A System Divided
Integrating a School, One Child at a Time
Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Prairie
Jones, 5, raising her hand at Public School 257 in Brooklyn, is one of
the few white children at the school. Kylie Cao, 5, third from left, is
the only Asian pupil in the kindergarten class this year. More Photos »
By LIZ ROBBINS
Published: June 15, 2012
HER bow flopping on her head, Kylie Cao pirouetted alongside her fellow kindergartners in pink tutus and black leotards.
Multimedia
A System Divided
The Magnet Model
This is the third article in a series examining the
changing racial distribution of students in New York City's public
schools and its impact on their opportunities and achievements.
Related
-
A System Divided: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High (February 26, 2012)
-
A System Divided: ‘Why Don’t We Have Any White Kids?’ (May 13, 2012)
News, data and conversation about education in New York.
The girls smiled with nervous concentration. They were, unwittingly, performing the delicate dance of desegregation.
One child was white, one was black, and seven girls were Hispanic. Kylie
was the only Asian student onstage — and in the kindergarten class this
year at Public School 257, a magnet school of the performing arts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“She’s become very, very popular,” her father, Benson Yang, said at the
school’s family night in early spring, when the children performed. “She
gets a lot of attention.”
Kylie’s mother, Angie Cao, was so pleased with her daughter’s experience
that she persuaded some friends to enroll their children at P.S. 257
next year. “Everybody will come here after seeing her,” she said.
If only change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital.
Instead, P.S. 257, where 73 percent of the students are Hispanic, has
found integration to be far more intricate. One of four Williamsburg
elementary schools to win a 2010 magnet grant from the United States
Education Department to spur desegregation, it has struggled to follow a
federal model created decades ago while focusing on more urgent
battles: for resources, students and, above all, test scores.
Since the mid-1980s, New York’s public schools, which are among the
nation’s most segregated, have received millions of dollars in magnet
grants from the federal government. In this most recent round of grants,
in 2010, the four Williamsburg elementary schools and one middle
school, all in District 14, received a total of $10.2 million over three
years; schools in Long Island City, Queens, and on the West Side in
Manhattan also won grants, for a total of $33 million.
Magnet schools were once the federal government’s favored mechanism to
increase diversity and prevent “white flight.” The idea was to create a
themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s
immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group.
Today, as the Williamsburg schools show, integration is an uneven
process at best, hampered by geography, legal limits and, critics say, a
lack of ideological commitment from the city.
Williamsburg, the epicenter of Brooklyn’s gentrification, where a
growing white population is moving into neighborhoods dominated by
Hispanics, would seem to have the most favorable conditions in the city
for integration. About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public
schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3
percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.
Reducing that percentage, as the grant requires, has proved to be a
challenge for the three magnet schools in the southeastern parts of
District 14, where the socioeconomic and ethnic changes have yet to take
hold with the same force as they have in the north.
Although decades of research studies show that children perform better
in integrated schools, desegregating New York City’s system has not been
a distinct priority for the mayor or his chancellors.
“I can’t remember the last time anyone in a leadership position said
anything about desegregation,” said Diane Ravitch, an education
historian at New York University.
“That sends a signal,” she added. “They talk about choice.”
The sweeping changes initiated under Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein
focused on the creation of new schools, notably charters and high
schools.
The current chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott,
said the administration’s priority was to “provide a richness in
quality education” for all the city’s students; there are 1.1 million,
three-quarters of whom are either Hispanic or black.
The magnet program, Mr. Walcott said, is one element of the system that promotes choice.
“If you have choice without civil rights policies, it stratifies the system,” said Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A., a research organization that recently published a study hailing the benefits of integrated schools. “People who have the most power and information get the best choices,” he added.
Among the policies needed in New York, Dr. Orfield said, were citywide
efforts to educate parents about magnet schools, transportation options
to help children get to schools outside their often-segregated
neighborhoods and accountability for diversity.
New York is not alone in operating its school system without a cohesive
integration plan, Dr. Orfield said, adding that the same could be said
of other major cities, like Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
“I am focused on having high-quality schools in all neighborhoods,” Mr.
Walcott said. “That’s the ultimate civil rights policy.”
For the magnet schools’ principals, the administration’s priorities are
unequivocal: “The bottom line is, if you don’t hit your academic
targets, they will put you on the turnaround list,” Brian Leavy-DeVale,
P.S. 257’s principal, said, referring to the process of reorganizing a
failing school.
In late May, P.S. 257 was one of two high-performing elementary schools
from District 14 to be investigated by the Education Department over
accusations of cheating on the annual New York State exams, after some
of the students’ scores plummeted when they reached middle school.
