by Sid Holt
As PS 8 improved, more and more white families from Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, and Vinegar Hill enrolled their children, and the classrooms in the lower grades became majority white. The whitening of the school had unintended consequences. Some of the black and Latino parents whose children had been in the school from the beginning felt as if they were being marginalized. The white parents were able to raise large sums at fund raisers and could be dismissive of the much smaller fund-raising efforts that had come before. Then, Goldsmith says, the new parents started seeking to separate their children from their poorer classmates. “There were kids in the school that were really high-risk kids, kids who were homeless, living in temporary shelters, you know, poverty can be really brutal,” Goldsmith says. “The school was really committed to helping all children, but we had white middle-class parents saying, ‘I don’t want my child in the same class with the kid who has emotional issues.’ ”
The parents who had helped build PS 8, black, Latino, white, and Asian, feared they were losing something important, a truly diverse school that nurtured its neediest students, where families held equal value no matter the size of their paychecks. They asked for a plan to help the school maintain its black and Latino population by setting aside a percentage of seats for low-income children, but they didn’t get approval.
PS 8’s transformation to a school where only one in four students are black or Latino and only 14 percent are low-income began during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, known for its indifference toward efforts to integrate schools. But integration advocates say that they’ve also been deeply disappointed by the de Blasio administration’s stance on the issue. In October 2014, after the release of the UCLA study pointing to the extreme segregation in the city’s schools, and nearly a year after de Blasio was elected, Councilmen Ritchie Torres and Brad Lander moved to force the administration to address segregation, introducing what became the School Diversity Accountability Act, which would require the Department of Education to release school-segregation figures and report what it was doing to alleviate the problem. “It was always right in front of our faces,” says Lander, a representative from Brooklyn, whose own children attend heavily white public schools. “Then the UCLA report hit, and the segregation in the city became urgent.”
The same month that Lander and Torres introduced the bill, Fariña, the schools chancellor, took questions at a town-hall-style meeting for area schools held at PS 307. A group of four women, two white, two black, walked to the microphone to address Fariña. They said that they were parents in heavily gentrified Park Slope and that Fariña’s administration had been ignoring their calls to help their school retain its diminishing black and Latino populations by implementing a policy to set aside seats for low-income children. Fariña, a diminutive woman with a no-nonsense attitude, responded by acknowledging that there “are no easy answers” to the problem of segregation and warned that there were “federal guidelines” limiting “what we can do around diversity.” What Fariña was referring to is unclear. While the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Parents Involved tossed out integration plans that took into account the race of individual students, the court has never taken issue with using students’ socioeconomic status for creating or preserving integration, which is what these parents were seeking. In addition, the Obama administration released guidelines in 2011 that explicitly outlined the ways school systems could legally use race to integrate schools. Those include drawing a school’s attendance zone around black and white neighborhoods.
At another town-hall meeting in Manhattan last October, Fariña said, “You don’t need to have diversity within one building.” Instead, she suggested that poor students in segregated schools could be pen pals and share resources with students in wealthier, integrated public schools. “We adopt schools from China, Korea, or wherever,” Fariña told the room of parents. “Why not in our own neighborhoods?” Integration advocates lambasted her for what they considered a callous portrayal of integration as nothing more than a cultural exchange. “Fariña’s silly pen-pal comment shows how desensitized we’ve become,” Torres told me. “It could be that the political establishment is willfully blind to the impact of racial segregation and has led themselves to believe that we can close the achievement gap without desegregating our school system. At worst it’s a lie; at best it’s a delusion.” He continued, “The scandal is not that we are failing to achieve diversity. The scandal is we are not even trying.”
Fariña would only talk to me for fifteen minutes by phone. She told me in May that her pen-pal comments had been taken out of context. “If you hear any of my public speeches, this has always been a priority of mine,” she said. “Diversity of all types has always been a priority.” She went on to talk about the city’s special programs for autistic students and about how Japanese students have benefited from the expansion of dual-language programs. But Asian American students are already the group most integrated with white students. When pressed about integration specifically for black and Latino students, Fariña said the city has been working to support schools that are seeking more diversity and mentioned a socioeconomic integration pilot program at seven schools. “I do believe New York City is making strides. It is a major focus going forward.”
On May 30, four days after our interview, the Department of Education said in an article in the Daily News that it was starting a voluntary systemwide “Diversity in Admissions” program and would be requesting proposals from principals. In 2014, several principals said they had submitted integration proposals and had not gotten any response from Fariña.
The announcement of the new initiative caught both principals and parents by surprise. Jill Bloomberg, principal at Brooklyn’s Park Slope Collegiate, which teaches sixth through twelfth grade, says she learned about the initiative from the news article but otherwise had heard nothing about it, even though the deadline to submit proposals is July 8, about a month away. “I am eager for some official notification for exactly what the program is,” she told me.
