Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

June 16, 2016 9:14 AM

Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City: 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.

A Game of Musical Chairs, Played With Schools, Divides the Upper West Side: “For us, it’s almost a 20-block difference in an area that we have no connection to, none whatsoever,” Mr. Byrd said.

Previously.

posted by roomthreeseventeen (25 comments total)

In slightly good news about diversifying NYC public schools, the city is launching an initiative to reach out to minority students and provide prep for the SHSAT, which is the SAT-style exam used to get kids into a certain strata of public high schools.
posted by griphus at 9:22 AM on June 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

That is very good news griphus. School guidance counsellors all over the city were in the habit of discouraging certain students from taking that test, and in some schools the counsellor would refuse to help even highly motivated students sign up.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:42 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I was really, genuinely shocked when I found out about how the SHSAT was administered/etc. in others schools after I left high school. I was in the upper ranks of a (public) magnet middle school and in 7th (and some of 8th) grade we had one class a week specifically meant to teach us how to take that test. It was straight-up implied that everyone in that section of the school would be taking it unless they had very specific plans otherwise. The names of the eight or nine kids who got into Stuyvesant were announced over the PA system the morning the results came in. It was a Big Fucking Deal, and in other schools it's barely talked about and severely discouraged, which is just awful.
posted by griphus at 9:46 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

I really appreciated that both articles really dug into the complexity of the situation and the attempts to remediate it, without sugarcoating the fact that the NYC school are, quite simply, segregated. It just makes me so sad to realize that the late 1980s/early 1990s were the peak of school integration in the US. I was in junior high, in the district that was the first in the country to have court-ordered busing (which has long since abandoned it). What's wrong with us that we are so selfish? Or, as the first article says:

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.
posted by hydropsyche at 11:41 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

What's wrong with us that we are so selfish?

IMO, our society doesn't considering something like that "selfishness" but pretty much the opposite when it comes to childrearing. Garnering ever little piece of privilege or advantage to help your child is an almost universal virtue here. And the idea that a person would choose to explicitly and in a very real and definite way disadvantage their own child to further a nebulous goal that may or may not be realistic is very much anathema and would be considered by many people to be "bad parenting."

Now, of course, my mother got plenty of lectures from some of her more well-off friends about how not sending me to private school was bad parenting. And I'm sure there were people much better off than the lot of us combined who considered the caliber of private school my mom couldn't afford to send me to to be just as bad as public school.

Which is why I don't think any of this will ever get off the ground if it is left up to the parents.
posted by griphus at 11:56 AM on June 16, 2016 [14 favorites]

I know that intuitively, but I just don't understand it. And to me, yes, it is selfish to care only about your child's education and not about the education of every other child in the US.
posted by hydropsyche at 12:08 PM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's a collective action problem. Everyone's kids end up better off with fully integrated schools because there's virtue in being exposed to people of different backgrounds and how good a school is depends an enormous amount on the percentage of parents with the money and free time to be involved in the running of the school, so it's to everyone's benefit to spread those parents around rather than segregate them to a handful of schools.

But even if you've got complete buy-in for that idea, which we don't, the individual optimum is for everyone else to integrate, and your own kid to go to the whitest, wealthiest school around. That strategy leads to the current bad situation when everyone follows it.

As always, the solution to a collective action problem is government mandate, but that's a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of people. We had this post a little while ago about how Seattle gave up on busing, which included some incredible details about Louisville, which has maintained pro-integration policies:

Louisville, which maintained integrative policies despite the 2006 Supreme Court ruling, has seen significant positive changes in the city. In 1970 in Louisville, 98 percent of suburban residents opposed the integration plan. In 2011, 89 percent supported it. Furthermore, their constancy with integrated busing and their moves to eliminate ways out of integration (the death knell in Seattle) in fact helped housing across the Louisville area. (In 2008, Seattle School Board members suggested schools couldn't integrate until neighborhoods did.) Because home buyers in Louisville knew that all schools had the same racial composition and were provided the same resources, housing segregation in Louisville actually decreased by 20 percent from 1990 to 2010.

posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:25 PM on June 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

I agree with you except I would change it to "the perceived individual optimum is for everyone else to integrate, and your own kid to go to the whitest, wealthiest school around. "

There is no evidence that wealthy white kids who go to integrated schools do worse than wealthy white kids who go to segregated schools. And plenty of reason to think that wealthy white kids who go to integrated schools might grow up to be more interesting, compassionate, engaged human beings.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:38 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” - Chief Justice John Roberts

ahahahahahaha

haha

hah

heh
posted by radicalawyer at 1:38 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Without some kind of governmental integration mandate (which we're supposed to have, but whatevs) it's incumbent upon individuals to make this kind of hard choice if we are to improve things for everyone. Parable of the Polygons really drove that point home for me.
posted by the_blizz at 1:42 PM on June 16, 2016 [7 favorites]

I had never seen Parable of the Polygons before. That's amazing!
posted by hydropsyche at 2:06 PM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

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.”

