Have NYC Schools Embraced the 'New Left'?

Jason Jones sent me an article recently that wound up causing me to write an awfully long email. I've lightly edited that email and turned it into this post.

The article in question in George Packer's "When the Culture War Comes for the Kids: Caught between brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City's schools" from this Month's Atlantic magazine. I can't decide if I recommend it because it's interesting and worthwhile or because it's useful context for what I'm writing here, but go ahead and check it out.

If you know me and have talked with me about my potential future research, I'm sure you can see why I have no interest in studying schools in NYC! And with all the absurdly stressful hoops that even the privileged jump through to secure what they consider the proper public or private educations for their children, you can also see why so many parents are vocal in maintaining segregated schools. And bathrooms. The demographics of NYC are fascinating when you consider how 'we' want America to look in a decade or two. Texas is almost there. Georgia will be there soon, too. Already, averaged across the US, most students are not white. As someone once said, the future is here but isn't distributed evenly. Perhaps I mean that in multiple senses when thinking about schools. 

And yes, life is so hard for a boomer Yale graduate who, with only an arts degree, has managed to live and raise a family in one of the most expensive cities in the world - all on the income from his writing. Woe is he. If only there was some way his children could be assured a future without succumbing to the oxymoronic pathway of the meritocratic elites. This guy's laments remind me of the kind of logic underpinning the recent college admissions scandal. He's got all the privilege afforded an educated white man but not quite enough money to entirely finesse the system. He looks at the hedge fund guy and recognizes that guy's kid will get into, say, Yale, because he'll buy them a new performing arts center or some other donations scheme. Meanwhile poor Mr. Packer's kids might have to settle for, gasp, Amherst, Swarthmore, or Williams! And when you see that he was considering $50,000 a year for private school tuition for 18 years, the $75,000 spent bribing a psychologist for a disability diagnosis, cheating on the SAT, and photoshopping some water polo photos starts to look less crazy. Hell, if the penalty is two weeks in prison and one year probation...

That bit about the PTA paying for various teachers' salaries was particularly grim. I wonder how much that has to do with testing in elementary and middle? New York's regents exams only cover ELA and Math until they get to high school so, I suppose, there's no reason to learn those things. There's also something incongruous about Packer's son's black friend Marcu simultaneously not know they had a backyard and almost always playing at their house. His insinuation that their friendship was made better by not talking about the obvious inequality of their families should be read against the following sections 5 and 6. Heaven forbid Packer or his kid have to feel uncomfortable. Someone find him a safe space! Mr. Packer is suddenly shocked when the Marcuses of the world want to talk about inequality, racism, and everything else. When the parents realize they have a choice in avoiding a series of tests that are used for middle and high school admissions, he balks at the 'opportunity' he might be throwing away for his own kids. Solidarity is, after all, only for the oppressed. 

Though, by the end of section 7, I was coming around to some of his criticisms of empty 'activist' education. It's a real pity that civics has been lost. Notice the PTA pays for a foreign language and science but not a social studies teacher - also not a tested subject until high school but they're an opt out school so I am increasingly confused by the logics. Elementary grades often fold all the subjects into the one classroom teacher's job. At least that was the case when I was over at PS 59. Social studies wasn't a separate class so much as an hour each week devoted more specifically to questions of history and society than to the use and consumption of language or math. Science was, curiously, a separate class with a separate teacher they attended once a week for two hours. Again, the logics confuse me. Because NYC in insane and kids can't even go to middle school without an application and test scores, they use a nobel-prize winning algorithm to 'match' children to schools. This is the exact same one used for medical residency matching - a process that I believe ensures nobody is happy. Seriously, no residents get their top choices, no residency gets their top recruits, and for six months nobody know where they're going to live in the following year. I'm so glad we're extending this to other areas.

But, I want to diverge from the article a little bit and talk more specifically about the integration initiative Packer mentions is happening in his district. I think it's an excellent case study in exactly how this fucking city replicates privilege at every opportunity. He only sees what what is happening to him and his kids' schools. Myopic but understandable. 