David Goldsmith, who has been working on desegregation efforts as a member of the community education council, says he found the initiative, its timing, and the short deadline for submitting proposals “puzzling.” “We could be very cynical and say, ‘They are not serious,’ ” he says.
Last June, de Blasio signed the School Diversity Accountability Act into law. But the law mandates only that the Department of Education report segregation numbers, not that it do anything to integrate schools. De Blasio declined to be interviewed, but when asked at a news conference in November why the city did not at least do what it could to redraw attendance lines, he defended the property rights of affluent parents who buy into neighborhoods to secure entry into heavily white schools. “You have to also respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area,” he said, because families have “made massive life decisions and investments because of which school their kid would go to.” The mayor suggested there was little he could do because school segregation simply was a reflection of New York’s stark housing segregation, entrenched by decades of discriminatory local and federal policy. “This is the history of America,” he said.
Of course, de Blasio is right: Housing segregation and school segregation have always been entwined in America. But the opportunity to buy into “good” neighborhoods with “good” schools that de Blasio wants to protect has never been equally available to all.
• • •
To best understand how so many poor black and Latino children end up in neglected schools, and why so many white families have the money to buy into neighborhoods with the best schools, you need to look no further than the history of the Farragut Houses and PS 307. Looking at PS 307 today, you might find it hard to imagine that the school did not start out segregated. The low-slung brick elementary school, which opened in 1964, and the Farragut public-housing projects right outside its front doors once stood as hopeful, integrated islands in a city fractured by strict col
or lines in both its neighborhoods and its schools.
The ten Farragut buildings, spread across roughly eighteen acres, opened in 1952 as part of a scramble to house returning GIs and their families after World War II. When the first tenants moved in, the sprawling campus—named for David Farragut, an admiral of the United States Navy—was considered a model of progressive working-class housing, with its open green spaces, elevators, modern heating plant, laundry, and community center.
In 1952, a black woman named Gladys McBeth became one of Farragut’s earliest tenants. Nearly three generations later, when I visited her in November, she was living in the same fourteenth-floor apartment, where she paid about $1,000 a month in rent. Back then, she said, Farragut was a place for strivers. “I didn’t know nothing about projects when I moved in,” she said. “It was veteran housing.” The project housed roughly even numbers of black and white tenants, including migrants escaping hardship from Poland, Puerto Rico, and Italy and from the feudal American South. To get in, everyone had to show proof of marriage, a husband’s military-discharge papers, and pay stubs.
Robert McBeth, Gladys’s husband, drove a truck while she stayed home raising their four children. In the years before the Brown decision, the oldest of the McBeth children went to a nearby school where the kids were predominantly black and Latino because the New York City Board of Education bused white children in the area to other schools, according to the NAACP. School officials at the time, as today, claimed the racial makeup of the schools was an inevitable result of residential segregation. Though Farragut was not yet segregated, most of the city was. And that segregation in housing often resulted from legal and open discrimination that was encouraged and condoned by the state, and at times required by the federal government.
Nowhere would that become more evident than in Farragut, which by the 1960s was careering toward the same fate overtaking nearly all public housing in big cities. White residents used Federal Housing Administration–insured loans to buy their way out of the projects and to move to shiny new middle-class subdivisions. This subsidized home-buying boom led to one of the broadest expansions of the American middle class ever, almost exclusively to the benefit of white families. The FHA’s explicitly racist underwriting standards, which rated black and integrated neighborhoods as uninsurable, made federally insured home loans largely unavailable to black home seekers. Ninety-eight percent of these loans made between 1934 and 1968 went to white Americans.
Housing discrimination was legal until 1968. Even if black Americans managed to secure home loans, many homes were off-limits, either because they had provisions in their deeds prohibiting their sale to black buyers or because entire communities—including publicly subsidized middle-class developments like Levittown on Long Island and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan—barred black home buyers and tenants outright. The McBeths tried to buy a house, but like so many of Farragut’s black tenants, they were not able to. They continued to rent while many of their white neighbors bought homes and built wealth. Scholars attribute a large part of the yawning wealth gap between black and white Americans—the typical white person has thirteen times the wealth of a typical black person—to discriminatory housing policies.
But before Farragut’s white tenants left, parents of all colors sent their children to PS 307. Gladys McBeth, who died in May, sent her youngest child across the street to PS 307 and worked there as a school aide for twenty-three years. “It was one of the best schools in the district,” she reminisced, sitting in a worn paisley chair. But by 1972, Farragut was more than 80 percent black, and to fill the vacant units and house the city’s growing indigent population, the city changed the guideline for income and work requirements, turning the projects from largely working-class to low-income.
