Two quick articles
May. 19th, 2010 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
This is one on how US schools are more segregated today than in the 1950s. This is no surprise, I think I've seen articles on this before.
And here's one on three citywide gifted programs in Manhattan, two of which are predominantly white, and one of which is largely black.
Now, to explain, the "citywide" gifted programs aren't zoned in any way. Other gifted programs are limited to children in a certain borough or district, or you have to get a variance to go there. (Going to a school out of district has some arcane rules I don't understand, and in all honesty schools don't always follow those rules. They didn't when I was a kid, and I doubt they really do now.)
As far as other schools sharing the building, in the past NYC public schools were huge affairs. Now the push is for smaller schools, but there isn't really any place to PUT these smaller schools, so many of these older school buildings have been divided up so that there's several smaller schools within them, each with their own principal and teachers... and uniforms, and teaching styles and so on. My understanding is that some of these schools, the different schools work together to share their building, thus enabling them to save money on certain resources, such as books or instruments. It's not impossible for two schools to share one music teacher or something like that, or to offer a shared afterschool program. And in others, they don't, for various reasons.
This should help clear up some of the background information there.
The Children Are Bright; the Setting, Scruffy
By SHARON OTTERMAN
The hulking three-story school building has corrugated metal siding and grates on the windows.
The closest playground, in the shadow of a housing project, has missing swings and peeling paint. At recess, the students play on a bare square of pavement in a public park, a thick metal chain on the gate to warn away the public during school hours.
At TAG Young Scholars, a citywide school in East Harlem for the talented and gifted, what goes on inside the classroom is praised by parents, but the aesthetics and facilities are, in a word, challenging. On a recent tour of the school, prospective kindergartners’ parents, many of whom live miles away, asked more questions about safety than curriculum.
“I want to ask about the elephant in the room,” said Chloe Brand of Washington Heights, bringing up an Internet report that children from the local middle schools that share TAG’s building were starting fights at dismissal.
TAG is the forgotten sibling of the two other citywide gifted schools in Manhattan. The programs are reserved for the 4- and 5-year-old children who score the highest on reasoning and ability tests. Many parents of those children avoid TAG, even though far more children qualify for these programs than there are seats.
This is particularly true for white parents, and to a lesser extent, Asians, creating a noticeably segregated gifted school landscape. The other two schools, the Anderson School on the Upper West Side and New Explorations Into Science and Technology and Math, known as NEST+m, on the Lower East Side, are at least 70 percent white and Asian, as are the city’s gifted programs as a whole. TAG is more than 80 percent black and Hispanic, and only 1 percent of its children are white.
Change is slowly coming to TAG, however, in part as a result of its higher profile since the city mandated a citywide test as the sole factor in gifted admissions in 2008. A new generation of TAG parents, who seem to be more diverse racially and economically, are arguing that their school deserves the same facilities and programs as the other gifted and talented schools.
Aware that it is not city funding, but private donations and grants that plump the budgets of the best-known gifted schools, TAG parents established a dedicated fund-raising circle, a grant-writing committee and a public relations committee this year. But, in part because 63 percent of TAG children are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, they raised relatively little.
Friends of the Anderson Program, a parent-led group, raised $530,000 in 2008, its latest public 990 form shows. This year, TAG raised $12,000, up from $6,000 last year and $4,500 the year before.
Janette Cesar, who has led the TAG program for more than a decade, initially disagreed with the new parents who were complaining about the school’s resources.
“What is the point of comparing ourselves to the other schools?” she asked. “Is that what we want to teach our children?” She noted that the local middle schools in TAG’s building, which serve poorer children than those at TAG, are just as deserving of space and services.
But last week, after a promising meeting with a nonprofit group that may be interested in helping the school find a nicer, more spacious building, it seemed that she was starting to change her mind. She had hired an artist to guide the children in painting murals to brighten the dim hallways, and she said, perhaps optimistically, she was glad they would be on canvas, “so we can take them when we move.”
“I have been focused on the academics — what happens in the classroom,” she said. But now that the young school’s foundation is laid, and its test scores place it among the best in the city, maybe, she said, it should get more attention. “It’s time.”
TAG has always served a predominately minority, working-class population, mostly from Upper Manhattan, the Bronx and nearby parts of Queens. It was founded in 1989 as a magnet program within the school system’s District 4, and became an independent K-8 gifted and talented school in 2004.
