Do the Right Thing (Thoughts on Middle School Admissions)

brooklynrob Uncategorized

I am a parent of three children, serve on CEC 13, live in weird hybrid of NYC DOE Community School District 13 for elementary and D15 for middle, and serve as Youth Chair for CB6 which overlaps mostly D15 and a bit of D13. I am an aspiring policy wonk (though have a long way to go to reach Brad Lander levels). Of my three kids I have one in middle and two more on the way. I think about middle schools and admissions policy a lot, especially in the D13 and D15 parts of Brooklyn. With this as context…

A couple years ago when I’d say to a friend that this area of Brooklyn has among the very most segregated schools in the nation they’d look at me like I had three heads.

Now, a few years later, and after the contentious PS 8 / 307 rezoning, for which I was one of the votes (and which, I should note, was presented to the CEC by the DOE as about capacity but quickly became a segregation story in the media) the staggering Brooklyn school segregation is no longer new news. Google the topic and there are all sorts of stories. Here’s a few:

Last month Patrick Wall wrote an article for Chalkbeat that appeared in The Atlantic about District 15 middle school admissions – it’s a good and important read.

The one article that I keep coming to though is the one published in Vox last February, perhaps because it comes after the CEC and by extension me personally a bit because of our advocacy for MS One Brooklyn.

I keep coming back to it too mostly though, I think, because the narrative – maybe inadvertently on the author’s part – hits on one of the most troublesome part of this discussion, especially when it comes to middle school admissions in District 13 and 15. Which families, if any, are to blame? And what does it mean, to do the right thing, both for your child and the community at large?

I want you to imagine two families. Let’s for now leave race out of the picture. In both families, both partners work and both partners have masters degrees. In both families one spouse makes $125,000 and the other makes $175,000, so both families have a household income of $300,000. This may sound like a lot but in Brooklyn in 2016, this is really not that rare any more.

Both families have one 4 year old child and decide to move to Clinton Hill from Williamsburg to buy a home. The homes are, in fact, next door to each other and both cost $1.3 million. Even at $300,000 in household income affording a $1.3M home is a stretch, but they pull it off. The mortgage makes private school not an option, and both parents in both sets of families tell each other, perhaps somewhat unconvincingly, that their belief in the importance of public school matters more anyway.

Both families secure a seat for pre-K in an official privately run NYC DOE Pre-K center in Clinton. In the winter of their children’s pre-K year though, with Kindergarten approaching, the stories start to become different.

One family, we’ll call them “Family A”, has made friends with another couple, “Couple C” also in Clinton Hill. Couple C’s 3rd grader attends PS 321 in Park Slope and their oldest is a 6th grader at MS 51, also in the Slope.

Couple C insists to Family A that PS 321 is the best elementary school in Brooklyn, and “really the only option”. Family A responds that they are not zoned for 321 or even in its district (15). How can we get our child in, they ask. “Couple C” insists that “everyone finds a way in … everyone does it. Everyone gets their kids into 321” (including, it must be noted here, the parents of the author of the Vox piece by her own admission – “In 1990, I started kindergarten at PS 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the borough’s best elementary school, because my family lied”).

Couple C further explains that “while you used to be able to just borrow an electric bill from a friend, the DOE has started to get more strict” and explains that the way most people do it is now is by renting an apartment in the PS 321 zone for a few months at the start of the kindergarten year, before moving back to Clinton Hill, as once a child is at a school they can stay there through graduation. While it feels like a financial stretch to Family A to pay for a few months of rent in center slope, figuring all told it’ll cost them about $12,000, it’s far less money than private school would have been for 6 years, which they had given up as an option when they bought their home. They decide to do as Couple C has suggested – they find a small studio in Center Slope, rent out their home in Clinton Hill via Airbnb for a few months, and enroll their child at 321 for the fall. Come the holidays they are back in Clinton Hill and getting used to the walk to 321 each day, which takes just under a half hour.

Back to “Family B”. They also have friends who have told them about different ways to get a seat at schools like 321 or 29 in District 15, as well as at PS 8. They’ve also visited PS 20, both Family A and Family B’s zoned school (remember, they are next door neighbors), and like what they see. They see a diverse community and like that. While they recognize PS 20 may not have a million dollar PTA budget like PS 321 does, they’re ready to “roll up their sleeves” and work hard to raise money for the school. They like that the school is in the neighborhood and an easy 3 minute walk from home. Off to PS 20 their child goes.

Let’s next fast forward 5 years. Our two families’ children are now ready for middle school.

Because Family A’s child went to a District 15 school, PS 321, Family’s A child is entitled to apply to District 15 middle schools, including and especially the “Big 3″ (447, 51, New Voices) cited in the Chalkbeat / Atlantic article. Family A’s child applies to 447, 51, and MS 88 and gets accepted at 447, the first choice of the family.

Family B’s child is still in District 13 and applies to middle schools there. Family B decides their top choices are MS 8 and Arts & Letters. These two schools have the highest test scores in District 13, and to Family B, who are thinking a lot about academics with high school and then college on the horizon, test scores matter. Moreover, having spent much of their past five years working bake sales nearly every weekend to raise money for PS 20′s PTA, they are ready for a school with a larger PTA budget, as is the case at both PS/MS 8 and Arts & Letters. PS 20 was great, but Family B also put in a lot of work, time, and commitment and don’t know if they can sustain the same pace of volunteering.

