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Even parents who can afford private schools send their children to P.S. 6 on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The school offers instruction in political cartooning and foreign language and a joint program with the Museum of Natural History. And all the innovation apparently pays off. More than 92 percent of the students at the school meet the state standards in reading and math for their grade level.
But there is another P.S. 6 in New York City, this one in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Despite a well-regarded principal, only 40 percent of its students meet the state standards in reading and less than a third in math.
The Manhattan P.S. 6 is overwhelmingly white and includes only a smattering of poor students. Its East Flatbush counterpart is more than 92 percent black, with almost 90 percent of its students from families with low enough incomes to qualify the children for a free school lunch.
The differences between these schools reflect the state of education in New York City public schools today, 50 years after the Supreme Court outlawed legally enforced school segregation in the United States. Despite a far greater ethnic diversity, with an increasing number of Asian and Hispanic students, New York City public schools are among the most segregated in the country. But, if integration has not been achieved, few New Yorkers seem to see it anymore as the most important goal in education.
On May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, legalized segregation in the country had just started to crumble in the wake of World War II. But separate and decidedly unequal still held sway across much of the country, particularly the South, with black Americans forced to sit in the back of the bus, drink at different fountains, and sit in separate train cars. They were barred from Woolworth lunch counters and could not try on clothes in department stores. Poll taxes, tests with arcane questions and intimidation prevented them from voting.
Linda Brown, a black third grader in Topeka, Kansas, had to attend a school a mile from her home, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. The principal of the white school refused to admit Linda, setting in motion the events that would lead to the historic court ruling.
In defense of its dual school systems, the Topeka school board argued that segregated schools prepared youngsters for the segregated society in which they would live and were not harmful to black youngsters.
After years of argument and deliberation, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, rejected those claims. In the decision, Warren wrote, "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn."
Brown and a related ruling "reflected and encouraged developments that would soon spark the burst of humane, bold and heroic action that we now know as the civil rights movement," Eric Foner and Randall Kennedy wrote in a special issue of The Nation magazine commemorating the Brown decision.
Some predicted all schools would be integrated within five years. But change came slowly. In 1955, the Supreme Court ruled that desegregation could proceed "with all deliberate speed," a phrase that many school districts took to mean "as slowly as possible." And so a decade after Brown, less than two percent of black youngsters in the South attended integrated schools.
But the civil rights movement helped change that. And by 1974, 20 years after Brown, almost half of all black children throughout the nation went to white-majority schools. Despite what many call the 'resegregation' of the last few decades, some of that change remains, including in Topeka, the city that gave birth to Brown.
But this is not the story in New York City, where the racial composition of schools today almost resembles those in the South of the 1950s.
Indeed, the city's schools were not much more integrated than Southern schools when the Brown decision was issued -- even though Governor Theodore Roosevelt had directed the New York State Legislature to abolish the last two officially black schools in New York City way back in 1900. But as recounted by Diane Ravitch in her book The Great School Wars, Kenneth Clark, a psychologist whose research bolstered the NAACP arguments in the Brown case, issued another report in 1954 concluding that New York City had a segregated school system and that black children received an inferior education. The head of the New York City Board of Education then, Arthur Levitt, said the segregation had not "been deliberately imposed by legislation" but was nonetheless "not good educational policy."
At the same time, the population of the school system was undergoing a huge change, as many whites left the city for the suburbs, and more and more Hispanics moved to New York. There were many subsequent efforts to address the segregation in the city -- some sincere, some cosmetic, few successful.
Today, of the approximately 1.1 million students in New York City public schools, about 13 percent are Asian, 15 percent white, 32 percent black and 40 percent Hispanic. Given the makeup of the student body, one reason for segregation of New York City schools, said Pedro Noguera, a professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, is that "there are no kids to integrate with."
But the population of many schools is even more skewed than the student population as a whole. Some 60 percent of all black students in New York State, including those in New York City, attend schools that are at least 90 percent black, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University; more Latinos in New York State than in any other state go to schools that are 90 percent or more Latino.