Yeah that's sort of the problem dude
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:07 PM on June 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

There is no evidence that wealthy white kids who go to integrated schools do worse than wealthy white kids who go to segregated schools.

I think more than that is needed to shift public policy: we'll need fairly strong evidence that that's the case.
posted by jpe at 2:41 PM on June 16, 2016

Has anyone ever considered changing the way tax money is distributed within school districts, so that the traditionally black schools don't end up being the "poor" schools that white parents don't want to send their children to? I'm probably being horribly naive about some aspect of it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:24 PM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Without some kind of governmental integration mandate (which we're supposed to have, but whatevs) it's incumbent upon individuals to make this kind of hard choice if we are to improve things for everyone.

I sum this up as If you didn't mean "not to" (discriminate/segregate) then you "meant to."
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 4:52 PM on June 16, 2016

In NYC the tax base isn't the issue. In the burbs yes, but in the city it is all centralized.
posted by JPD at 5:46 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

So then I don't understand why some schools are (apparently) horrible and others are (apparently) great. If it isn't money, and it they're under the same administration, what's going on?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:56 PM on June 16, 2016

There are other ways schools are differentiated other than per student operating budget. The wealthier, whiter schools tend to be newer and better maintained (from a separate capital budget). The wealthier, whiter schools tend to attract veteran teachers and keep them longer, while the poorer schools serving mostly black and Latino kids get less experienced teachers. Wealthier, whiter parents spend a lot of time and money on PTA fundraisers, and the profits from those pay for cool enrichment programs (robotics, foreign languages, music, art) and teacher appreciation programs that again help retain the veteran teachers. Wealthier parents are also likely to volunteer in and out of the classroom and to enroll their kids in expensive extra-curriculars which give them additional academic boosts. Wealthy kids are likely to go to fancy preschools, while poorer kids are more likely to spend their before-school years in childcare situations that don't include preschool education.

And finally, when a kid is hungry, tired, or scared because they live in abject poverty, and we don't do a thing to help them, they don't do as well in school, including on standardized tests.

And when a bunch of poor kids do bad on standardized tests, we call their school a failure and call them failures, without for even a moment acknowledging that we set them up to fail.

There are some in our country who look at all these facts and just shrug and say, "I don't want my kid going to a failing school. My kid deserves the best." There are others of us who know because we have seen it that when schools are integrated the ethnic/socioeconomic achievement gaps decrease and everybody benefits. We know that a different world is possible.

Mostly, we get called names.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:21 PM on June 16, 2016 [12 favorites]

Right, that's the way it is NOW.

But if you funded the schools equally, couldn't you then split the poor students and affluent students equally across both schools? The affluent parents couldn't complain that their kids are being sent to a poor school anymore, and both schools would receive the same amount of parent support. The better teachers wouldn't be lured away from the poor schools because the advantage would have been removed. Am I missing something?
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:35 PM on June 16, 2016

" If it isn't money, and it they're under the same administration, what's going on?"

The largest predictor of student success -- by a LOT -- is the socioeconomic status of the parents. An awful lot of school reform is just fiddling at the margins with the 5% to 25% of student success that we can influence through policy; the VAST BULK of the problem is poverty. (And poverty's knock-on effects -- hunger, unstable housing, lack of emotional support from stressed parents, information-poor environments, lack of access to community resources, etc etc etc.)

So the trick, for this particular post, is that we know that for poor students, there are big gains to be had from being in classrooms with middle-class and wealthy student peers (who have many of these social advantages that provide academic advantages -- stable homes, accessible parents, access to zoos and parks and libraries, information-rich homes, etc.). BUT, conversely, it does not harm middle class or wealthy students even if they are enrolled in an otherwise-all-impoverished classroom -- the effects of their parents' socioeconomic advantages are too sturdy to be harmed by low-achievement peers. According to some studies, the single largest thing we can do to raise student achievement for poor students is to economically (which also means racially, in practice) integrate schools.