At some point, PS 307’s attendance zone was redrawn to include only the Farragut Houses, ensuring the students would be black, Latino and poor. The New York City Department of Education does not keep attendance data before 2000, but as McBeth remembered it, by the late 1980s, PS 307 was also almost entirely black and Latino. McBeth, who sent all four of her children to college, shook her head. “It all changed.”
• • •
PS 307 was a very different place from what it had been, but Najya was thriving. I watched as she and her classmates went from struggling to sound out three-letter words to reading entire books. She would surprise me in the car rides after school with her discussions of hypotheses and photosynthesis, words we hadn’t taught her. And there was something almost breathtaking about witnessing an auditorium full of mostly low-income black and Latino children confidently singing in Mandarin and beating Chinese drums as they performed a fan dance to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
But I also knew how fragile success at a school like PS 307 could be. The few segregated, high-poverty schools we hold up as exceptions are almost always headed by a singular principal like Roberta Davenport. But relying on one dynamic leader is a precarious means of ensuring a quality education. With all the resources Davenport was able to draw to the school, PS 307’s test scores still dropped this year. The school suffers from the same chronic absenteeism that plagues other schools with large numbers of low-income families. And then Davenport retired last summer, just as the clashes over PS 307’s integration were heating up, causing alarm among parents.
Najya and the other children at PS 307 were unaware of the turmoil and the battle lines adults were drawing outside the school’s doors. Faraji, my husband, had been elected copresident of PS 307’s PTA along with Benjamin Greene, another black middle-class parent from Bed-Stuy, who also serves on the community education council. As the potential for rezoning loomed over the school, they were forced to turn their attention from fund raising and planning events to working to prevent the city’s plan from ultimately creating another mostly white school.
It was important to them that Farragut residents, who were largely unaware of the process, had a say over what happened. Faraji and I had found it hard to bridge the class divides between the Farragut families and the middle-class black families, like ours, from outside the neighborhood. We parents were all cordial toward one another. Outside the school, though, we mostly went our separate ways. But after the rezoning was proposed, Faraji and Benjamin worked with the Rev. Dr. Mark V. C. Taylor of the Church of the Open Door, which sits on the Farragut property, and canvassed the projects to talk to parents and inform them of the city’s proposal. Not one PS 307 parent they spoke to knew anything about the plan, and they were immediately worried and fearful about what it would mean for their children. PS 307 was that rare example of a well-resourced segregated school, and these parents knew it.
The Farragut parents were also angry and hurt over how their school and their children had been talked about in public meetings and the press. Some white Dumbo parents had told Davenport that they’d be willing to enroll their children only if she agreed to put the new students all together in their own classroom. Farragut parents feared their children would be marginalized. If the school eventually filled up with children from high-income white families—the median income for Dumbo and Vinegar Hill residents is almost ten times that of Farragut residents—the character of the school could change, and as had happened at other schools like PS 8, the results might not benefit the black and Latino students. Among other things, PS 307 might no longer qualify for federal funds for special programming, like free after-school care, to help low-income families.
“I don’t have a problem with people coming in,” Saaiba Coles, a Farragut mother with two children at PS 307, told those gathered at a community meeting about the rezoning. “I just don’t want them to forget about the kids that were already here.” Faraji and Benjamin collected and delivered to the education council a petition with more than 400 signatures of Farragut residents supporting the rezoning, but only under certain conditions, including that half of all the seats at PS 307 would be guaranteed for low-income children. That would ensure that the school remained truly integr
ated and that new higher-income parents would have to share power in deciding the direction of the school.
In January of this year, the education council held a meeting to vote on the rezoning. Nearly four dozen Farragut residents who’d taken two buses chartered by the church filed into the auditorium of a Brooklyn elementary school, sitting behind a cluster of anxious parents from Dumbo. Reporters lined up alongside them. In the months since the potential rezoning plan was announced, the spectacle of an integration fight in the progressive bastion of Brooklyn had attracted media attention. Coverage appeared in the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, and on WNYC. “Brooklyn hipsters fight school desegregation,” the news site Raw Story proclaimed. The meeting lasted more than three hours as parents spoke passionately, imploring the council to delay the vote so that the two communities could try to get to know each other and figure out how they could bridge their economic, racial, and cultural divides. Both Dumbo and Farragut parents asked the district for leadership, fearing integration that was not intentionally planned would fail.
In the end, the council proceeded with the vote, approving the rezoning with a 50 percent low-income set-aside, but children living in PS 307’s attendance zone would receive priority. But that’s not a guarantee. White children under the age of five outnumber black and Latino children of the same age in the new zone, according to census data. And the white population will only grow as new developments go on the market. Without holding seats for low-income children, it’s not certain the school will achieve 50 percent low-income enrollment.