Another study, this one by the Lewis Mumford Center at the State University of New York at Albany, found that Asians and Hispanics are more segregated from whites in New York schools than in any other school system in the country. For black-white segregation, New York ranks third.
The Mumford study also found that, in 2000, the typical black student attended a school where only five percent of the other students were white, a sharp drop from 1970.
This segregation has a different cause than that in the South of the 1950s. In New York, "the segregation in the schools reflects segregation in the housing market," said John Logan, who conducted the Mumford center study. While New Yorkers think of this as a progressive city, it is, Logan said, "one of the most segregated cities in the country in terms of blacks and whites."
But the city has had little success implementing policies that might reduce the effects that housing segregation has on schools.
Particularly at the high school level, the Department of Education established schools with special programs around the city, in an effort to encourage students to leave their neighborhoods. But the effort has not done much to improve integration. Although some of the individual school programs are good, "I don't believe school choice has made New York a less segregated city," said Jill Chaifetz, executive director of Advocates for Children, which works on school issues.
In another attempt to encourage diversity, the city requires that some high schools with special programs admit the same number of students who do poorly on standardized tests as those who score substantially above average. But this gives the lowest scoring students a better chance at admission because far fewer of that group applies. And some parents, many of them white, complain that their children are being unfairly denied a place in these schools.
Partly in response, white parents in several communities have lobbied to bring back the neighborhood high school, at least in their communities. "Despite paying the highest tax rates in New York City, we don't have a school that will prepare our children to go to the superior colleges they are qualified to attend," a proposal by East Side parents said.
The parents won creation of the new Eleanor Roosevelt High School on East 76th Street, but the school admits children from a broad swath of Manhattan, not just the immediate neighborhood, as the parents had wanted. Eleanor Roosevelt, now in its first year of existence, is 10 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 35 percent Asian, and 40 percent white.
Parents in the white, affluent Park Slope section of Brooklyn fought to revamp John Jay, a high school attended largely by black and Hispanic students from outside the community. They believed that three new small schools, with grades 6 through 12, would enable more Park Slope kids to attend high school in their neighborhood. They won their fight but may have achieved a Pyrrhic victory. Top students from Park Slope have been slow to embrace the three new schools and at least one is plagued by discipline problems and a poor reputation in the area.
If the schools are still segregated, does segregation still matter? Some would argue that it does.
Claude Steele, a professor at Stanford University, listed some effects segregation has on black students. "They are more likely to go to poorly funded schools in run-down buildings and more likely to be taught by uncertified and poorly trained teachers," he wrote. "They are likely to be counseled with lower expectations. They are more likely to go to schools with few or no Advanced Placement courses, and they are likely to have less access to test-prep courses and related tutorials."
Although there are exceptions, schools in New York City with higher test scores tend to have greater numbers of white and Asian students, while struggling schools are more likely to be composed primarily of black and Hispanic students.
In the 1990s, the community group ACORN charged that many junior high schools in predominantly black and Hispanic areas did not teach students what they needed to know in order to do well on the test for the selective specialized high schools, such as Stuyvesant. In response, rather than improve the program for all youngsters, the city began offering special instruction for selected students. Despite the classes, less than 10 percent of students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.
Black and Hispanic students score significantly lower than whites and Asians on virtually all standardized tests and are less likely to finish high school. About 94 percent of white youngsters in New York State who started high school in 1999 were seniors in June 2003, but only 61 percent of Hispanic children and 65 percent of black students were.
As New York increasingly relies on standardized tests, some critics worry that black and Hispanic students will be most affected. For example, most students at Taft High School and Bushwick High School, both of which are 98 percent black and Hispanic, did not pass even one of the five Regents tests required for graduation. "On the 50th anniversary of Brown, we've come full circle," said Jane Hirschmann of Timeout From Testing. Relying so much on Regents and other tests, she said, "is very unequal and very unfair."
