‘It Has to Start Somewhere’: Grass-Roots Drive to Integrate New York Schools

NEW YORK — The middle school in northern Manhattan is named after Booker T. Washington, a champion of education for African-Americans. But in a district where half the students are Hispanic and black, less than a quarter of the 852 students in this selective, high-performing school are from those groups.

Now Booker T. Washington on West 107th Street, also known as Middle School 54, is at the center of a debate over segregation in New York City’s public schools.

In the absence of a coordinated policy by the Education Department, District 3 — a diverse and highly segregated school district that spans the Upper West Side and Harlem — came up with its own desegregation plan for its middle schools, including MS 54, which would require them to set aside seats for children with low test scores.

The plan is one of an increasing number of desegregation efforts around the city led by local education officials and parents. And while this plan has met with resistance, some of it captured on a viral video of a meeting of angry parents at another District 3 school, chroniclers of the city’s fitful desegregation efforts see a growing recognition across demographic lines that segregation is a problem that needs to, and can be, addressed.

“When you look at the history of desegregation, it was a policy implemented top down,” said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, who characterized the last major efforts in the 1960s and 1970s as “paying lip service” to diversity in curriculum and teaching practices within schools. “This is grass-roots. It’s much more bottom up.”

The plan is intended to open the door at MS 54 and other selective middle schools to more black and Hispanic students, many of whom score below average on standardized state tests. “We’re trying to capture the students in District 3 elementary schools who have been shut out of some of the highest-performing schools, " said Kimberly Watkins, president of the district’s community education council, a parent group that advises on admissions policy.

But the district continues to grapple with just how to do that. During a meeting Wednesday night, the district superintendent introduced two alternative plans that would also set aside seats for low-performing students — not based solely on low test scores, but on a combination of test scores and grades, or test scores and the poverty of the students at their elementary school.

Josh Kross, 41, a father of three who is white, agreed that something must be done. When he attended an orientation for new families at MS 54, “It was all white people and a couple of Asian families,” he said. “There were no Hispanic families. There were no black families. It’s offensive and it doesn’t reflect the city.”

But Kross said that the plans failed to address the real problem — the poor education that these children had received until this point — and instead proposed to drop them into middle schools that they could be ill prepared to handle. “The school system is horribly segregated and underserves the underserved, but this isn’t the way to fix it,” he said.

Across the city, the desegregation efforts are driven by shifting demographics, as more white, middle-class families are choosing the city over the suburbs, and once-poor and immigrant neighborhoods in Manhattan and swaths of Brooklyn and Queens are becoming gentrified. “There are opportunities that didn’t exist before to create more integrated schools,” said Pedro Noguera, an education professor at UCLA, where a 2014 report finding that New York state has the most segregated public schools in the nation helped galvanize the issue.

And they are a response to a widespread perception that the city Education Department has moved too slowly on school segregation, which Mayor Bill de Blasio has called an unavoidable byproduct of residential segregation. The new schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, telegraphed his support for District 3’s plan when he tweeted the video of the angry meeting. Clara Hemphill, editor of the InsideSchools website, said she has heard from multiracial groups of parents working together to integrate schools in Jackson Heights in Queens, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. “We’re sort of waking up to how bad it is,” she said. “There is a momentum.”

Still, some black and Hispanic parents remain deeply skeptical after living with decades of segregation. Cleveland Campbell, 46, a father of two in Harlem, said that even when white students do not have top test scores and grades, he believes they still get into schools that black students do not. “That’s from years ago, we can’t change that,” he said. “It never stops.”

In Brooklyn’s District 15, some poor and minority families have felt excluded from the high-performing Middle School 51 in affluent Park Slope. Others have looked no further than the closest school, even if it is struggling, because they do not know any better or feel most comfortable there.

“It’s hard to look at, but segregated schools function as a system for hoarding privilege,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, D-Brooklyn, who is working with parents to integrate middle schools, which have been a recent focus partly because they are seen as gateways to further academic success. “Schools with whiter and wealthier student bodies are able to provide students with access to many more opportunities.”

Naila Rosario, a mother of two in largely working-class Sunset Park, recalled her frustration one year when even the top-performing student at her neighborhood elementary school was not admitted to MS 51. Meanwhile, she noted, Park Slope’s prestigious Public School 321 sent many students to MS 51, year after year.

“It’s not fair, it’s not equitable,” she said. “All kids should have access to all the schools — and not because you live in a certain neighborhood and your parents have access to certain resources.”

At the request of parents and local elected officials, the city Education Department spent $150,000 to hire an urban planning firm, WXY Studio, to lead a community process to come up with a way to integrate the middle schools. Hundreds of parents and educators have worked collaboratively over the past year — largely avoiding the drama of District 3 — on a plan that will be presented this summer.

In District 3, a battle erupted two years ago when school zones were redrawn to reduce crowding and increase diversity at elementary schools. One of the schools involved was Public School 199, a high-performing elementary school on the Upper West Side where parents hire tutors to ensure their children excel on state tests, and where the angry meeting caught on video took place.

The district’s middle-school effort has drawn a variety of criticisms from parents. Some say there are not enough seats for all the qualified applicants at the top schools, and that it could lower the quality of education. Others say it doesn’t do enough to help lower-performing middle schools. Robin Aronow, a school consultant, said that she had received a flood of calls from parents who are anxious about the plan and are considering applying to private schools in addition to public schools.

City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, a Democrat from the Upper West Side, said the goal should be to increase the academic and economic diversity in every school, though she also understood the concerns raised by some white, middle-class parents. “This is about, ‘I don’t want to lose a spot for my kid,'” she said.

Under the plan that was initially unveiled, every District 3 school would offer 10 percent of its sixth-grade seats to students who average a 1 on state tests — the lowest grade on a 1-to-4 scale — and another 15 percent to those who average a 2. For the current school year, only 11 percent of Booker T. Washington’s 299 admission offers went to these students.

Several of the district’s middle schools are already embracing diversity on their own. For Lafayette Academy on West 93rd Street, one result of expanding a popular dual-language French program has been to draw more affluent, white, foreign-born and high-achieving students to a predominantly black and Hispanic school that once had abysmal test scores. Brian Zager, the principal, said the diversity has improved learning across the school. “Once you start knocking down walls and putting kids together,” he said, “it’s going to create a unifying culture.”

At the Computer School, which receives up to 1,000 applicants for 140 sixth-grade spots, about 19 percent of those admitted for the fall scored either 1s or 2s on the state tests. Once admitted, students with low and high test scores learn side by side. “I see it as a challenge, but that’s what we’re supposed to do as educators — we’re supposed to be the problem solvers,” said Henry Zymeck, the principal.

Edwin Franco, 37, whose daughters go to school in Harlem, said that after years of hearing talk about desegregation, he was finally seeing action. But Franco, who himself went to segregated schools in Washington Heights, added that simply rolling out a new admissions policy would not be enough to roll back decades of segregation.

“It’s small,” he said. “But it has to start somewhere.”