The normal cutoff score for the five citywide programs (Queens and Brooklyn each have one) is the 97th percentile on the gifted test. But while the other schools have many more applicants than seats, so few parents list TAG as a preference that in past years it has had room for the handful of students in District 4 who score over the 90th percentile.
In an unfortunate coincidence, just as TAG’s inclusion on the list of citywide gifted schools began to raise its profile, it lost space to the four other schools in its building. It no longer has an art room, library or music room for the elementary grades. Classrooms in the upper grades, which can house as many as 30 active, inquiring students in red and white uniforms, can feel busy and cramped.
Ms. Cesar said she believed that the racial composition of her school was a result of parent choice and geography, as parents seek a place where they and their children feel comfortable.
The issue works both ways. On the prospective student tour, the white parents focused the most on security concerns. One father, whose wife later asked that he not be named, said he would feel uncomfortable if his son were the only white child in his class.
But Stephanie Thacker, whose son, Elijah, is in the sixth grade, said she chose TAG over Anderson four years ago in part because she wanted her son, who is black, to feel like he could be himself. “This is a school that is as good as any other,” she said.
And Isis Castillo, who is encouraging her TAG fifth grader, Abigail, to attend middle school elsewhere, in part because she is worried about the behavior of children from the other middle schools, said her daughter had visited NEST+m. She saw few Hispanic faces there and told her mother, “I feel very out of place here.”
Diana Cornell, whose son, Forest, is one of two or three white children in the TAG kindergarten, is helping the effort for better facilities and enrichment programs, like a chess club, and the parents working with her are a diverse lot, mirroring the 5- and 6-year-olds in Forest’s class.
TAG’s kindergartners, almost all of whom can read and write, clustered one April afternoon on multicolored floor cushions with reading books, chatting happily with one another as they waited to be called to paint flowerpots.
Emphasizing the care given to the children, Ms. Cornell said that the first person her son sees in the morning is a security guard, and that no matter where the children are, someone is watching them closely. Ms. Cesar said that despite parental fears, no child from TAG has ever been hurt.
Gwen Randolph, a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center and the mother of a prospective student, said that while she was intimidated by the building’s prisonlike appearance at first, she liked the school after completing the tour, particularly the science program for elementary students. She plans to apply, but also has some improvements in mind.
“The first thing I’m going to do,” she said, “is get parent volunteers to give that playground a fresh coat of paint.”
And here's one on three citywide gifted programs in Manhattan, two of which are predominantly white, and one of which is largely black.
Now, to explain, the "citywide" gifted programs aren't zoned in any way. Other gifted programs are limited to children in a certain borough or district, or you have to get a variance to go there. (Going to a school out of district has some arcane rules I don't understand, and in all honesty schools don't always follow those rules. They didn't when I was a kid, and I doubt they really do now.)
As far as other schools sharing the building, in the past NYC public schools were huge affairs. Now the push is for smaller schools, but there isn't really any place to PUT these smaller schools, so many of these older school buildings have been divided up so that there's several smaller schools within them, each with their own principal and teachers... and uniforms, and teaching styles and so on. My understanding is that some of these schools, the different schools work together to share their building, thus enabling them to save money on certain resources, such as books or instruments. It's not impossible for two schools to share one music teacher or something like that, or to offer a shared afterschool program. And in others, they don't, for various reasons.
This should help clear up some of the background information there.
The Children Are Bright; the Setting, Scruffy
By SHARON OTTERMAN
The hulking three-story school building has corrugated metal siding and grates on the windows.
The closest playground, in the shadow of a housing project, has missing swings and peeling paint. At recess, the students play on a bare square of pavement in a public park, a thick metal chain on the gate to warn away the public during school hours.
At TAG Young Scholars, a citywide school in East Harlem for the talented and gifted, what goes on inside the classroom is praised by parents, but the aesthetics and facilities are, in a word, challenging. On a recent tour of the school, prospective kindergartners’ parents, many of whom live miles away, asked more questions about safety than curriculum.
“I want to ask about the elephant in the room,” said Chloe Brand of Washington Heights, bringing up an Internet report that children from the local middle schools that share TAG’s building were starting fights at dismissal.
TAG is the forgotten sibling of the two other citywide gifted schools in Manhattan. The programs are reserved for the 4- and 5-year-old children who score the highest on reasoning and ability tests. Many parents of those children avoid TAG, even though far more children qualify for these programs than there are seats.
