I truly enjoy acrimony between elite hipster liberals whose true colors come out like Bloods and Crips when they begin discussing school zoning issues. From Park Slope, Brooklyn:
When Park Slope mom Anita Gasser-Bodzin told her friends how much her daughter Emma was thriving in a second-grade class with chess, gardening, music and drama programs, her fellow mothers immediately wanted to know which school the 7-year-old was attending.
When she told them Emma was at P.S. 282, “their eyes almost fell out,” Gasser-Bodzin remembers.
This same group of moms had questioned her decision to send Emma to P.S. 282. “My friends were like, ‘Don’t you know it’s a black school?’ I was like, ‘What did you just say?’” Gasser-Bodzin recalled.
Even in a neighborhood that prides itself on progressive thinking, discomfort around P.S. 282′s racial makeup is a common theme when families chat about local schools, parents say.
First thing’s firth: hyphenated name alert. P.S. 282 is 73% black and 4% white. Many in the district bend the rules to send their kids to P.S. 321 which is 64% white and 15% black:
Meanwhile, P.S. 282 suffers from the perception that it doesn’t measure up academically to its neighborhood peers.
Some say that reputation is undeserved, but it means that few local families are willing to send their kids to P.S. 282. A mere 15 percent of P.S. 282′s pre-K through fifth-grade students actually live in the school’s zone, a desirable section of the North Slope full of multimillion-dollar brownstones.
…
“There’s a mythology that’s developed in the Slope among more affluent parents, especially those newer to the neighborhood, about P.S. 282 that is wildly different from the on-the-ground reality,” Underwood said.
“P.S. 282 is a great school.”
Gasser-Bodzin said she’s mystified by the school’s bad reputation. Her two daughters love P.S. 282 so much they “skip” to the school every morning, and she’s been “blown away” by their academic progress, she said.
Her older daughter, Emma, started reading chapter books at the end of kindergarten, she said.
I have to laugh at Gasser-Bodzin being “blown away” at the progress of her daughters. “Compared to what?” is the economist’s response to a measure as relative as early age intellectual development. Did Gasser-Bodzin expect her kids to regress at this early stage in life?
I looked at the stats of each school compiled by the New York Times (
P.S. 282 and
P.S. 321) to see how similar the two schools were in terms of performance. Intentionally or not, the article makes it seem as if the two schools perform similarly despite their racial differences. That’s mainly because they lead with a parent who clearly is blind to the world.
One pattern that often goes unmentioned is that the performance of students in schools with lots of minorities or poor students tend to perform worse and worse as they get older. The opposite seems true at schools with low proportions of such students. P.S. 321 student improved slightly from the 3rd to the 5th grade. Perhaps we can extrapolate all the way up through high school. Would parents rather send their kids to a school whose students perform better and better each year, or would they rather send their kids to a school that for some reason has students whose trajectory points downward? P.S. 282 students fell off a cliff. Does Gasser-Bodzin think that her daughters won’t be negatively effected by this?
Robert Underwood, a P.S. 282 parent, posts a quote he sent to the article’s author that was left out of the piece:
But in Brooklyn the diversity is real. And Park Slope is in Brooklyn, not Maine. If white parents want exclusively white, affluent schools, they should move to Darien. I just find it kind of amazing how there exist as many white parents in the Slope as there are who can so strongly support a black man for President, but can’t get their heads around their child going to a majority African-American school led by a strong African-American woman.
I agree with Underwood and part of my joy in discussing this topic comes from the hypocrisy of these NIMBY liberal parents who are totally cool with theoretical diversity. But to flip Underwood’s point, these white parents could and seemingly should let their local policy determine their national policy. They should take their local attitude and scale it upwards rather than adopting a utopian ideal which they’ll never live by.
Like this:
Like Loading...
– “I just find it kind of amazing how there exist as many white parents in the Slope as there are who can so strongly support a black man for President…”
I doubt any of them supported Sharpton in 2004 primaries. You know, a *real* black man.
– “but can’t get their heads around their child going to a majority African-American school…”
Even liberal whites don’t want their daughters beaten up by black girls and groped by packs of black boys. Or picking up ghetto slang and mannerisms.
– “…led by a strong African-American woman.”
If there is one thing a liberal white woman is terrified of, it’s a Strong African-American Woman.
Emma is going to be pregnant by age 14.
I’d rather have my kids be less intelligent students in a high performing school. That’s better for them than the opposite.
My parents, both lifelong Democratic voters, would readily admit that they moved us out to the county for better schools, but whether they would admit that the schools are better because they are full of middle-class white kids is a toss-up.