It is possible that the scope of the investigation could include other
elementary magnet schools in District 14, according to one person with
knowledge of the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity because
the process was still in its early stages. During the Bloomberg
administration, about 1,250 claims of cheating have been received, most
of which have gone unproven. But this investigation has clouded P.S.
257’s immediate future.
With the school year coming to a close, it is still too early to judge
how much progress P.S. 257 and the other District 14 schools that
received grants have made in desegregation. According to the Education
Department, two elementary schools made incremental steps toward
reducing the large percentage of Hispanic students, one stayed the same,
and one actually increased its Hispanic population.
Those numbers do not tell the full story; the schools are rich in
programming, and all have waiting lists for kindergarten next year, said
Joseph Gallagher, District 14’s magnet project director. “It’s a good
foundation to build on,” he said.
But magnet schools have a short window to create lasting diversity.
After the 2010 grants end, schools may recruit from outside their
attendance zones for only three more years, unless the Education
Department approves an extension. There are currently 39 schools
operating as magnets in New York City.
“Ultimately, the big issue comes down to how important this is to the
people in charge,” Dr. Ravitch, the education historian, said. “Given
the demography,” she added, “the question is, do you do something about
it, or do you do nothing about it?”
Hurdles to Diversity
At P.S. 257, music jumps in the hallways. In the second-floor gym one
afternoon, a drum line crashed out a beat, trumpets blared, and flute
players bounced from side to side, as the marching band built a joyful
crescendo. Already seasoned performers at Puerto Rican Day parades, the
band members were practicing to play for the governor in Albany.
On Friday mornings this year, the chorus sang the national anthem over
the public address system. In the piano room, the twins Antonio and
Christian Mendoza, second graders, spent weeks practicing a Mozart piano
sonata in Robert Siegel’s music class.
P.S. 257, also known as the John F. Hylan School, received an A on its
last school progress report. It has used its magnet money to build an
arts-based curriculum, enrich its after-school programs and “make school
fun” for its 632 students. That is the refrain of the school’s
tirelessly chirpy assistant principal, Melvin Martinez, a former club
promoter who designed the school’s program while he was studying for his
master’s degree in education.
Even before the Education Department and District 14 administrators
chose his school for the grant, Mr. Martinez was looking for extra
sources of money for the school. He had parents and students recycle
cans and bottles, then used the refunds to buy the school’s first set of
drums.
Now, thanks to about $520,000 a year in magnet money, the marching band
performs in spiffy navy and gold uniforms made by the same company that
outfits big college programs. A new sound system and an air-conditioner
turned the cafeteria into a second performance space. Two
performing-arts teachers were hired.
Part of the mission of the federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program
is rallying teachers and students around a theme. Some themes seem to
blend more fluidly than others with the citywide curriculum
requirements.
But integration is still the magnet grant’s primary purpose, and this
presents a geographic challenge in District 14. As it stretches from
Greenpoint to Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, the
district becomes more segregated, ethnically and socioeconomically.
P.S. 257 is a Title I school, meaning that it has a high level of
poverty and offers free lunches, as the other three elementary magnet
schools in Brooklyn do.
Given that the elementary-school-age population in its area is 65
percent Hispanic, traditionally Puerto Rican, the key to desegregation
is drawing white and Asian students from outside the attendance borders.
According to recent federal guidelines, enrolling black students also
counts toward progress in reducing Hispanic isolation. (There is no box
to check for multiracial heritages on District 14’s magnet application.)
But P.S. 257’s location, some 20 blocks southeast of the condominium and
artisan enclaves of Williamsburg, surrounded by sprawling
public-housing projects and in the shadow of Woodhull hospital, makes it
a tough sell.
Nora Barnes, the longtime principal at another of the magnets, Public School 250,
the George H. Lindsay School, which is seven blocks north of P.S. 257
and 77 percent Hispanic, acknowledged that drawing white families was
difficult.
“They don’t come to a school that’s basically a Hispanic school because
it’s like everybody else — they’re looking for a school that looks like
them,” she said.
After the first year of its grant, P.S. 250’s student population was
10.4 percent Asian, higher than most schools in Williamsburg, in part
because a growing number of Asian families live in the nearby Lindsay
Park Houses. But the Hispanic population at the school remained
unchanged.
“Whatever people think about minority-populated schools,” Ms. Barnes
said, “on a number of levels it’s hard to convince white families to
come to a school like this. And then, a lot are looking for gifted and talented programs.”
Because magnet schools are prohibited from using academic screening,
they are not allowed to offer gifted and talented programs.