Test proponents argue, however, that the lack of firm standards in education has been discriminatory, awarding black and Hispanic students diplomas but without giving them the skills they need to earn a living or function in society.
Black and Hispanic students also bear the brunt of discipline in the city schools. More than 90 percent of students at Second Opportunity Schools for students serving lengthy suspensions were black or Hispanic, according to Advocates for Children.
Academics, educators and politicians endlessly debate the reasons for these disparities. But one factor could be that, along with the achievement gap, there is a resource gap. Predominantly black and Hispanic New York City spends $10,500 per pupil, about half the $21,000 that the rich -- and largely white -- Long Island suburb of Manhasset spends, Jonathan Kozol has noted. At the same time, many senior teachers avoid poor, minority schools in the city in favor of richer schools.
The gap to some extent reflects the fact that much of the money for schools comes from local tax revenues, and more affluent -- usually white -- communities have more money to spend than the black and Hispanic communities that tend to be less affluent.
But critics charge that New York State does nothing to erase the gap, and some things that make it worse. According to David Jones, president of the Community Service Society, in New York State "school districts with the highest percentage of minority students receive over $2,000 annually less than school districts with the lowest percentage of minority students." He blames the state's method of allocating funds to districts.
The demand for integration is not purely academic. Students who attended the more integrated schools of the 1970s, and those who attend the segregated schools of today, apparently see the value of diversity.
A recent study by Columbia University Teachers College looked at people who had attended school in the peak integration years of the 1970s before courts began rolling back orders requiring busing and other integration measures. While the integration may not have completely reformed society, it did change individual members of the class of 1980.
The study concluded that the integrated schools did more than any other institution, except perhaps the military, to "bring people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds together and foster equal opportunity." And, the people interviewed said they found attending mixed schools "to be one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives, the best -- and sometimes the only -- opportunity to meet and interact regularly with people of different backgrounds."
Today's school children seem to want a similar chance. Advocates for Children conducted an essay contest to mark the Brown anniversary, asking students to write about such topics as whether integration is important.
In the essays, some of which will be on the group's web site later his month, students wrote about the value of diversity, said Deborah Apsel of the group. "There were kids who said we really wish our school had more Caucasian students or kids from outside our neighborhood," she said. "A lot of kids talked about "tolerance" or "about how integration in the classroom builds on the learning and can add a different dimension to discussions."
But experts debate the value of integration.
Derek Bell, a former civil rights lawyer who teaches at NYU law school, said that in some respects Brown was "a disaster." Those who cheered the decision at the time failed to recognize how entrenched segregation and white racism was in America, he said. Rather than trying to do away with separate schools, Bell has argued, the Supreme Court "might have been better off" if it had set out steps, such as monitoring and enforcement, to ensure that black youngsters attended schools truly equal to those for white students.
Others who support integration, such as Gary Orfield, author of the Harvard Civil Rights Project study, question whether meaningful integregation can take place without crossing boundaries between city and suburb. But in 1974 -- 20 years after Brown -- the Supreme Court in Milliken v. Bradley ruled that school integration efforts did not have to cross government boundaries -- in that case between predominantly black Detroit and its white suburbs.
Faced with that and other court decisions that have chipped away at efforts to integrate schools, activists in New York have shifted their efforts to trying to get more funding to improve the schools that black and Hispanic youngsters attend.
In one, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity challenged the formula New York State uses to determine how much money the state gives each local school district. Activists in other states have also argued that poorer school districts need more money to help their students meet new state standards.
In the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, the state's highest court ruled that Albany's funding formula denied students in New York City and other cities in the state their right to a "sound, basic education," and ordered that the situation be corrected. But the issue remains entangled in politics and disputes about the amount of money required. Neither Governor George Pataki nor the legislature -- nor localities -- have come up with a means to fund the court's mandate. The governor suggested using funds from electronic gambling machines.
