Author: chrisramos270

I’m working with Steven and Kash to look at the differences between New Dorp High School and Staten Island Technical High School. The articles “School Choice” and “Is Demography Still Destiny?” both relate to our school profiles. Staten Island Technical High School has a very competitive color-blind admissions test, but is very racially segregated compared to New Dorp High School, which is not competitive and whose student body is more reflective of the surrounding community.

“School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide” is a study of a diversely populated school district with very pronounced segregation despite colorblind school choice policies. The colorblind admissions benefitted white upper-class students because of parent social connections and money. Allison Rosa and Amy Stuart Wells interviewed white parents in the district about how they decided where to enroll their children. They found that, despite an increasing trend of desiring diverse schools, white parents with economic means still were drawn to mostly white “good” schools and gifted and talented programs. Their study pertained to kindergarten enrollments, but the same principle is relevant to specialized high school applications. Segregation is a major issue in specialized high schools, but white parents still encourage their children to apply. Both sets of parents fear that their children would fall behind in the high-stakes education system, so they chose “good” schools despite desiring more diversity.

This reading reminded me of a prior class reading by Nikole Hannah-Jones titled “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” which was a first-hand account by a Black mother who wants to fix the segregated public-school system but also hopes her daughter can get ahead. According to “School Choice,” white upper-class parents struggled between wanting diverse schools and deciding how to best benefit their children. Both show parents trying to navigate an unfair system of power. Margaret Anderson wrote that having white parents “unlearn” racism will not dismantle a racist system. This supports a broader argument to make structural changes in the school system, so that parents aren’t forced to make decisions under these constraints.

“Is Demography Still Destiny?” outlines the problems with the current school choice system, and the former article also builds on that. The Bloomberg administration’s restructuring of schools to focus on school choice still allows white economically-advantaged students to have more options and obtain their first choice, as also mentioned by Rosa and Stuart. When we look at Staten Island Tech and other specialized high schools’ admissions policies, we find that the “color-blind” admissions test benefits white, economically well-off students. Specialized high schools are not as accessible a choice for economically disadvantaged students and students of color as they are for white economically advantaged students.

It’s clear that “busing” is just an excuse white parents gave so they can reject school desegregation. They argued that they didn’t want their children to have to be bused to in integrated schools, despite the fact that buses were already commonly used in most cities to maintain segregation in schools. The protests against busing took place before courts ordered to use buses to desegregate schools (29). The busing protests gave the North time to “postpone desegregating until ordered to do so by a federal court” (29).

“Busing” was a concern white parents could hide behind when they were really opposed to their children attending school alongside Black children, and it was effective. 15,000 white mothers protested in March 1964 against “busing,” and the protest shaped federal policies about school integration. Because they weren’t claiming to be against integration like the South, Northern states were able to claim issues with side effects of school integration, like busing, as an excuse not to integrate their schools. What the 1964 protest did was increase tension and fear among white people about desegregation coming to other city school systems, and it gave these cities a united excuse. Media like newspapers and television broadcasts spread this fear throughout the country, and limited attempts to desegregate schools.

We see again that the issue of “segregation” is more centered about the use of the word “segregation” rather than the segregation itself. Arguments presented about school segregation are met with literary critiques about “preferring words like separation and racial imbalance” (32). The dispute over “busing” is another example of diction being used as a tool to avoid a critical element of an argument. “Busing” clearly is a synonym for “segregation” in these protests. Superintendent Jansen used an argument of “extremists on both sides” to “present official inaction as a fair middle ground rather than as the maintenance of an educational status quo that benefitted white students and harmed black students” (36). Because of these twisted words, Jansen was able to listen to demands of white parents calling for “busing” rather than seeing it as an issue of segregation.

The chapters from Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School detail the creation of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, and the factors that induced its creation.

There was a boom in children attending school during the Great Depression. “By the end of the 1930s [in the country], roughly 73 percent of fourteen-to seventeen-year-olds were attending high school, up from just over half at the start of the Depression” (112). Students were staying in school instead of competing in the competitive job market, because the youth market collapsed. These students were usually from immigrant backgrounds. Schools filled up and often became overcrowded.

In districts with an absence of high schools, local leaders worried that children would be tempted into misbehaving because they didn’t have jobs or schools to attend. There was no senior high school accessible to boys who lived in the lower Bronx or Upper East Side of Manhattan. Leonard Covello, future principal of Benjamin Franklin High School, wrote that boys “turn to the street for recreation and activity which is often of an undesirable nature” (115). The vision for Benjamin Franklin High School was that it would be “a school for all children of all the people” (115). However, its attendance zone was drawn “to avoid a large influx of Negroes from the Central Harlem District” (117) despite the fact that overcrowding had already funneled Black students into less desirable (“unzoned, older”) buildings and essentially created segregated schools.

The chapter explains that, while Covello is known for his social justice efforts, “… their strategy may have played unwittingly into a larger pattern of restricted access for blacks to upper Manhattan high schools” (117). The statement seems modest because America as a country has historically restricted Black people from access to not just schools but also jobs and neighborhoods, which we’ve been discussing in class. Authors Johnek and Puckett stress that they were reluctant to consider “any ulterior motive” for drawing district lines to exclude Black students from attending the high school (117), but there was never a real reason for why to intentionally manipulate the racial makeup of the school to exclude Black students.

The Department of Education’s report Diversity in New York City Public Schools released in 2017 outlined goals to achieve “Equity and Excellence for all.” Their goals are to increase the number of students in racially representative schools, decrease the number of economically stratified schools, and increase the number of inclusive schools to serve English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities. The DOE assigned a School Diversity Advisory Group to work with the community and help New York City achieve these goals.

The report doesn’t address New York’s segregation problem by name. The word segregation is never mentioned, but it’s referred to in roundabout phrases like “increased diversity” and “racial representation.” The way data is represented also goes out of its way to avoid talking about segregation. It uses the phrase “economically stratified” to define schools that don’t have students from integrated income levels, but won’t say that schools without racial integration are segregated or even racially stratified. Instead it says “30.7% of schools are racially representative today,” leaving readers to infer that the rest are segregated. The report doesn’t mention that a significant percent of economically stratified students are also minority students. The language purposely leaves out politically loaded words like “segregation” and “integration.” There doesn’t seem to be a reason not to call the plan an attempt at integration until you check the date of its release, in June 2017, and remember that the mayor was in a reelection campaign and that integration is a controversial problem.

A major concern when reading this report is that the bar seems really low. The first goal in the plan is to increase the number of students in racially representative schools by 50,000 over the next five years, but there are 1.1 million students in NYC public schools, and there are no plans mentioned to continue this success after the first five years. The second goal is to decrease the number of economically stratified schools by 150 in the next five years, but there are over 1,700 schools and again there’s no mention of change after that. The third goal in the plan is to increase the number of inclusive schools for English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities and this goal doesn’t even have a number goal to strive for.

While the proposals for how to achieve these goals might be criticized for not adequately addressing the problems of NYC schools, the report and case studies of various other schools make it seem like desegregation is best solved on a case by case basis. “The larger, long-term work of making our schools more diverse must be driven by meaningful community discourse and debate,”  and this statement probably refers to community efforts to integrate their local public schools. Most of these proposals would be amazing for New York City schools as a whole, like online applications and increased STEM/AP participation, but the most important work of integrating NYC schools is still left to be done at the community level with the support of the DOE.