Some articles
Jun. 13th, 2012 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Integrating a School, One Child at a Time
It comes with pictures
HER bow flopping on her head, Kylie Cao pirouetted alongside her fellow kindergartners in pink tutus and black leotards.
The girls smiled with nervous concentration. They were, unwittingly, performing the delicate dance of desegregation.
One child was white, one was black, and seven girls were Hispanic. Kylie was the only Asian student onstage — and in the kindergarten class this year at Public School 257, a magnet school of the performing arts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“She’s become very, very popular,” her father, Benson Yang, said at the school’s family night in early spring, when the children performed. “She gets a lot of attention.”
Kylie’s mother, Angie Cao, was so pleased with her daughter’s experience that she persuaded some friends to enroll their children at P.S. 257 next year. “Everybody will come here after seeing her,” she said.
If only change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital.
Instead, P.S. 257, where 73 percent of the students are Hispanic, has found integration to be far more intricate. One of four Williamsburg elementary schools to win a 2010 magnet grant from the United States Education Department to spur desegregation, it has struggled to follow a federal model created decades ago while focusing on more urgent battles: for resources, students and, above all, test scores.
Since the mid-1980s, New York’s public schools, which are among the nation’s most segregated, have received millions of dollars in magnet grants from the federal government. In this most recent round of grants, in 2010, the four Williamsburg elementary schools and one middle school, all in District 14, received a total of $10.2 million over three years; schools in Long Island City, Queens, and on the West Side in Manhattan also won grants, for a total of $33 million.
Magnet schools were once the federal government’s favored mechanism to increase diversity and prevent “white flight.” The idea was to create a themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group. Today, as the Williamsburg schools show, integration is an uneven process at best, hampered by geography, legal limits and, critics say, a lack of ideological commitment from the city.
Williamsburg, the epicenter of Brooklyn’s gentrification, where a growing white population is moving into neighborhoods dominated by Hispanics, would seem to have the most favorable conditions in the city for integration. About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3 percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.
Reducing that percentage, as the grant requires, has proved to be a challenge for the three magnet schools in the southeastern parts of District 14, where the socioeconomic and ethnic changes have yet to take hold with the same force as they have in the north.
Although decades of research studies show that children perform better in integrated schools, desegregating New York City’s system has not been a distinct priority for the mayor or his chancellors.
“I can’t remember the last time anyone in a leadership position said anything about desegregation,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University.
“That sends a signal,” she added. “They talk about choice.”
The sweeping changes initiated under Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein focused on the creation of new schools, notably charters and high schools.
The current chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said the administration’s priority was to “provide a richness in quality education” for all the city’s students; there are 1.1 million, three-quarters of whom are either Hispanic or black.
The magnet program, Mr. Walcott said, is one element of the system that promotes choice.
“If you have choice without civil rights policies, it stratifies the system,” said Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A., a research organization that recently published a study hailing the benefits of integrated schools. “People who have the most power and information get the best choices,” he added.
Among the policies needed in New York, Dr. Orfield said, were citywide efforts to educate parents about magnet schools, transportation options to help children get to schools outside their often-segregated neighborhoods and accountability for diversity.
New York is not alone in operating its school system without a cohesive integration plan, Dr. Orfield said, adding that the same could be said of other major cities, like Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
“I am focused on having high-quality schools in all neighborhoods,” Mr. Walcott said. “That’s the ultimate civil rights policy.”
For the magnet schools’ principals, the administration’s priorities are unequivocal: “The bottom line is, if you don’t hit your academic targets, they will put you on the turnaround list,” Brian Leavy-DeVale, P.S. 257’s principal, said, referring to the process of reorganizing a failing school.
In late May, P.S. 257 was one of two high-performing elementary schools from District 14 to be investigated by the Education Department over accusations of cheating on the annual New York State exams, after some of the students’ scores plummeted when they reached middle school.
It is possible that the scope of the investigation could include other elementary magnet schools in District 14, according to one person with knowledge of the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the process was still in its early stages. During the Bloomberg administration, about 1,250 claims of cheating have been received, most of which have gone unproven. But this investigation has clouded P.S. 257’s immediate future.
With the school year coming to a close, it is still too early to judge how much progress P.S. 257 and the other District 14 schools that received grants have made in desegregation. According to the Education Department, two elementary schools made incremental steps toward reducing the large percentage of Hispanic students, one stayed the same, and one actually increased its Hispanic population.
Those numbers do not tell the full story; the schools are rich in programming, and all have waiting lists for kindergarten next year, said Joseph Gallagher, District 14’s magnet project director. “It’s a good foundation to build on,” he said.