Elise Boddie of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said she hates to choose between fighting for integration and struggling for more money. But she admitted that in light of legal rulings and hostile courts, "Funding equity cases may be our only hope."
That funding, said Pedro Noguera, can lead to better schools and maybe even more integrated ones: "If you can get really outstanding teachers into high-need areas and really outstanding programs . . . then you're going to attract middle-class kids of all races," he said. "Quality is what is ultimately going to bring people in, -- whites and Asians as well as middle-class blacks and Hispanics."
But it will be a long hard road. And many experts, while recognizing the promise of Brown, see few reasons for optimism on its much-observed anniversary.
On a recent Saturday, a young woman passed out free red pencils in front of Bishop Kearney High School to adults filing into the building to take state-required teacher certification exams. The pencils were a gift of New York Urban Teachers, one of several expensive Department of Education projects aimed at streamlining the Byzantine certification process.
But inside the building, the pencils generated confusion and a warning.
"Do not use them," an exam administrator advised test-takers preparing to fill in dozens of bubbles on question sheets. "We have no way of knowing if they are No. 2."
Indeed, the pencils bore a catchy slogan - "Bringing outstanding certified teachers to NYC public schools," but no indication of lead hardness. The most vital information just wasn't there.
The pencils were emblems of the failures of the city's much vaunted teacher recruitment efforts. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the latest of these last month, a glitzy campaign sponsored by the Ad Council said to be the most ambitious in the city's history. The mayor promised TV commercials and billboards that would help attract the city's "largest pool of teaching candidates."
Like the useless free pencils, glitzy ads cannot help the majority of people who already want to be city teachers, but who now face
• heightened certification requirements,
• long delays in application processing,
• and a hiring culture that favors the well connected over the merely qualified.
On Feb. 1, requirements for a teaching certificate jumped significantly, even as the starting salary for most city teachers remained a modest $39,000. On that date New York State changed the requirements for entry-level teachers. First-time teachers sending paperwork after the deadline could no longer get a provisional certificate, which had allowed them to postpone one of three standardized exams until after they started work and demanded slightly less - or, in some cases, just different - coursework.
Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, said the state toughened the requirements to comply with a portion of the federal No Child Left Behind act (PDF Format) mandating measurable state efforts to improve teacher quality by 2006.
"It's a national trend," Dunn said, adding, "We have no interest in certifying unqualified people as teachers."
But will the new regulations really produce better teachers? Depending on the certificate sought, applicants might need no more than two or three extra courses than they would have in January. Still, that could be a major deterrent for people who lack three credits of "information retrieval" - that is, a computer course -- now required for most teaching certificates.
Even before February, certificates required passing grades on two standardized exams - one in liberal arts and sciences, the other in teaching skills - each costing $70 for registration. With the addition of the third exam, the so-called "content-based test" on the subject to be taught -applying for a certificate costs an average of $500; added to the exam costs are fees for fingerprinting, application processing and required workshops, most of which have risen recently.
There is, of course, no guarantee that the applicant will be awarded a certificate, and then a job, after these expenses.
As the deadline for the changes loomed, an unprecedented 30,000 applications for teaching certificates poured into Albany in the first weeks of the year. Applicants currently enrolled in college education programs apply through their institutions and get priority. Others are being told to brace for a 24-week wait before their transcripts can be evaluated.
The process was delayed further by the state's failure to promptly issue new application forms and lists of coursework requirements. On Feb. 1, the state removed its downloadable application from the Office of Teaching Initiatives website; not until four weeks later did the new form materialize. During the hiatus, officials in the education program at one CUNY campus told students to cross out a heading on the old application reading, "Do Not Use After Feb. 1," and send it in anyhow.
First lesson for new teachers: break the rules. Given the 24-week wait, those who waited obediently for the new applications may not have their credentials in time for the September hiring season.