I would expect them to rationalize it by socioeconomic status rather than race, but I never really asked.
I, too, enjoy this, starting right off with Ms.Gasser-Bodzin’s faux outrage: “What did you just say?”
Other tidbits of interest from the article.
Nonetheless, P.S. 282… lost about 74 students this year, and that cost the school about $380,000 in funding… As a result of the cuts, a gym teacher and a dance teacher were let go, Alexis said.
Wait, what? A dance teacher? For K through 8th grade? They need a dance teacher? I weep for this tragic loss. I guess they won’t be learning the hokey-pokey.
This part is interesting, and I think explains a good deal of why PS 282 might not be that bad.
But a mom who toured P.S. 282 said she was put off by the school’s culture. She said administrators seemed defensive and unwelcoming, and were too focused on discipline for her taste. “They wear uniforms…They talked about how there was no talking in the hallways,” said the mom, who asked that her name not be used.
There you go! Uniforms and discipline = a good school. At least, as good as you can make it given the student body. Uniforms are the single easiest thing you can do to provide a startling change to the tone of a school. Of course, the Progressive parent quoted is just appalled that her little snowflakes wouldn’t be able to status-flaunt their wealth by wearing the latest fashions.
But is the discipline really there? Well…. the schools progress report suggests otherwise. Find it here: http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2011-12/Progress_Report_2012_EMS_K282.pdf
In the category of “School Environment” defined as “School Environment measures student attendance and a survey of the school community rating academic expectations, safety and respect, communication, and engagement,” PS 282 gets a big fat D. What about PS 321? School Environment is an A.
Now why would a mostly black school get a D in areas like “safety and respect” while a mostly white school gets an A? One could try to puzzle this out, but even attempting to do so would surely be racist.
A final thing unmentioned in the article is how classes are divided. Is there a “high achievers” class in PS 282? That is, are the little cohort of white kids actually largely segregated from their more rambunctious black and brown fellows? One wonders.
Meanwhile, major players seem to want to forget all about Trayvon Martin.
lara: “I’d rather have my kids be less intelligent students in a high performing school. That’s better for them than the opposite.”
This is actually an interesting conundrum. The old saw that’s it’s better to be a big fish in a little pond has some merit. If you want your supersmart kid to have high self-esteem and confidence that will carry forward through his life, it makes intuitive sense to have him taking advanced classes and excelling in a school full of mediocrities and dummies. Maybe that’s what goes through the warped heads of liberal whites who willingly put their kids in mostly-black schools for years of torment? Of course, it doesn’t work in reality, because the small boost in big fish-ism is vastly outweighed by the negative externalities of occupying a quasi-prison complex with antagonistic members of a much larger gang who live and breathe to make your kid’s life a hell matrix.
There is also the challenge factor: is a smart white kid going to buckle down even harder to escape into books and away from fellow students, in hopes of bolting a year early for safer pastures? Or is he going to graduate with an inflated sense of his ability because he was able to sail through classes that stumped his classmates, only to find he isn’t all that brilliant in a college full of his racial peers?
Another dimension to the conondrum that CH mentions is the development of race-realism. Too much whitopia insulation can result in the kid growing up without the kind of judgment and skill necessary to navigate our increasingly warlike diverse society.
(my parents came to the US from a martial law communist country to provide a better future for their posterity. The irony. The irony.)
One cannot help but be struck by the frequency of the mention of race by those who most vociferously deny its existence.
A conundrum, itz.
If your children can’t handle attending a majority-black school without becoming a bunch of idiots, then you are not fit to be a parent. A parent is supposed to be guiding their kids along the straight path. Better schools are only better because the parents of the kids who go there are more in tune with what their kids needs to succeed. I’d much rather send my kid to a ghetto school than some over-competitive, SWPL shithole. Even if they’re not a minority, going to some school in the hood looks a lot better to an elite school than being from an upper/upper-middle class area like 95% of the other applicants. It’s better to let them stand out and have the chance to be the best rather than get on the endless rat race of credential-ism and “well-roundness”. Plus, it would give them a chance to see the real world and be less insufferable.
anonymous:
you contradict yourself. up top you say that if your kids attend a black school but become idiots that you’re a failure as a parent. but at the bottom you say that if they attend a SWPL school that they stand a greater chance of becoming insufferable. wouldn’t that be a parental failure too?