But wealthy and middle-class parents fight this tooth and nail, for a variety of reasons, many of which come down to misconceptions that their children will do worse if forced to go to school with low-achieving, impoverished peers. Some of it is plain racism or classism dressed up in pretty clothes. But a lot of it is simply fear that their children will not get an adequate education or will not live up to their potential in an integrated school.

Another problem, which I can't really speak to in New York City but comes up a lot in other places, is that the US system places a real premium on neighborhood schools and kids being able to "walk to school" and being in a school that's embedded in a neighborhood community, and neighborhoods are hella segregated economically (and racially, in much of the country). So attempts to economically (or racially) integrate schools have to reckon with this issue of segregated neighborhoods and housing, and transporting children into and out of their home neighborhoods.

(I served five years on my local school board, and we are a two-professional family where we have enrolled one child in a school that is 82% impoverished and the other at a school that is 99% impoverished, so I have a lot of thoughts on and personal experience with this issue and we have made an affirmative choice to be part of the solution.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:44 PM on June 16, 2016 [20 favorites]

An awful lot of school reform is just fiddling at the margins with the 5% to 25% of student success that we can influence through policy; the VAST BULK of the problem is poverty.

maybe the problem isn't poverty.

But wealthy and middle-class parents fight this tooth and nail...

maybe the problem is actually the wealthy and "middle class" and their unrelenting war on the poor.

there are big gains to be had from being in classrooms with middle-class and wealthy student peers (who have many of these social advantages that provide academic advantages

But other than that, you could hardly be surprised that a politics based on the idea that the poor benefit from rubbing shoulders with their betters would have an appeal limited to certain sectors of society. I grew up with this sort of limousine liberalism even though my mother grew up with an illiterate father and a family that lived on peanut butter some years, because my mother went to college and her family wasn't "those poor", they had values, etc.

you can't have egalitarian schools in a society which is viciously unequal. imagine a Manhattan where every child really got the same education, turned 18, and looked with the same eyes at the opportunities afforded the children of art directors and ad executives versus those of children of hotel cleaning staff . you can't actually imagine such a Manhattan because it would require dismantling the structure which created those differences in social power at the start.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:49 PM on June 16, 2016

education is sold as a tool against poverty because the idea appeals exactly to the middle class: those people who have won the golden ticket out of the bottom floor. But the thing with golden tickets is not everyone can have one. but then, if you do grab the ticket, it's easy to convince yourself it's because you were different than all those other poor people reaching up, you were better.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:55 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

What's going on? Class size.
posted by I-baLL at 8:50 PM on June 16, 2016

Someone I thought I liked got pregnant and flipped her previous social justice position on education to planning on enrolling her child in elite schools, rather than economically disadvantaged schools. I have a similar option with one of my kids, and it was a strike against putting my child into that elite school because the smaller class size and additional physical resources of the school are outweighed by growing up in a bubble of insular wealth and race. And long-term, you want your kid to have community ties that are diverse and based on your values. It was kind of terrifying how absolute she did a 180-turn when the child in question was her child, and suddenly all that mattered was getting the right connections through to university alumni and the right kind of classmates who spoke proper English.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:11 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

I just came on here to give a totally tangential anecdote on my school experience. I grew up in a South East Asian developing country. The public school system was terrible -- syllabus, education, teachers. I would say it is equal to or worse than some of America's poorest high schools.

However, my dad was educated, went to university (first of his family), and was in a professional, managerial role. In the US, you could say that he was middle class, maybe upper middle, but just barely. In terms of money, compared to the US, we can be considered poor.

My peer group at school were kids whose parents were in similar occupations -- anywhere from lower middle to upper middle. I knew of a few genuinely poor kids.

We lived in a 'good' neighbourhood. So that mitigated the schooling system.

Additionally, the South East Asian society I lived in had Great Expectations for their kids. Study hard, and become a doctor, lawyer, engineer. Study hard and get As. This was the standard expectation. This message was impressed upon every single student, however poor they were or what their parents did. As a result, even a smart kid who was poor had the drive and determination to do well at school. There was a road map for them, and they had something to strive for, even though their path was much harder.

I'm not saying that it is necessarily the best roadmap (not everyone wants to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer), but hey, it gave ambition to students from underprivileged backgrounds. Much better than just wandering through the broken high school system where teachers and the school has no expectation of you.
posted by moiraine at 10:50 AM on June 17, 2016