Or so it would seem. Actually, despite all the subway posters and radio ads contrasting teaching with baser callings like investment banking, networking and connections play as big a role in this low-paid world as they do on Wall Street. Individuals attempting to navigate the system on their own discover that it's like a nightmarish deli line, where those who came later than you keep elbowing to the front.
The New York City Teaching Fellows program streamlines, and subsidizes, the certification process for college graduates willing to teach in low-performing schools, mainly in the Bronx and central Brooklyn. But those wishing to teach high school social studies or elementary school need not apply: this highly selective program looks for people able to teach subjects for which there are acute teacher shortages, like math, science, Spanish and special education.
Another city-funded program that accelerates the process for teachers willing to work at troubled schools is New York City Urban Teachers, the program advertised on the pencils given away at the Brooklyn testing site. But Urban Teachers is mainly aimed at luring back certified teachers who have left the profession, particularly if they're already certified in a high-shortage subject or wish to add a second certificate in one of those subjects.
Those who do meet the criteria of these narrowly focused programs, but whose heart strings have been plucked by the Teaching Fellows recruitment posters ("Take your next business trip on a big yellow bus"), get shoved to the back of the line.
There's another shortcut, one that doesn't get announced at press conferences. A notice that appeared recently on the state's Office of Teaching Initiatives website informs prospective teachers, "If you are offered paid employment in a certified position in a New York City Public School, the New York City Department of Education can request an expedited review of your application."
How can uncertified teachers be offered jobs requiring certification? Dunn, the state education department spokesman, said job seekers who have sent their transcripts and test scores to Albany could show those same materials at an interview and expo. If a local official believes that certification requirements have been met, Albany will evaluate the application in 7 to 10 days, Dunn said.
Asked how local officials could so rapidly master the recent changes in requirements for dozens of different certificate titles, Dunn said, "People are being offered jobs by district hiring officials familiar with the process."
Who imagined that the education ads in the Sunday New York Times - and even in Craig's List, the online swap shop, where some of the city's public schools advertise for teachers - don't necessarily mean "certified teachers" when they describe jobs as open only to "certified teachers"?
It's a safe bet that Albany isn't rushing those applications to the front to reject them. That's why stories abound of job seekers who were "walked through" the certification process by a friendly administrator and landed a job although lacking a few pesky courses.
Thus, those who know someone who knows someone are favored, raising questions about where this leaves members of minority groups without social connections or heavy political wiring.
Maybe that's why the city didn't bother to specify whether the giveaway pencils were No. 2 - those in the know already knew.
Marcia Biederman writes about city public schools for InsideSchools.org and contributes regularly to The New York Times.
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For weeks after Natalia Mermelshteyn, an immigrant from western Ukraine, was laid off from her software testing job in downtown Manhattan in 2002, she would buy Russian language newspapers, open to the classifieds page, and cry. The papers advertised jobs as babysitters and caretakers for the elderly. “I thought I could do more. There was something better for me out there,” said Mermelshteyn, now 49 and still unemployed.
Mermelshteyn came to New York along with 126,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union Countries. Another 60,000 newcomers arrived from India and the Phillipines. Some two-thirds of these immigrants held bachelor’s degrees. Eager to earn a living, ambitious, and skilled, they readily plunged into the Information Technology field. They changed careers, took out education loans, and betting on their secure employment, made downpayments on houses while waiting for green cards.
As the dot com euphoria gave way to disillusionment, many wound up among the 20,000 Information Technology professionals in the city whose jobs were eliminated in the past two years.
“To lose a job is so much more painful for immigrants, because they have tried so hard to reach that level, to be a good employee,” said Van Le, director of the New York City Refugee Employment Program for the International Rescue Committee.
During the dot com era, IT jobs turned into such a fad among the Russian-speaking community that the Russians even came up with a slightly deragotory term that referred to all the freshly minted IT people: computerschiks.
Now only 15 percent of students of ASA Institute of Business and Computer Technology, where Mermelshteyn studied, pursue any computer-related degrees, while many of its old computerschiks are figuring out what to do next.
