The New York Times has stepped up its race and class conversations in education, highlighted by this article from NYT’s Kate Taylor on the proposed rezoning of a school district in Brooklyn. While it makes sense to de-zone our schools in an effort to temper down the flurry of studies showing NYC as one of the most segregated school districts in the country, the resistance to integration has come from both white parents for the typical reasons and black parents for atypical reasons. Typically, the resistance against integration comes from a vocal set of white parents who don’t want their children matriculating with kids they view as uncouth or less intelligent. A faux-integration often takes place when a school creates a specialized or magnet program on the penthouse floor, not ironically letting the cream rise to the top.
This time, however, I’m curious about the black parents’ responses:
“We fought hard to build this school, and we’re not just going to let people come from outside when we worked so hard and dedicated ourselves,” Dolores Cheatom, a Farragut Houses resident, said at the meeting, holding her 1-year-old daughter on her hip … She said she had “no problem working with anybody, but I’m not going to let anybody take from my daughter.”
On the one end, I wonder what Ms. Cheatom and the community did to “build this school,” specifically what it looked like prior to white folks jogging through their neighborhoods in neon polyurethane. Why is this specific narrative not told in light of the deluge of school choice advocates spraying our morning newscasts with their ideologies? It’s also instructive in the ways well-meaning, tongue firmly in cheek, white progressives underestimate black resentment. After decades of redlining, state property taxes, private schooling, and coalitions that only secured wins for white families, perhaps these parents felt like their isolation in DUMBO is the solution to their ills. They can define the term “public” for themselves.
Good on them.I don’t have a dream, but I do have a belief system. I believe that, as long as children of different racial backgrounds occupy different schools, they will always be unequal. Our country’s foundation for schooling makes this so. Even if P.S. 8 and 307 had the same amount of students, same test scores, same color uniforms, similar teaching staff, and effective administrators, the perception of the student make-up would be enough to elevate or raze the school.
Here’s a bit from Jelani Cobb’s ode to the school formerly known as Jamaica High School:
In 1954, Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s arguments about the pernicious effects of racism on black children implicated white society. Sixty years later, arguments that black students associated studiousness with “acting white” were seen not as evidence of the negative effects of internalized racism but as indicators of pathological self-defeat among African-Americans. The onus shifted, and public policy followed. The current language of educational reform emphasizes racial “achievement gaps” and “underperforming schools” but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened. Integration was a flawed strategy, but it recognized the ties between racial history and educational outcomes.
Our current set of education reformers have found a way to shift the onus on integration as well, from a vaunted strategy used to close the achievement gap in the late ’70s to early ’80s to a flawed strategy that internalizes societal racism masked as stagnation. To use integration now is speak of dilution, misappropriation, and parents who send their kids to private school saying “Yeah, sounds like a plan, but I’m glad I have options.” Even advocates for public school need to see themselves as complicit in this as well. The original opt-out movement was neither the opt-out of standardized testing nor the opt-out into charter schools.
It was the opting out of publicly controlled schools and matriculation into private schools.
That’s why, when people ask me whether I believe in school choice, I’d love to say “Yes,” because why wouldn’t you want to choose? Except the choice should come down to a choice in pedagogical vision, not classroom resources or lack thereof. I doubt we’ll ever reach a point where a school with a predominantly white student body and a school with majority students of color will ever get equitable funding, but, if we do, the surest way is to make all administrators fully fund our schools.
This issue with two public schools may set precedent for integrating our schools without the ridiculous creation of magnet schools on either campus. Until all students in that district have an equal chance at educational attainment, the children of those schools will serve as another generation of educational neglect. But it’s much easier to pretend that separate public schools can be equal.
Yes. I read this piece in the Times yesterday and was really struck by how much was going on between the lines. I wanted to sit and unpack every single quotation. When I got to the one you pulled, I almost stood up and cheered. Because I’m tired of the narrative that this type of re-zoning is only a problem for the aggrieved white kids.
BUT one of the things I found the most loaded was when the NYT went out of its way to say (and I’m paraphrasing, but just barely), “it’s not that these parents are RACIST.” I had to read that part twice, because… Well… Really, NYT? And what exactly would make them “racist”?
Author
Because racism is only when it’s about personal grievances, not anything systemic. Goodness.
Thanks for commenting.
