A SYSTEM DIVIDED
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.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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