“You can’t truly eliminate the hurt, the pain, unless they get a better job with a better salary,” said Le, whose program counsels New York’s unemployed refugees and asylees, explaining the mechanisms of a free market economy that is new to many of them.
If in the boom years professional immigrant workers felt like they were assimilating, lately many say that New York no longer feels like home, thanks in part to a backlash after September 11th. Later the government imposed a tight cap on temporary work visas, called H1B visas, as waits for citizenships and green cards turned torturous.
Sarvjet Singh, who came to New York from the volatile Jammu Kashmir State in India in early 2001 and works as a software developer, lives in Flushing, Queens amidst many Indian immigrants. But the community is waning. Singh’s friends who were here on H1B visas were forced to go back home after lay-offs. Without them, “I feel very sad,” said Singh, 32, whose green card application is still pending.
The increased anti-immigrant sentiment limits the ability of immigrants to network. Operating within the immigrant community and lacking fluent English skills severely restricts the ability to raise capital of people like Alex Falin, an immigrant from Yalta, Ukraine, who lives in Brooklyn and has tried to open an offshore consultancy and a pharmacy in between his programming jobs.
Even inside ethnic communities relationships have not been supportive. Mermelshteyn found little congeniality in the all Russian-speaking work group at her old job where people’s protectiveness over their jobs caused them to be uncooperative, afraid she would learn more and turn into their rival.
Many immigrants find they cannot compete with their U.S. born counterparts especially in the tough economic times, either because of prejudice or inferior language skills.
Still, there are some things that actually count in immigrants’ favor.
Rafael Gutierrez, formerly of Manila, Philippines, said that being Asian is a plus in his job search. “It may be a stereotype, but if you are either Indian, Chinese, Filipino – Oriental, in general -- they think computers are a part of you.” Having graduated from a six-month course at Chubb Institute, Gutierrez works as the “IT dude” in a Manhattan nonprofit.
Le thinks the most important advantage immigrants have over the U.S. born professionals is their motivation to do well. After all, going back to their countries of birth holds little appeal. For people in their circumstances, he said, “you either float or you sink.”
Immigrants are also resilient people, having gone through pain and stress while immigrating.
And although there are reasons, financial and emotional, why moving again to pursue a job is hard for immigrants, it may be easier for them relocate than native New Yorkers, because they are not as attached to the city.
“I have made up my mind,” said Singh. “If I am laid off, I’ll go back to India for a year. And from there, anywhere. It could be Canada, Australia, or Germany.”
The alternative to a job search is a return to school, and many seem to be taking that alternative.
Some are pursuing medicine. Of course, in comparison to IT, it takes much longer to get a degree, the pay is lower, and the communication skills required are more demanding. Still, 65 percent of ASA students are pursuing medical careers.
Keeping in mind the four more years of repayment on his $14,000 Chubb tuition loan and that 80 percent of his classmates never found an IT job, Gutierrez also gave the medical profession a thought. It’s a popular field among the city’s Filipinos, the second highest earning immigrant group here.
The idea of another profession is boosting Mermelshteyn’s spirits as well. On advice of friends she recently joined a gym, “to clear my mind.” And after hearing from a doctor that medical offices need ultrasound technicians, she enrolled in the Institute of Allied Medical Professions. Conveniently, the school expanded to Brooklyn, and in 2002 its Web site’s homepage displayed a greeting in two languages only: English and Russian. About a third of Mermelshteyn’s class are Russian-speaking, the rest are high school graduates. She finds that she and her former compatriots do better in school, with help from their technical background. She also realized that when she briefly thought thirty years ago of going into medicine she may have been on to something. She likes her ultrasound classes.
“The last nine months of studying flew by in a flash,” said Mermelshteyn who is almost done with her theory classes and will be starting a six-month ultrasound training shortly. Meanwhile, without health insurance, she is not able to afford any regular check-ups.