Applying to an elementary magnet school is not a simple process for
students who live outside the school’s zone. Parents must submit an
application for a lottery, listing the district magnet schools they wish
their child to attend.
The principals then determine how many lottery slots they will have
available — the majority of the magnet students enter in kindergarten —
making sure to reserve seats for all students who live in their zones.
To draw diverse applicants, Mr. Martinez, at P.S. 257, recruited at
community centers in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in neighborhoods in
Greenpoint (where he lives with his Irish-American wife and two
children). He pitched the school at Head Start nursery programs and
bodegas in Hispanic areas, and even flagged down prospective parents
jogging on the track at McCarren Park.
The percentage of Hispanic students at P.S. 257 decreased to 73 percent
in the 2011-12 school year, from 75 percent the year before. And the
progress seems likely to continue. Preliminary enrollment figures for
P.S. 257’s incoming kindergarten class show that out of nearly 100
children, 4 are white, 3 are Asian, and 16 are black — all coming from
outside the attendance zone.
“It is a major influx for us; we’ve never had that,” Mr. Martinez said.
Whether the appeal of the school, which has fervent parent support, will
fade because of the investigation into cheating accusations is not yet
clear. Mr. Leavy-DeVale, the principal, said he had not been notified
that his school was under investigation and denied that there had been
any cheating. “I stand by my teachers; I have great staff,” he said.
“And we have never seen that.”
The investigation began after teachers at Intermediate School 318
received poor evaluations because their students had performed badly on
the state tests. While seemingly focused on two schools that feed into
I.S. 318 — P.S. 257 and Public School 31 — the inquiry could expand its
scope.
Neither Ms. Barnes, at P.S. 250, nor Diane Vitolo, the principal at
Public School 380, another of the magnets, said she had been notified
that her school was being investigated.
P.S. 380, the John Wayne Elementary School, is a Brooklyn paradox: It is
named for a rugged American film star, sits in the middle of a
staunchly Hasidic neighborhood in Williamsburg and yet has a student
body that is 73 percent Hispanic.
The geographic area the school serves is 5 percent Hispanic and 93
percent white, but the white children are mostly Orthodox Jews, who
overwhelmingly attend yeshivas.
In 2009, P.S. 380 won a national academic award, but its enrollment was
dwindling. When the magnet grant allowed the school to recruit outside
its zone, enrollment grew to 580 from 470, but the Hispanic population
went up by 3 percentage points. Ms. Vitolo said that many of her current
students had parents or relatives who used to live in the neighborhood
before its demographic shifted.
“Although we want to attract — and that’s the goal, to attract — lots of
diversity, we just want children,” Ms. Vitolo said. “We don’t
necessarily see the different diversity. Children are children to us.”
Mr. Leavy-DeVale, at P.S. 257, was even blunter. “I didn’t get into this
just to have 12 European blond English-speaking kids,” he said. “If
that’s the mission of it, as long as my kids are getting things, then so
be it. Whoever can bring us money, I don’t care if they are liberal,
conservative, communists,” he said, adding: “I’ll put a Coca-Cola sign
on the door if it brings in dollars and direct services.”
Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme
Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court,
in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless
kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion,
he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring
attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity.
Referring to New York City, Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of education
at Teachers College at Columbia University, asked, “Is there even a goal
in terms of trying to create more diverse educational settings — not
just by race?”
She added: “If so, how can policy makers look at the given makeup of a
district and, if that’s a goal, make sure that more kids have more
access?”
The Education Department said it was addressing the issue by appointing a
deputy chancellor in charge of equity and access and offering tutoring
for students from low-income families studying for the exam for
specialized high schools.
Walking in Both Worlds
Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been
the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been
able to attract them in droves. It just has not opened yet.
Public School 414, the Brooklyn Arbor School,
is to open in September in a building alongside what is left of Public
School 19, a failing school whose scheduled closing nonetheless drew
strong parental protest. Brooklyn Arbor’s kindergarten class will be
mostly white, in a neighborhood that has been predominantly Dominican.
Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor in a prime location to draw
families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn
Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new
principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her
commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white
middle-class families to try the new school.
“A lot of it is marketing,” Ms. Irizarry said. “It takes a certain person who can walk in both worlds.”
Ms. Irizarry, 34, is white, grew up in the Netherlands, married a man of
Puerto Rican heritage and has a school-age son. She also spent the past
11 years teaching at P.S. 257; her assistant principal, Cristina
Albarran, 33, did, too. (She was also a student there.)