But magnet schools have a short window to create lasting diversity. After the 2010 grants end, schools may recruit from outside their attendance zones for only three more years, unless the Education Department approves an extension. There are currently 39 schools operating as magnets in New York City.
“Ultimately, the big issue comes down to how important this is to the people in charge,” Dr. Ravitch, the education historian, said. “Given the demography,” she added, “the question is, do you do something about it, or do you do nothing about it?”
Hurdles to Diversity
At P.S. 257, music jumps in the hallways. In the second-floor gym one afternoon, a drum line crashed out a beat, trumpets blared, and flute players bounced from side to side, as the marching band built a joyful crescendo. Already seasoned performers at Puerto Rican Day parades, the band members were practicing to play for the governor in Albany.
On Friday mornings this year, the chorus sang the national anthem over the public address system. In the piano room, the twins Antonio and Christian Mendoza, second graders, spent weeks practicing a Mozart piano sonata in Robert Siegel’s music class.
P.S. 257, also known as the John F. Hylan School, received an A on its last school progress report. It has used its magnet money to build an arts-based curriculum, enrich its after-school programs and “make school fun” for its 632 students. That is the refrain of the school’s tirelessly chirpy assistant principal, Melvin Martinez, a former club promoter who designed the school’s program while he was studying for his master’s degree in education.
Even before the Education Department and District 14 administrators chose his school for the grant, Mr. Martinez was looking for extra sources of money for the school. He had parents and students recycle cans and bottles, then used the refunds to buy the school’s first set of drums.
Now, thanks to about $520,000 a year in magnet money, the marching band performs in spiffy navy and gold uniforms made by the same company that outfits big college programs. A new sound system and an air-conditioner turned the cafeteria into a second performance space. Two performing-arts teachers were hired.
Part of the mission of the federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program is rallying teachers and students around a theme. Some themes seem to blend more fluidly than others with the citywide curriculum requirements.
But integration is still the magnet grant’s primary purpose, and this presents a geographic challenge in District 14. As it stretches from Greenpoint to Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, the district becomes more segregated, ethnically and socioeconomically.
P.S. 257 is a Title I school, meaning that it has a high level of poverty and offers free lunches, as the other three elementary magnet schools in Brooklyn do.
Given that the elementary-school-age population in its area is 65 percent Hispanic, traditionally Puerto Rican, the key to desegregation is drawing white and Asian students from outside the attendance borders. According to recent federal guidelines, enrolling black students also counts toward progress in reducing Hispanic isolation. (There is no box to check for multiracial heritages on District 14’s magnet application.)
But P.S. 257’s location, some 20 blocks southeast of the condominium and artisan enclaves of Williamsburg, surrounded by sprawling public-housing projects and in the shadow of Woodhull hospital, makes it a tough sell.
Nora Barnes, the longtime principal at another of the magnets, Public School 250, the George H. Lindsay School, which is seven blocks north of P.S. 257 and 77 percent Hispanic, acknowledged that drawing white families was difficult.
“They don’t come to a school that’s basically a Hispanic school because it’s like everybody else — they’re looking for a school that looks like them,” she said.
After the first year of its grant, P.S. 250’s student population was 10.4 percent Asian, higher than most schools in Williamsburg, in part because a growing number of Asian families live in the nearby Lindsay Park Houses. But the Hispanic population at the school remained unchanged.
“Whatever people think about minority-populated schools,” Ms. Barnes said, “on a number of levels it’s hard to convince white families to come to a school like this. And then, a lot are looking for gifted and talented programs.”
Because magnet schools are prohibited from using academic screening, they are not allowed to offer gifted and talented programs.
Applying to an elementary magnet school is not a simple process for students who live outside the school’s zone. Parents must submit an application for a lottery, listing the district magnet schools they wish their child to attend.
The principals then determine how many lottery slots they will have available — the majority of the magnet students enter in kindergarten — making sure to reserve seats for all students who live in their zones. To draw diverse applicants, Mr. Martinez, at P.S. 257, recruited at community centers in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in neighborhoods in Greenpoint (where he lives with his Irish-American wife and two children). He pitched the school at Head Start nursery programs and bodegas in Hispanic areas, and even flagged down prospective parents jogging on the track at McCarren Park.
The percentage of Hispanic students at P.S. 257 decreased to 73 percent in the 2011-12 school year, from 75 percent the year before. And the progress seems likely to continue. Preliminary enrollment figures for P.S. 257’s incoming kindergarten class show that out of nearly 100 children, 4 are white, 3 are Asian, and 16 are black — all coming from outside the attendance zone.
“It is a major influx for us; we’ve never had that,” Mr. Martinez said.