the most important thing in all of this is what level of education these kids will receive. since this is all relative, it’s hard to determine how kids across the spectrum at each type of school will fare in these different settings. lacking a definitive way to determine how each kid will learn in each environment, we should assume that the curriculum will be fit to the average student. in schools with better “average students” we’d expect better overall learning environment. you can worry about relative status for your kids, but is that what is most important long term? maybe they feel inferior during school and for a few years afterwards, but when they confront the real world i think they’ll be happy that they got the better education even if their class rank was lower than it might have been if they attended a minority school.
anti-racist,
it looks like you spent a lot of time on that long response. sorry i had to delete it.
white boy chuck you will restore the comment of Brother Anti-Racist and behumble your racist self to him. If you cannot restore it you will repeat what Anti-Racist wrote. It better be exactly what he wrote. When Soldiers speak racists shut up and listen. And stay shut up.
@ Heartiste “Or is he going to graduate with an inflated sense of his ability because he was able to sail through classes that stumped his classmates, only to find he isn’t all that brilliant in a college full of his racial peers?”
You just explained the higher than average suicide rate for Ivy + sister schools as well as the transfer/probation rates after frosh year + the cheating that goes on in 2nd semester Freshman courses. Cornell’s gorges swallow up plenty of engineers who got their first C. The horror, the horror.
anonymous,
I don’t get the impression you have kids. Sending a well behaved, sensitive and intelligent child to a ghetto school is child abuse. I do think sometimes nice kids can muddle through early elementary school in not so great areas (more mixed rather than all out ghetto), but by 4th or 5th grade you need to get him or her out of there. Most halfway intelligent people understand this.
In reading this post, I just couldn’t wait to get done and go to the comments. What can I say, I’, not disappointed. Kudos guys, especially PA.
PA:
Agreed about whitopia folks. They often have all the self-preservation of a domesticated bunny. When I was in grad school, I tried to gently dissuade a bunch of my fellow students from camping at a beach park. The park is beautiful, but it’s in a rural Hawaiian town with a bit of a meth problem and the camp has a contingent of homeless Hawaiians, who as you might guess, are not fond of rich white townie grad students coming down to party on their turf. Of course they didn’t listen to me. Unfortunately, not once in the three times they did it, did reality intervene to teach them a lesson. Sometimes I think God takes favor on the meek, the mild and the cataclysmically stoned.
whites do not want their children to attend Black schools because the white girls are entranced by the Black Boys and the Black Boys beat up on the white boys
anti-racist:
and you’re OK with black boys beating up white boys?
You know he is.
You white boys need to turn off your thinking you do it too much. With submission. There is peace. Anti-Racist wants white blood spilled in his Name He will tell you Show your neck and hope the knifeman walks past you.
I went to a somewhat more diverse school than the norm for someone of my background – I’m guessing approximately 30% black. This was largely offset by the number of advanced academic programs offered which broke out demographically as one would expect. IMHO, it was diverse enough to give the necessary enlightenment, but had a fraction of the student body with enough parental investment necessary to create opportunities for high achievers. I’m imagining that there are plenty of such schools in the US- you just won’t find them in big cities, where population dynamics tend to cause considerably more demographic separation in public schools.
If you spend time in NAM schools, one of the first things you’ll notice is the..heightened, charged atmosphere. There are rules everywhere “Don’t Piss on the Floor” “Wash your hands” “No Gum”- it goes on and on and the kids have to be constantly reminded of the most basic sense of decorum. And most of it is ignored anyway. Sailer wrote on how this intensely disciplinarian environment produces good results (I think his example was the military, an accounted for pre-selection). But, it’s a miserable place to be for any normal white kid. It boils down to how you get kids to do what they’re supposed to do, and for one group moral suasion and explanation (relatively) work fine. For another, you just have to bark orders, to demand and expect and do so constantly- rules must be retaught over and over. And when kids from one group enter into the environment of the other, well, one feels terrible and afraid, and the other says “Party Time!”. It’s not fun to witness.
People who doubt the power of raw tribalism need to spend some time with teenagers. Putting children into an actively hostile situation to prove anti-racist bonafides helps no-one: Black kids don’t behave better; white kids get the snot and piss beaten out of them on a regular basis; white parents end up becoming jaded and their anti-racism never becomes more than a minor gloss over their white guilt, in their jostling for social status with other whites; and teachers have to abandon their principles to protect white kids or to ignore them.
It serves no-one. Almost no teacher I know – black or white – believes that teaching black kids and white kids in this country is the same. The best way to have the anti-racism beaten out of you is to try teaching in a mixed environment for a while.
Pingback: Lightning Round – 2012/12/12 « Free Northerner