I also would like to know more about the community that has built PS 307. But two things I do know may complicate narratives even more: First, a large portion of the students who attend 307 come from outside of the zone. In that way, like many of our Brooklyn zoned schools, what PS 307 is today is already a reflection of some “school choice” (albeit informal). Second, last year PS 307 won $1.8 million federal integration grant. A decent amount of the current programming is funded by this grant, with the expectation that the enhanced programming would attract a broader diversity of students, including the very affluent ones living minutes away. I am not sure how much – if at all – these things are affecting the dynamic but I think they need to be understood as context.
Ruby, those are both super interesting pieces of context. Another way in which “school choice” affects PS 307 is the charters. The children who attend PS 307 are largely kids who live in housing projects. Those same populations have been targeted by “no excuses” charters. The charters have, in many cases, cherry-picked students from those populations, which is why PS 307 has so much room to house kids from PS 8. The children whose parents have the most time / money / access to advocate for their children’s school choice who would be headed to PS 307, are instead sent to charters. So PS 307 has disproportionate numbers of kids whose parents have the least access, and kids who are special needs and wouldn’t be served by the charters and kids who are “behavior problems” and kicked out by charters.
STILL, the teaching staff at PS 307 is extraordinarily collaborative, thoughtful and qualified. They are working hard to establish curriculum that focuses on kids’ social and emotional needs in addition to their academic needs.
I don’t get this last part about funding: “I doubt we’ll ever reach a point where a school with a predominantly white student body and a school with majority students of color will ever get equitable funding”. There is a lot of transparency from DOE around funding at each school including disclosure of the funding formulae. So I can look at the predominately white school my son attended, East Side Middle and compare it with your school which is predominately Hispanic. The DOE web site says funding per student at East Side is $14K with $12K per kid for general ed and $29K for special ed. At your school the numbers are $22K per student overall with $19K in general ed and $43K for special ed.
Here’s the link http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/02/M114/AboutUs/Statistics/expenditures.htm
This is pretty typical of what I’ve seen in budgets when comparing schools. City, State and Federal Title I funding formulae all consider either socioeconomic status and/or test scores in deciding how much money to allot for each kid. People and the press just assume that schools in white neighborhoods have more funding but it isn’t supported by the math.
Author
I’ll save the more personal details of my school’s case for e-mail, but the core of your argument is, at best, odd. You’re saying that there hasn’t been a historically disproportionate funding system for schools based on property tax? You’re saying that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit had little to no merit, or that AQE has no reason to worry and everything’s fine? I challenge that premise. We should challenge ourselves in wondering *why* we need federal fixes for local and state regressive funding on a statewide level. As far as the line, NYC is atypical with regards to this type of funding formula, which also makes me question whether folks fully understand what I mean by equity. Even in the schools we’ve discussed, P.S. 8 has plenty of funding, but, in lieu of parent donations and bake sales that are typical of white schools, these folks had to fight for STEM grants. (Yes, I did look that up).
But I do defer to your expertise on budgets since you’ve dealt with it on a more consistent basis.
Yes, you’re right about property tax, disproporianate funding based on property tax and CFE. Your post was about New York and the District 13 issue so I assumed we were talking about NYC. Statewide, funding is not equitable. CFE was supposed to fix some of that and urban districts got no where near what they were supposed to. So my premise isn’t that nationally or in NY State there is equity of funding but that within NYC there is. People may disagree with NYC’s Fair Student Funding but it’s transparent and it’s built on the premise that kids coming in with lower socioeconomic status, special needs or lower test scores need to get more $ per capita.
I’ve seen the numbers on bake sales and parent donations and they don’t amount to much with maybe a couple of schools excepted.
But this is just about the budget and you may be talking about equity in a broader sense. One example would be admissions to elite schools based on test-scores. And there NYC has plenty of problems.
Can you clarify why integration is a bad policy for me? I know the word itself is a bit taboo and brings up scenes of the national guard and the violence in the south from the 50 years ago, but I recently heard an interesting piece from This American Life call “The Problem we all live with.” It was a two part serious on the issue of the achievement gap and the disparity between schools that are predominantly white versus schools that are predominantly black. Part one promotes the concept of integration as one of the only strategies that has worked, statistically speaking, to raise the performance of the black population in schools across the country. They also mention that if we were to give incentives to schools that are predominantly white to become more diverse (aka integration), that it would benefit society as a whole since a large part of the problem is that many white people see blacks as other, even if they don’t realize it. Integration would create schools where the different groups learn to co-exist more genuinely and eventually (hopefully) breakdown those barriers. To me, (and to the woman interviewed on T.A.L.) integration was hard and scary for people, so we just gave up. Maybe I am naive, and I am not African American, so I can’t say I know from experience, I admit. I am curious though, if you were to listen to that argument, what you think after hearing it.