Whether the appeal of the school, which has fervent parent support, will fade because of the investigation into cheating accusations is not yet clear. Mr. Leavy-DeVale, the principal, said he had not been notified that his school was under investigation and denied that there had been any cheating. “I stand by my teachers; I have great staff,” he said. “And we have never seen that.”
The investigation began after teachers at Intermediate School 318 received poor evaluations because their students had performed badly on the state tests. While seemingly focused on two schools that feed into I.S. 318 — P.S. 257 and Public School 31 — the inquiry could expand its scope.
Neither Ms. Barnes, at P.S. 250, nor Diane Vitolo, the principal at Public School 380, another of the magnets, said she had been notified that her school was being investigated.
P.S. 380, the John Wayne Elementary School, is a Brooklyn paradox: It is named for a rugged American film star, sits in the middle of a staunchly Hasidic neighborhood in Williamsburg and yet has a student body that is 73 percent Hispanic.
The geographic area the school serves is 5 percent Hispanic and 93 percent white, but the white children are mostly Orthodox Jews, who overwhelmingly attend yeshivas.
In 2009, P.S. 380 won a national academic award, but its enrollment was dwindling. When the magnet grant allowed the school to recruit outside its zone, enrollment grew to 580 from 470, but the Hispanic population went up by 3 percentage points. Ms. Vitolo said that many of her current students had parents or relatives who used to live in the neighborhood before its demographic shifted.
“Although we want to attract — and that’s the goal, to attract — lots of diversity, we just want children,” Ms. Vitolo said. “We don’t necessarily see the different diversity. Children are children to us.”
Mr. Leavy-DeVale, at P.S. 257, was even blunter. “I didn’t get into this just to have 12 European blond English-speaking kids,” he said. “If that’s the mission of it, as long as my kids are getting things, then so be it. Whoever can bring us money, I don’t care if they are liberal, conservative, communists,” he said, adding: “I’ll put a Coca-Cola sign on the door if it brings in dollars and direct services.”
Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion, he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity.
Referring to New York City, Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University, asked, “Is there even a goal in terms of trying to create more diverse educational settings — not just by race?”
She added: “If so, how can policy makers look at the given makeup of a district and, if that’s a goal, make sure that more kids have more access?”
The Education Department said it was addressing the issue by appointing a deputy chancellor in charge of equity and access and offering tutoring for students from low-income families studying for the exam for specialized high schools.
Walking in Both Worlds
Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been able to attract them in droves. It just has not opened yet.
Public School 414, the Brooklyn Arbor School, is to open in September in a building alongside what is left of Public School 19, a failing school whose scheduled closing nonetheless drew strong parental protest. Brooklyn Arbor’s kindergarten class will be mostly white, in a neighborhood that has been predominantly Dominican.
Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor in a prime location to draw families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white middle-class families to try the new school.
“A lot of it is marketing,” Ms. Irizarry said. “It takes a certain person who can walk in both worlds.”
Ms. Irizarry, 34, is white, grew up in the Netherlands, married a man of Puerto Rican heritage and has a school-age son. She also spent the past 11 years teaching at P.S. 257; her assistant principal, Cristina Albarran, 33, did, too. (She was also a student there.)
P.S. 19, the Roberto Clemente School, had originally won the magnet grant, but the Education Department announced this year that it was closing the school. Now, Brooklyn Arbor (beginning with kindergarten, first and second grades) will split the magnet money with P.S. 19 (with third, fourth and fifth grades this year and phasing out one year at a time) and adopt the theme of global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof; her school will be housed in separate wing in the building.
Becoming a magnet school was not part of her original plan, Ms. Irizarry said, but she eagerly adopted the idea when Mr. Gallagher, the magnet program director, told her the school would receive about $1 million over the next two years.
“This money is the perfect thing for us right now to put us in business,” Ms. Irizarry said.
P.S. 19 had no choice but to share the money. The first year of the grant, P.S. 19’s Hispanic population slightly decreased to 92 percent from 95 percent; because the school was to close, it was prohibited from recruiting in the 2011-12 school year.
P.S. 19 finished the year with a depleted roster of teachers and low morale.
When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican neighborhoods.
She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities photographed in green T-shirts.
Ms. Irizarry was interviewed by Joyce Suzflita, who runs a well-known blog, nycschoolhelp. (Mr. Martinez had not heard of the blog.) As of now, the 75-student kindergarten class will have 55 children from outside the school’s zone, most of them white (including a number of new immigrants from Western Europe and Asia who are bilingual); of the 60 first graders, 25 are out of zone. The second grade, with 75 of its 80 students from the zone, is mostly Hispanic.
