‘Many Echoes of My Family’s Journey’: Readers React to School Segregation
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Version 0 of 1. When the magazine published my article on how my husband and I navigated selecting a school for our daughter in New York City — one of the most segregated school systems in the country — it certainly touched a nerve. Since it went online last Thursday, it has garnered hundreds and hundreds of comments, emails, Facebook shares and Twitter conversations. It’s clear that people felt compelled to share, criticize and consider the arguments put forth in the article and discuss their own school decisions, and mine. Below are some comments and questions from readers, with responses from me. “Segregated’ is most definitely a poor word choice. It has a connotation implying that the lack of diversity in New York City schools is imposed by law. How is a predominantly Latino school in a predominantly Latino neighborhood “segregated”? The school demographic is based on who lives in the neighborhood. New York City has had specifically ethnic neighborhoods since its birth. To use the term “segregated” is dangerous. If you don’t like the schools in a particular neighborhood, choose another neighborhood that suits your needs better. Margaret Elizabeth Some readers objected to my use of the word “segregation” to describe schools in New York City that are almost entirely black and Latino. They believe that segregation occurs only when mandated by law. But both legally and culturally, we have always recognized varying forms of segregation — de jure, by law, and de facto, by fact. In the North, the lines between de jure and de facto segregation have long been muddied, because while laws requiring segregation were not common, as my article points out, segregation still often resulted from the intentional and discriminatory policies and actions of public officials. To say that the segregation in New York City, or any city, is simply a result of individual housing choices assumes a free and open housing market, where people can simply choose where they want to live. We have never had a free and open housing market in this country, and that is why it was important for me to show the story of the Farragut Houses, and how federal and local policy constrained the choices of black and Puerto Rican residents and how it socially engineered housing segregation where it did not exist before. Further, we know from record lending-discrimination settlements in the last decade, and from fair-housing testing done by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and many other agencies, that potential black and Latino home buyers still face rampant discrimination when trying to move into communities with better opportunities. For readers who want to understand the history of housing segregation in this country, and particularly how the segregation experienced by black Americans is different from that experienced by Italians, Polish, Irish and other immigrant groups, I’d suggest the book “American Apartheid,” by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton. Another Times school desegregation article ignoring Asian students. Why, Ms. Hannah-Jones, do Asian students thrive equally well in either a segregated or integrated setting? Sean, Fort Lee, N.J. I’d need a lot more space than this to address why the experience of Asian-Americans, as a whole, is different from black students. The history of a group of people brought here as slaves, for whom the entire American racial caste system was built, is necessarily going to be very different from the experience of a group who chose to immigrate to this country. Though Americans like to group everyone who is not white together, different racial groups have always had vastly different experiences in this country. There is a reason most school desegregation law does not address Asian students. But to try to sum it up quickly, Asian-Americans by and large are the most integrated of all racial groups in this country, both in terms of housing and schools, and they are the most likely to live next to and attend schools with white children. They do not typically experience the intense segregation that black students face, nor are they typically concentrated in high-poverty schools with few resources. As a result, their educational experiences, again, generally speaking, are quite different from those of black and Latino students. The author neglects to describe the condition of the three other local public schools she “considered” in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she lives. Were these schools so inferior that even P.S. 307 seemed a better option? I suspect so, and the author should have come clean about this. I’m African-American and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the ’70s and ’80s. My parents sent me to private and public schools outside the neighborhood because the local schools were so bad. My mother, who also grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was sent by my grandparents to a parochial school in the neighborhood and then a public high school outside the neighborhood. My four children, all born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, were sent to a wonderful, independent Montessori school in Cobble Hill. My point being that middle-class black residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant seeking better educational opportunities for their children have been abandoning the neighborhood public schools since the 1960s. This history, coupled with recent gentrifiers continuing the tradition of not sending their children to the local public schools, reveals that this is more of a class phenomena than it is a race thing. I’m sure the author doesn’t want to appear culpable, like me and many other residents who have abandoned the local Bedford-Stuyvesant public schools for better schools, but she’s no different. Sending