So, as Parker points out, District 15 in Brooklyn is supposed to be undergoing an integration plan that seeks to, largely, equalize the racial demographic proportions of the middle schools. Whereas they may have had 1 very white school and 9 very not white schools, now they will be distributed around in a way where about 10% of each middle school is white and so-on. (I'm using 10 middle schools as a nice round number example, I think there are actually only 8). Unlike in, say, Atlanta where Fulton County buses black students 30-40 miles from the south side to white schools on the north side, District 15 is only about 3 miles long and a mile wide. The transportation changes would be minimal. You could probably walk end to end in about 1.5 hours. Anyway, time for a thought experiment. We know who, demographically speaking, tends to do the best in school. White kids and Asian kids. As it stands, throughout NYC, white and asian students end up clustered in a few high ranked public schools. They score higher on tests, sure, but also attend schools that promote them through in a way that better sets them up for admissions to competitive middle and high schools and, eventually, colleges. All of this is what the DOE's proposal is trying to fix. Here's the thought experiment: should this plan succeed and the middle schools in this district become largely proportionate to the demographics of the district, which students will be the highest performing students at every school?

Okay, now, keeping your answer in mind, allow me to introduce another initiative that the mayor and DOE are trying to implement. They want to overhaul admissions at the city's selective admissions high schools. These are only 8 of hundreds of schools but they are, essentially, private academies for the highest performing students in the city and are considered a golden ticket into Ivy League universities. As it stands now, there is even a special test for the selective admissions high schools, the SHSAT (again, these people are fucking insane). The proposal would change admissions at these elite schools to automatically accept the top 7% of students from every middle school. The top 7%. Not 10 or 5 but 7 because why not?

Now, do you remember the answer you had to your thought experiment? The one about which students would comprise the top students of middle schools under the proposed integration plans? That is how privilege really works. That is how the most segregated school system in America will replicate white supremacy under the guise of diversity and equity. That is how a progressive mayor and a DOE largely run by people of color can be the handmaidens of social reproduction. Indeed, I have experience with a not-too-dissimilar program, the HOPE scholarship. I benefited from a Democrat's progressive attempt to make college free for a large number of students. That attempt, though, was largely funded by the poor and by black Georgians because that's who buys most of the lottery tickets! When I talk to people about this, they don't respond well. Most, like Packer, are concentrated on what it means for their kid, for their school, and if they need to flee to private schools or somewhere unthinkable, like White Plains.

Of course, everything is still muddling its way through. Nothing is rolled out city-wide or, in the case of the high school admissions, even close to becoming policy, yet. It'll never happen that way, they assure me. We thought that about concentration camps for children at the southern border, too. We felt that way about voting, that rights only move in one direction. We felt a lot of things that made us feel better about an uncertain future. Packer seems eager to portray his son as a budding Atticus Finch. Maybe he thinks it'll help his admissions chances to Stuyvesant High School. Meanwhile, the machine grinds on; mulching people into the grist needed to keep the Packers of the world on top. 

Thinking more broadly about the situation nationwide, I wonder how it is that the most progressive places in theory are often the least progressive in practice? Why is it that black men have higher social mobility in the conservative, discriminatory South than in the progressive, inclusive northeast? Why is it that the most segregated schools are found in the northeast and midwest? (Even when controlled for desegregation busing!) How can the west coast be both the most progressive and the national hotbed of unsheltered homelessness? (Georgia cut its homeless population by 10,000! Makes me wonder if they're playing with the math?) How is it possible that 10% of progressive NYC's students are homeless? Yet we are told to worry about opt-out and too much discussion of identity in the classroom?

It's a stunning indictment of American progressive values put into effect. No wonder there's a reverse great migration of African Americans away from the North. Recently Gloria Ladson-Billings gave a talk here at TC. She was discussing the 'northern strategy'. This is obviously a play on the Southern Strategy but, rather than focusing on reframing political coalitions, she is focusing on how schools nationwide are being reframed in the lens of northern education reform. The talk does a good job of tracing the often-hidden lineage of the northern cities and states in maintaining and growing segregation both in the pre- and post-Brown US. She flat out calls it de jure and I am inclined to agree. 

A pox on both their houses.