprise. Jill Bloomberg, principal at Brooklyn's Park Slope Collegiate, which
teaches sixth through 12th grade, says she learned about the initiative from
the news article but otherwise had heard nothing about it, even though the
deadline to submit proposals is July 8, about a month away. "I am eager for
some official notification for exactly what the program is," she told me.
David Goldsmith, who has been working on desegregation efforts as a member of
the community education council, says he found the initiative, its timing and
the short deadline for submitting proposals "puzzling." "We could be very
cynical and say, 'They are not serious,' " he says.
Last June, de Blasio signed the School Diversity Accountability Act into law.
But the law mandates only that the Department of Education report segregation
numbers, not that it do anything to integrate schools. De Blasio declined to be
interviewed, but when asked at a news conference in November why the city did
not at least do what it could to redraw attendance lines, he defended the
property rights of affluent parents who buy into neighborhoods to secure entry
into heavily white schools. "You have to also respect families who have made a
decision to live in a certain area," he said, because families have "made
massive life decisions and investments because of which school their kid would
go to." The mayor suggested there was little he could do because school
segregation simply was a reflection of
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New York's stark housing segregation, entrenched by decades of discriminatory
local and federal policy. "This is the history of America," he said.
Of course, de Blasio is right: Housing segregation and school segregation have
always been entwined in America. But the opportunity to buy into "good"
neighborhoods with "good" schools that de Blasio wants to protect has never
been equally available to all.
To best understand how so many poor black and Latino children end up in
neglected schools, and why so many white families have the money to buy into
neighborhoods with the best schools, you need to look no further than the
history of the Farragut Houses and P.S. 307. Looking at P.S. 307 today, you
might find it hard to imagine that the school did not start out segregated.
The low-slung brick elementary school, which opened in 1964, and the Farragut
public-housing projects right outside its front doors once stood as hopeful,
integrated islands in a city fractured by strict color lines in both its
neighborhoods and its schools.
The 10 Farragut buildings, spread across roughly 18 acres, opened in 1952 as
part of a scramble to house returning G.I.s and their families after World War
II. When the first tenants moved in, the sprawling campus - named for David
Farragut, an admiral of the United States Navy - was considered a model of
progressive working-class housing, with its open green spaces, elevators,
modern heating plant, laundry and community center.
In 1952, a black woman named Gladys McBeth became one of Farragut's earliest
tenants. Nearly three generations later, when I visited her in November, she
was living in the same 14th-floor apartment, where she paid about $1,000 a
month in rent. Back then, she said, Farragut was a place for strivers. "I
didn't know nothing about projects when I moved in," she said. "It was veteran
housing." The project housed roughly even numbers of black and white tenants,
including migrants escaping hardship from Poland, Puerto Rico and Italy, and
from the feudal American South. To get in, everyone had to show proof of
marriage, a husband's military-discharge papers and pay stubs.
Robert McBeth, Gladys's husband, drove a truck, while she stayed home raising
their four children. In the years before the Brown decision, the oldest of the
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McBeth children went to a nearby school where the kids were predominantly black
and Latino, because the New York City Board of Education bused white children
in the area to other schools, according to the N.A.A.C.P. School officials at
the time, as today, claimed the racial makeup of the schools was an inevitable
result of residential segregation. Though Farragut was not yet segregated,
most of the city was. And that segregation in housing often resulted from
legal and open discrimination that was encouraged and condoned by the state,
and at times required by the federal government.
Nowhere would that become more evident than in Farragut, which by the 1960s
was careering toward the same fate overtaking nearly all public housing in big
cities. White residents used Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to
buy their way out of the projects and to move to shiny new middle-class
subdivisions. This subsidized home-buying boom led to one of the broadest
expansions of the American middle class ever, almost exclusively to the benefit
of white families. The F.H.A.'s explicitly racist underwriting standards,
which rated black and integrated neighborhoods as uninsurable, made federally
insured home loans largely unavailable to black home seekers. Ninety-eight
percent of these loans made between 1934 and 1968 went to white Americans.
Housing discrimination was legal until 1968. Even if black Americans managed
to secure home loans, many homes were off-limits, either because they had
provisions in their deeds prohibiting their sale to black buyers or because
entire communities - including publicly subsidized middle-class developments
like Levittown on Long Island and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan - barred black
home buyers and tenants outright. The McBeths tried to buy a house, but like so
many of Farragut's black tenants, they were not able to. They continued to
rent while many of their white neighbors bought homes and built wealth.
Scholars attribute a large part of the yawning wealth gap between black and
white Americans - the typical white person has 13 times the wealth of a
typical black person - to discriminatory housing policies.