her child to a better, though still predominantly black, school in another neighborhood reveals that she is just like the rest of us. edepass, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. In case it was not clear in the article, my husband and I applied to three neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant schools in addition to P.S. 307, which actually had lower test scores than the three neighborhood schools. The reason we picked P.S. 307 as our first choice was simple mathematics. We did not want to pay for another year of preschool, and P.S. 307 had 100 prekindergarten seats, while our neighborhood schools had between 16 and 32, before sibling preferences. P.S. 307 offered us better odds. Had we gotten into one of the other schools instead, Najya would be in a neighborhood school. With that said, I understand why parents make a different choice than I did. This article was not intended to separate myself from other parents. There are certainly black and white and Asian and Latino parents in this city who have made similar choices as my husband and me, and many who did not. What I did hope to do was get people to grapple more with those choices, to think about the role of public education and to open their eyes to the devastating consequences for those families who have the least choice. And, quickly, I think it’s important to point out that as much as we’d like to negate the role of race, we simply can’t. It is true that the problems facing the New York City public schools are those of both race and class. Mounds of research shows that race has its own effect. If class were the only issue, there are enough poor white children in this country to have schools that are poor and integrated. But that is not the case. In fact, what we know is that the typical poor white family lives in a wealthier neighborhood than a middle-class black family and therefore is more likely to have access to middle-class schools than middle-class black families. Dear Nikole, Thank you for your article on school segregation. We are living a similar experience here in Philadelphia, where our son is one of a small but growing number of white and/or middle-class kids (heavily concentrated in the younger grades) at our neighborhood public school, where about 85 percent of the overall population comes from economically disadvantaged families. It is, frankly, a school we did not envision sending our future children to when we bought our house nearly nine years ago, despite it being down the block. Then we went inside, got involved and were thrilled to find that the school is amazing and a wonderful fit for our family. We are in the school zone (“catchment”) next to a school that is predominantly white and affluent, drives higher property values and has developed a tradition of parental engagement and financial investment. This year, for the first time, some of these families are being redirected to our school because of overcrowding. There are so many nuances, opportunities and challenges, and we are lucky to have an amazing and clearheaded principal to navigate the local landscape. Basically, we cannot do anything about the other school’s overcrowding, which is likely to impact us, so for now we keep our focus on improving our thriving school and building our community. In this light, I have been working with others to lead community engagement and get families and other community members to walk through the doors and see the school for themselves. We have a small, mixed-income and diverse pocket of the city — the catchment is only 25 square blocks — where conventional wisdom among families that can choose otherwise is not to even look at the neighborhood school. This is true but rapidly changing for many schools in Philadelphia, especially around Center City. We love our school. We love our kid’s teachers and his friends, and he delights in seeing them around the neighborhood. The idea is to have the school reflect our neighborhood, but I think a lot about how that happens responsibly, respectfully and for everyone. Over the next few years, what we and other families have started with the best of intentions is likely to snowball. More and more white and/or middle-class families with prekindergarten-age kids are showing interest. Also, no matter the eventual solution for the adjacent catchment school’s overcrowding (redrawing lines, lotteries, etc.), our school will be impacted. Reading your story felt like reading our own in a way, and it very much spoke to me. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Ben Schindler, Philadelphia I have heard from so many families who have wrestled with these choices, and I commend you. I think your concerns about the unintended consequences of your school possibly gentrifying show just how hard building and maintaining an integrated, equitable system will be. But it is worth the work. I loved your piece. There were so many echoes of my own family’s journey. Twenty years ago, my wife, Mari Matsuda, and I decided to send our children to our local public school in Washington, D.C., which was 96 percent black. Two weeks ago, our daughter Kimiko graduated from Harvard College — Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude — and is still a young freedom fighter and activist artist. I wrote about the early years of our experience in a Yale Law Journal article titled “Forbidden Conversations.” Thank you again for all of your thoughtful, brave and loving writing. Thank your husband, too. I’d love the chance to meet you both. If you are ever in Hawaii, please look us up and we will have you over for dinner. Charles Lawrence These are the types of stories that make this reporting worth it, and that tell me what I know logically but worry about emotionally — that my daughter will be just fine and that enrolling her in the P.S. 307 was the right thing to do. And, if we are ever in Hawaii, we’d love to meet you, too. |