P.S. 19, the Roberto Clemente School, had originally won the magnet
grant, but the Education Department announced this year that it was
closing the school. Now, Brooklyn Arbor (beginning with kindergarten,
first and second grades) will split the magnet money with P.S. 19 (with
third, fourth and fifth grades this year and phasing out one year at a
time) and adopt the theme of global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry
plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof; her
school will be housed in separate wing in the building.
Becoming a magnet school was not part of her original plan, Ms. Irizarry
said, but she eagerly adopted the idea when Mr. Gallagher, the magnet
program director, told her the school would receive about $1 million
over the next two years.
“This money is the perfect thing for us right now to put us in business,” Ms. Irizarry said.
P.S. 19 had no choice but to share the money. The first year of the
grant, P.S. 19’s Hispanic population slightly decreased to 92 percent
from 95 percent; because the school was to close, it was prohibited from
recruiting in the 2011-12 school year.
P.S. 19 finished the year with a depleted roster of teachers and low morale.
When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when
she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican
neighborhoods.
She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At
Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s
carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities
photographed in green T-shirts.
Ms. Irizarry was interviewed by Joyce Suzflita, who runs a well-known blog, nycschoolhelp.
(Mr. Martinez had not heard of the blog.) As of now, the 75-student
kindergarten class will have 55 children from outside the school’s zone,
most of them white (including a number of new immigrants from Western
Europe and Asia who are bilingual); of the 60 first graders, 25 are out
of zone. The second grade, with 75 of its 80 students from the zone, is
mostly Hispanic.
Celeste Stern, a white parent from Crown Heights, was impressed by Ms.
Irizarry’s energy and won over by her approach. She soon told her
friends to apply.
Ms. Stern said she was looking for diversity after her daughter Alice
was shut out of her neighborhood kindergarten. And yet, at the same
time, Ms. Stern wanted there to be a balance.
“I don’t want Alice to be the only white kid,” she said, while
registering for Brooklyn Arbor in a classroom at P.S. 257. “I want her
to have a chance to have friends from all ethnic backgrounds and
socioeconomic backgrounds. I think that’s what makes New York so great
and so exciting.”
Yaskara Ramirez, 31, registering her son Alejandro the same day, did not
care that as a Hispanic child he would be in the minority. “That’s
perfectly fine,” she said. “I honestly don’t care about what makes up
the kindergarten class. I am just more concerned about the academics.”
Ms. Irizarry, nonetheless, said she was concerned that Hispanic parents
might feel they were being pushed out of the school. “I really need to
think about ways to address any kind of issues that will come up,” she
said.
Brooklyn Arbor is now an alternative to Public School 84, an increasingly popular school in the fastest-changing part of Williamsburg that has become a success in integration.
After P.S. 84 was named a magnet school for the visual arts in 2004, the
school struggled to blend its white students with its predominantly
Hispanic population. But when a new principal, Sereida Rodriguez,
arrived in 2009, she united the parents and infused the school with
programs and energy. She said she even discovered supplies left unused
from during the magnet grant.
Now the school has an intensely active PTA, led by white parents from
Northside. Its Hispanic population decreased to 73 percent from 85
percent this year; 17 percent of its students are white.
Still, Ms. Rodriguez encountered confusion with the Education Department
over out-of-zone recruiting. A magnet school can apply for an extension
past the six years guaranteed by the grant, though Ms. Rodriguez said
she was not initially told that.
But this spring, the department automatically put all her out-of-zone
kindergarten applicants on a waiting list for the fall.
“Finally,” Ms. Rodriguez said, “I get white families coming to my
school, and I didn’t want to discourage them, but I told them, O.K.,
we’ll get back to them.” She said the city eventually allowed those
applicants.
Increasingly, magnet schools are competing for students against new charter schools that are opening in the district. A vocal group of P.S. 84 parents led a vehement protest against the planned opening of a Citizens of the World Charter School in a portion of the building.
Brooke Parker, a founder of Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our
Public Schools, said advocates for the charter had been looking to
attract white families, recruiting in the same places that the more
savvy magnet schools had gone. That is unusual for charter schools,
which in New York have not often focused on integration as a goal.
Even with the number of charter schools increasing, and testing as the
overarching measure of a school’s success becoming the norm, federally
supported magnet schools still resonate with parents like Justin Jones
who value diversity as much as test scores. He and his wife moved to
Bushwick 12 years ago from Blacksburg, Va., and were one of the few
white families in the neighborhood. They were at P.S. 257’s
season-ending talent show to watch their daughter, Prairie, 5, one of
the school’s nine white children, twirl alongside her classmates in
rainbow-colored tutus.
“Ideally,” Mr. Jones said, “I like to think that everyone eventually is
going to have to work together to find solutions to fix the world.”
Kindergarten, he said, seems as good a place as any to start.
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