But before Farragut's white tenants left, parents of all colors sent their
children to P.S. 307. Gladys McBeth, who died in May, sent her youngest child
across the street to P.S. 307 and worked there as a school aide for 23 years.
"It was
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one of the best schools in the district," she reminisced, sitting in a worn
paisley chair. But by 1972, Farragut was more than 8o percent black, and to
fill the vacant units and house the city's growing indigent population, the
city changed the guideline for income and work requirements, turning the
projects from largely working-class to low-income.
At some point, P.S. 307's attendance zone was redrawn to include only the
Farragut Houses, ensuring the students would be black, Latino and poor. The New
York City Department of Education does not keep attendance data before 2000,
but as McBeth remembered it, by the late '8os, P.S. 307 was also almost
entirely black and Latino. McBeth, who sent all four of her children to
college, shook her head. "It all changed."
P.S. 307 was a very different place from what it had been, but Najya was
thriving. I watched as she and her classmates went from struggling to sound out
three-letter words to reading entire books. She would surprise me in the car
rides after school with her discussions of hypotheses and photosynthesis,
words we hadn't taught her. And there was something almost breathtaking about
witnessing an auditorium full of mostly low-income black and Latino children
confidently singing in Mandarin and beating Chinese drums as they performed a
fan dance to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
But I also knew how fragile success at a school like P.S. 307 could be. The few
segregated, high-poverty schools we hold up as exceptions are almost always
headed by a singular principal like Roberta Davenport. But relying on one
dynamic leader is a precarious means of ensuring a quality education. With all
the resources Davenport was able to draw to the school, P.S. 307's test scores
still dropped this year. The school suffers from the same chronic absenteeism
that plagues other schools with large numbers of low-income families. And then
Davenport retired last summer, just as the clashes over P.S. 307's integration
were heating up, causing alarm among parents.
Najya and the other children at P.S. 307 were unaware of the turmoil and the
battle lines adults were drawing outside the school's doors. Faraji, my
husband, had been elected co-president of P.S. 307's P.T.A. along with
Benjamin Greene,
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another black middle-class parent from Bed-Stuy, who also serves on the
community education council. As the potential for rezoning loomed over the
school, they were forced to turn their attention from fund-raising and planning
events to working to prevent the city's plan from ultimately creating another
mostly white school.
It was important to them that Farragut residents, who were largely unaware of
the process, had a say over what happened. Faraji and I had found it hard to
bridge the class divides between the Farragut families and the middle-class
black families, like ours, from outside the neighborhood. We parents were all
cordial toward one another. Outside the school, though, we mostly went our
separate ways. But after the rezoning was proposed, Faraji and Benjamin worked
with the Rev. Dr. Mark V. C. Taylor of the Church of the Open Door, which sits
on the Farragut property, and canvassed the projects to talk to parents and
inform them of the city's proposal. Not one P.S. 307 parent they spoke to knew
anything about the plan, and they were immediately worried and fearful about
what it would mean for their children. P.S. 307 was that rare example of a
well-resourced segregated school, and these parents knew it.
The Farragut parents were also angry and hurt over how their school and their
children had been talked about in public meetings and the press. Some white
Dumbo parents had told Davenport that they'd be willing to enroll their
children only if she agreed to put the new students all together in their own
classroom. Farragut parents feared their children would be marginalized. If
the school eventually filled up with children from high-income white families
- the median income for Dumbo and Vinegar Hill residents is almost 10 times
that of Farragut residents - the character of the school could change, and as
had happened at other schools like P.S. 8, the results might not benefit the
black and Latino students. Among other things, P.S. 307 might no longer
qualify for federal funds for special programming, like free after-school
care, to help low-income families.
"I don't have a problem with people coming in," Saaiba Coles, a Farragut
mother with two children at P.S. 307, told those gathered at a community
meeting about the rezoning. "I just don't want them to forget about the kids
that were already here." Faraji and Benjamin collected and delivered to the
education
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council a petition with more than 40o signatures of Farragut residents
supporting the rezoning, but only under certain conditions, including that
half of all the seats at P.S. 307 would be guaranteed for low-income children.
That would ensure that the school remained truly integrated and that new
higher-income parents would have to share power in deciding the direction of
the school.
In January of this year, the education council held a meeting to vote on the
rezoning. Nearly four dozen Farragut residents who'd taken two buses chartered
by the church filed into the auditorium of a Brooklyn elementary school,
sitting behind a cluster of anxious parents from Dumbo. Reporters lined up
alongside them. In the months since the potential rezoning plan was announced,
the spectacle of an integration fight in the progressive bastion of Brooklyn
had attracted media attention. Coverage appeared in The New York Times, The
Wall Street Journal and on WNYC. "Brooklyn hipsters fight school
desegregation," the news site Raw Story proclaimed. The meeting lasted more
than three hours as parents spoke passionately, imploring the council to delay
the vote so that the two communities could try to get to know each other and
figure out how they could bridge their economic, racial and cultural divides.