This is particularly true for white parents, and to a lesser extent, Asians, creating a noticeably segregated gifted school landscape. The other two schools, the Anderson School on the Upper West Side and New Explorations Into Science and Technology and Math, known as NEST+m, on the Lower East Side, are at least 70 percent white and Asian, as are the city’s gifted programs as a whole. TAG is more than 80 percent black and Hispanic, and only 1 percent of its children are white.
Change is slowly coming to TAG, however, in part as a result of its higher profile since the city mandated a citywide test as the sole factor in gifted admissions in 2008. A new generation of TAG parents, who seem to be more diverse racially and economically, are arguing that their school deserves the same facilities and programs as the other gifted and talented schools.
Aware that it is not city funding, but private donations and grants that plump the budgets of the best-known gifted schools, TAG parents established a dedicated fund-raising circle, a grant-writing committee and a public relations committee this year. But, in part because 63 percent of TAG children are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, they raised relatively little.
Friends of the Anderson Program, a parent-led group, raised $530,000 in 2008, its latest public 990 form shows. This year, TAG raised $12,000, up from $6,000 last year and $4,500 the year before.
Janette Cesar, who has led the TAG program for more than a decade, initially disagreed with the new parents who were complaining about the school’s resources.
“What is the point of comparing ourselves to the other schools?” she asked. “Is that what we want to teach our children?” She noted that the local middle schools in TAG’s building, which serve poorer children than those at TAG, are just as deserving of space and services.
But last week, after a promising meeting with a nonprofit group that may be interested in helping the school find a nicer, more spacious building, it seemed that she was starting to change her mind. She had hired an artist to guide the children in painting murals to brighten the dim hallways, and she said, perhaps optimistically, she was glad they would be on canvas, “so we can take them when we move.”
“I have been focused on the academics — what happens in the classroom,” she said. But now that the young school’s foundation is laid, and its test scores place it among the best in the city, maybe, she said, it should get more attention. “It’s time.”
TAG has always served a predominately minority, working-class population, mostly from Upper Manhattan, the Bronx and nearby parts of Queens. It was founded in 1989 as a magnet program within the school system’s District 4, and became an independent K-8 gifted and talented school in 2004.
The normal cutoff score for the five citywide programs (Queens and Brooklyn each have one) is the 97th percentile on the gifted test. But while the other schools have many more applicants than seats, so few parents list TAG as a preference that in past years it has had room for the handful of students in District 4 who score over the 90th percentile.
In an unfortunate coincidence, just as TAG’s inclusion on the list of citywide gifted schools began to raise its profile, it lost space to the four other schools in its building. It no longer has an art room, library or music room for the elementary grades. Classrooms in the upper grades, which can house as many as 30 active, inquiring students in red and white uniforms, can feel busy and cramped.
Ms. Cesar said she believed that the racial composition of her school was a result of parent choice and geography, as parents seek a place where they and their children feel comfortable.
The issue works both ways. On the prospective student tour, the white parents focused the most on security concerns. One father, whose wife later asked that he not be named, said he would feel uncomfortable if his son were the only white child in his class.
But Stephanie Thacker, whose son, Elijah, is in the sixth grade, said she chose TAG over Anderson four years ago in part because she wanted her son, who is black, to feel like he could be himself. “This is a school that is as good as any other,” she said.
And Isis Castillo, who is encouraging her TAG fifth grader, Abigail, to attend middle school elsewhere, in part because she is worried about the behavior of children from the other middle schools, said her daughter had visited NEST+m. She saw few Hispanic faces there and told her mother, “I feel very out of place here.”
Diana Cornell, whose son, Forest, is one of two or three white children in the TAG kindergarten, is helping the effort for better facilities and enrichment programs, like a chess club, and the parents working with her are a diverse lot, mirroring the 5- and 6-year-olds in Forest’s class.
TAG’s kindergartners, almost all of whom can read and write, clustered one April afternoon on multicolored floor cushions with reading books, chatting happily with one another as they waited to be called to paint flowerpots.
Emphasizing the care given to the children, Ms. Cornell said that the first person her son sees in the morning is a security guard, and that no matter where the children are, someone is watching them closely. Ms. Cesar said that despite parental fears, no child from TAG has ever been hurt.
Gwen Randolph, a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center and the mother of a prospective student, said that while she was intimidated by the building’s prisonlike appearance at first, she liked the school after completing the tour, particularly the science program for elementary students. She plans to apply, but also has some improvements in mind.
“The first thing I’m going to do,” she said, “is get parent volunteers to give that playground a fresh coat of paint.”