Family B recognizes though, that because both MS 8 and A&L give admissions preference to students continuing on from those school’s respective lower schools, Family B’s child’s chances of getting a seat at either MS 8 or A&L are low – perhaps even lower than the odds that the Family A student – still their next door neighbor – faced at 447 and 51. Family B decides to also apply to a citywide admissions district middle school in Manhattan a couple friends have recommended – it’s a stretch but the school has a reputation for solid academics and it’s another option to put in play. It’s a both a reach and backup plan in one.

As it turns out, come May of 5th grade, Family B’s child does not secure a seat at either A&L or MS 8. Instead the Family B child is offered by the DOE a seat at Unisons, AP Piller’s school, as the DOE algorithm will do when it can’t make a match to a preference listed on the application. Somewhat unexpectedly though, Family B’s child does get offered that seat at the Manhattan citywide public school. While they are worried about the commute to Manhattan every day, Family B decides on the Manhattan school over Unisons, largely citing the test scores and even more than the test scores that the Manhattan middle school places many of its graduates at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or Brooklyn Tech. Family B, like Family A, has every expectation their child will go to post-grad and they are starting to think about how to get from here to there.

So, at the end of 5th grade, Family A’s child leaves 321 for MS 447 in Boerum Hill; Family B’s child leaves PS 20 for a school in Manhattan. Come 6th grade, neither student is attending school in the neighborhood or even District 13.

These two scenarios are both very common and ones I drew up to protect anonymity rather than to create a work of fiction.

Let’s now fill in the picture a bit more on Family A and B and assume that in both Family A and B, both partners are white. And, at both of their new middle schools, the children will be in the majority racially.

Through their choices – by ultimately not choosing for their child Unisons or another D13 middle that is majority students of color, both Family A and Family B made more entrenched the segregation of our schools. Both families could have helped integrate Unisons, which AP Piller says in her piece is essential (”…(S)egregation is unacceptable. No amount of curriculum magic, or experienced teachers, or school choice, can overcome the fact that to overcome educational inequality, white students need to be in school with minority students”).

And then I wonder which family, A or B, AP Piller might fault more, if either, for their respective “contribution” to segregation and in turn the impact of their decision to Unison. Family A? Family B?

It’s Family B that was still in District 13 at 5th grade, and who would have seen the Unisons’ presentation at a PTA meeting. It was the child of Family B that was offered a seat at Unisons – a seat Family B turned down.

And Family A? They left D13 years ago. Do they get a pass? What culpability do they own? When they opted out of their zone school, PS 20, to pursue PS 321 at Kindergarten, they were effectively opting out of District 13 as well. Perhaps going into Kindergarten, middle school was the furthest thing from their mind. Or, just maybe, they were very aware (perhaps because Couple C told them) that not only would they get the benefits of 321 but also the privilege to apply to the “Big 3″. Remember too – because Family A still lived in D13 they’d have retained the option apply to Unisons. Do you think the Clinton Hill family with a 5th grader at 321, Family A, applied to Unisons? In my fictitious example, do you think they even visited or even thought about the school? What of MS 266, a District 13 in Park Slope they might have walked by every day on the way to 321. Was that ever on Family A’s list?

While Family A was enjoying the dividends accrued at 321 from privilege, money, and power, Family B was building up their local neighborhood school. Do Family B’s sweat equity and financial contributions, in the “calculus” of political correctness and “doing the right thing”, somehow balance out their not choosing Unisons for their child? Or should we nonetheless indict Family B for “selling out” on some idealized progressive vision for our schools and the choices that we think parents should unilaterally make in the name of the greater good? And if so, what then of Family A? What is their “culpability”? Should they have returned to D13 after PS 321 in order to “do the right thing” an help integrate Unisons?

Of course, this all isn’t really about AP Piller, a dedicated educator here in our district, or her thoughtful piece in Vox. This isn’t about our “fictional” families or the families you and I might know that are a lot like them.

What this is all really about is living our publicly espoused values in our own lives and with our own children’s futures. It’s one thing for a white parent to stand up at a “town hall” and decry the segregation and demand changes. It’s quite another for that same parent to send her child to a majority-minority school.

This is also about this constant “calculus”, as I call it above, that permeates how Brooklyn parents size up each other, day by day, interaction to interaction. Here in Brooklyn, we like judging others and their choices almost almost as much as we do fresh cheese from the co-op and sledding the hills of Prospect Park in the winter. The progressive purity test of our neighbors is one we never opt-out of.

I hope we can get a discussion going about how the different scenarios and dynamics are playing out in our schools, especially in district 13 and 15 middle schools, and crucially between the districts instead of looking at them as islands. Ultimately the patterns of school choice we see are the aggregate of lots of individual choices which after time form well-trodden paths. I think many of us want the same thing – schools with strong academics that foster character growth and social-emotional welfare within the context of diverse, integrated settings that draw on the melting pot of Brooklyn.

But how do we get there? Can we maintain a full choice model and integrate our schools at the same time? Should we focus on “quality” first? What does quality even mean? What does it mean to implement controlled choice models that purportedly will not constrain choice? How do we implement policies that encourage more students to stick around in districts like 13 for middle rather than policies that end up only driving more families away?

Have the districts outlived their usefulness and appropriateness as constraints of middle school choice, especially considering the arbitrary nature of many district lines in the context of Brooklyn in 2016?

Much of the DOE integration policy seems to assume voluntary integration by families like “A” and “B” above – is that realistic? Can integration happen without removing some form of choice?

How do we do the right thing, for both our own kids and the community at large?