Both Dumbo and Farragut parents asked the district for leadership, fearing
integration that was not intentionally planned would fail.
In the end, the council proceeded with the vote, approving the rezoning with a
5o percent low-income set-aside, but children living in P.S. 307's attendance
zone would receive priority. But that's not a guarantee. White children under
the age of 5 outnumber black and Latino children of the same age in the new
zone, according to census data. And the white population will only grow as new
developments go on the market. Without holding seats for low-income children,
it's not certain the school will achieve 5o percent low-income enrollment.
David Goldsmith, president of the council, told me he didn't believe that
creating low-income set-asides in only one school made sense; he is working to
create a plan that would try to integrate the schools in the entire district
that includes P.S. 8 and P.S. 307. But Benjamin Greene, who voted against the
rezoning because it did not guarantee that half of the seats would remain for
low-income
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children, said: "We cannot sit around and wait until somebody decides on this
wonderful formula districtwide. We have to preserve these schools one at a
time."
In voting for the rezoning, the council touted its bravery and boldness in
choosing integration in a system that seemed opposed to it. "With the eyes of
the nation upon us," Goldsmith began. "Voting 'yes' means we refuse to be
victims of the past. We are ready to do this. The time is now. We owe this to
our children."
But the decision felt more like a victory for the status quo. This rezoning did
not occur because it was in the best interests of P.S. 307's black and Latino
children, but because it served the interests of the wealthy, white parents of
Brooklyn Heights. P.S. 8 will only get whiter and more exclusive: The council
failed to mention at the meeting that the plan would send future students from
the only three Farragut buildings that had been zoned for P.S. 8 to P.S. 307,
ultimately removing almost all the low-income students from P.S. 8 and turning
it into one of the most affluent schools in the city. The Department of
Education projects that within six years, P.S. 8 could be three-quarters white
in a school system where only one-seventh of the kids are white.
P.S. 307 may eventually look similar. Without seats guaranteed for lowincome
children, and with an increasing white population in the zone, the school may
flip and become mostly white and overcrowded. Farragut parents worry that at
that point, the project's children, like those at P.S. 8, could be zoned out of
their own school. A decade from now, integration advocates could be lamenting
how P.S. 307 went from nearly all black and Latino to being integrated for a
period to heavily white.
That transition isn't going to happen immediately, so some Dumbo parents have
threatened to move, or enroll their children in private schools. Others are
struggling over what to do. By allowing such vast disparities between public
schools - racially, socioeconomically and academically - this city has made
integration the hardest choice.
"You're not living in Brooklyn if you don't want to have a diverse system
around your kid," Michael Jones, who lives in Brooklyn Heights and considered
sending his twins to P.S. 307 for pre-K because P.S. 8 no longer offered it,
told me
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over coffee. "You want it to be multicultural. You know, if you didn't want
that, you'd be in private school, or you would be in a different area. So,
we're all living in Brooklyn because we want that to be part of the
upbringing. But you can understand how a parent might look at it and go,
'While I want diversity, I don't want profound imbalance.' " He thought about
what it would have meant for his boys to be among the few middle-class
children in P.S. 307. "We could look at it and see there is probably going to
be a clash of some kind," he said. "My kid's not an experiment." In the end,
he felt that he could not take a chance on his children's education and sent
them to private preschool; they now go to P.S. 8.
This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what
makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we
can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor,
segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability.
True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and
when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural. Najya's
first two years in public school helped me understand this better than I ever
had before. Even Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research showed the
debilitating effects of segregation on black children, chose not to enroll his
children in the segregated schools he was fighting against. "My children," he
said, "only have one life." But so do the children relegated to this city's
segregated schools. They have only one life, too.
Correction: June 26, 2016 An article on June 12 about segregation in New York
City schools misstated the number of buildings from the Farragut Houses, a
public-housing project in Brooklyn, that were previously included in P.S.
307's attendance zone. It was five of the 10 buildings, not seven.
Correction: July 3, 2016 An article on June 12 about segregation in New York
City schools referred incorrectly to homes in Stuyvesant Town. They have
always been rental properties; residents have never been able to buy the homes
there. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine. She won a 2016
Peabody Award for her series on school segregation for "This American Life."
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9/8/2017 Choosing a School for My Daug hter in a
Segregated City- The New York Times
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A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2016, on Page MM34 of
the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Worlds Apart.
2017 The New York Times Company
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