Author
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ pieces have been excellent. It’s worth reading the work she’s done in the last couple of years on this very topic. I don’t think integration itself is bad. I am a proponent of integration generally, but it has to be an equitable form of doing so. I simultaneously don’t think that the country is ready for full integration. If anything, New York City has shown that, even with its progressive lean, you can have a truly diverse city and still a segregated school system. The issue I’m finding with the integration debate is two-fold: how we integrate and who gets agency. I am a proponent of dezoning and restructuring property taxes. I also have a hint of pessimism less on integration itself, but on agency, and that all folks will be granted voice when it comes to their schools, public, private, charter, or whatever. Integration is a means to an end, but it’s a powerful means.
I think it’s right to focus on the question of agency. The PS 307 and PS 8 zone lines are bluntly and obviously discriminatorily drawn – which is itself obviously a product of massive disenfranchisement and the history of segregation. And they’ve been left untouched for decades despite the obviously segregative effects. Yet the school has built a very nice community for itself, and that is a product of agency. (I’m not sure the STEM grant is — I believe that was driven by the DOE and elected officials, and isn’t really something parents were involved in, but I could be wrong.) I believe the comments from some PS 307 families are mainly reactive to the fear of losing their community, and are less about funding.
Having seen multiple DOE co-location proposals across the district, it’s fair to say the DOE really doesn’t ever invest agency in the schools on the receiving end of a proposal like this, no matter what their demographics are. Indeed, outside of overcrowding, the DOE really doesn’t respond to agency from any school from what I’ve seen. But I think structural racism makes it so that schools like 307 are far more likely to be the subject of these kinds of proposals (co-locations, closures, etc.), and so that when issues like overcrowding and proposals like this do come about, white and affluent families have a system that is ready to respond to their needs and concerns — or at least to hear them. And it was pretty apparent that the 307 families didn’t have that attention. I think a lot of the early reaction to this proposal from the 307 families arises out of this obvious inequity.
That said, in thinking about agency I also wonder whether the PS 307 families ought now be provided more room to voice their own thoughts, and be listened to, rather than being squished into a narrative being drawn for them. For example, the comments of the 307 PTA presidents (one of whom is Faraji Hannah-Jones, husband to Nikole) make it clear that the parent leaders (at a minimum) are supportive of the idea of integrating their school, and that black families are ready to be leaders in building those bridges. They are encouraging dialogue and welcoming prospectively zoned families to visit the school; they are taking agency for bringing these communities together, while appropriately taking the DOE to task for not engaging the existing 307 community in the right way.
I recognize it’s much easier to focus on the inflammatory — on one side, the shocked DUMBO parents incredulous that they are losing a bit of privilege, on the other, clergymen trying to advance an agenda. But I’d love to see as much attention paid to the parents and community members who are doing their best to try to make it work, for the good of the kids.
I like and agree with Ruby’s clear-eyed view of the DOE with regard to agency and schools: “the DOE really doesn’t respond to agency from any school”. Fortunately the power to approve zoning changes is the one real authority the law grants to parents in the community (specifically the Community District Education Council) under mayoral control. Every other authority rests with the mayor. The CEC is comprised of parents elected by PTA officers and while that may not be everyone’s idea of the best decision-making body, it does guarantee people who are knowledgable and respected by parent leaders are deciding. True, the media narrative isn’t about these leaders who are trying to make it work but I bet they will make the right decision.
I think it is important to view this story as a very particular story – specific in several aspects:
1) It occurs in the zone where gentrification and “ethnic cleansing” are taking place. These zones are getting larger, but they do not encompass the bulk of NYC.
2) 307 has created something special. Damn, Jose, I wish this were common. I do.
3) Not all opposition to integration is equal. When members of a group that has been historically discriminated against say no to integration, we should listen.
Integration can work, might work, maybe we can help it work in the public schools in NYC, but only where Black and Hispanic families and communities want it to work.
Jonathan
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