Celeste Stern, a white parent from Crown Heights, was impressed by Ms. Irizarry’s energy and won over by her approach. She soon told her friends to apply.
Ms. Stern said she was looking for diversity after her daughter Alice was shut out of her neighborhood kindergarten. And yet, at the same time, Ms. Stern wanted there to be a balance.
“I don’t want Alice to be the only white kid,” she said, while registering for Brooklyn Arbor in a classroom at P.S. 257. “I want her to have a chance to have friends from all ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic backgrounds. I think that’s what makes New York so great and so exciting.”
Yaskara Ramirez, 31, registering her son Alejandro the same day, did not care that as a Hispanic child he would be in the minority. “That’s perfectly fine,” she said. “I honestly don’t care about what makes up the kindergarten class. I am just more concerned about the academics.”
Ms. Irizarry, nonetheless, said she was concerned that Hispanic parents might feel they were being pushed out of the school. “I really need to think about ways to address any kind of issues that will come up,” she said.
Brooklyn Arbor is now an alternative to Public School 84, an increasingly popular school in the fastest-changing part of Williamsburg that has become a success in integration.
After P.S. 84 was named a magnet school for the visual arts in 2004, the school struggled to blend its white students with its predominantly Hispanic population. But when a new principal, Sereida Rodriguez, arrived in 2009, she united the parents and infused the school with programs and energy. She said she even discovered supplies left unused from during the magnet grant.
Now the school has an intensely active PTA, led by white parents from Northside. Its Hispanic population decreased to 73 percent from 85 percent this year; 17 percent of its students are white.
Still, Ms. Rodriguez encountered confusion with the Education Department over out-of-zone recruiting. A magnet school can apply for an extension past the six years guaranteed by the grant, though Ms. Rodriguez said she was not initially told that.
But this spring, the department automatically put all her out-of-zone kindergarten applicants on a waiting list for the fall.
“Finally,” Ms. Rodriguez said, “I get white families coming to my school, and I didn’t want to discourage them, but I told them, O.K., we’ll get back to them.” She said the city eventually allowed those applicants.
Increasingly, magnet schools are competing for students against new charter schools that are opening in the district. A vocal group of P.S. 84 parents led a vehement protest against the planned opening of a Citizens of the World Charter School in a portion of the building.
Brooke Parker, a founder of Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools, said advocates for the charter had been looking to attract white families, recruiting in the same places that the more savvy magnet schools had gone. That is unusual for charter schools, which in New York have not often focused on integration as a goal.
Even with the number of charter schools increasing, and testing as the overarching measure of a school’s success becoming the norm, federally supported magnet schools still resonate with parents like Justin Jones who value diversity as much as test scores. He and his wife moved to Bushwick 12 years ago from Blacksburg, Va., and were one of the few white families in the neighborhood. They were at P.S. 257’s season-ending talent show to watch their daughter, Prairie, 5, one of the school’s nine white children, twirl alongside her classmates in rainbow-colored tutus.
“Ideally,” Mr. Jones said, “I like to think that everyone eventually is going to have to work together to find solutions to fix the world.”
Kindergarten, he said, seems as good a place as any to start.
How to Read a Racist Book to Your Kids
“Dad, why do the pirates have a gorilla?” This unexpected question intruded on a recent intergenerational cultural exchange: I was introducing my 6-year-old son to Asterix the Gaul. The pirates in the “Asterix” comics don’t travel with a gorilla, of course. One of the pirate crew is a grotesque caricature of an African who does indeed more closely resemble a gorilla than a person.
Freeze-frame on this parenting situation. What am I supposed to do? I figure I have three options.
1) Explain that the gorilla is supposed to be a black person.
2) Try to explain the history of French colonialism, how the economics of exploitation in sub-Saharan Africa led to an ideology of racism, which survived in a ghostly transfer even after the conclusion of the French Empire, infecting even silly comics about ancient Gaul.
3) Say, “I don’t know why the pirates have a gorilla” and flip to the next page.
Naturally I chose 3 — the cowardly choice. There will be time enough to explain the cruelties of history later, I figure. Nonetheless I am left with the queasy knowledge that I had better come up with a solution soon, because my lies and obfuscations are washing ever thinner, and the summer movie season is coming as well, with new “Ice Age” and “Madagascar” installments. Their ethnic typologies and attitudes — from Ray Romano as a Brooklyn-fuhgeddaboudit woolly mammoth to Chris Rock as a zebra whose catchphrase is “crackalackin!” — resemble a sort of preglobalization New York. Besides, much of the great old children’s material, like so much of the great old adult material, is either racist to the core or at least has seriously racist bits. Learning to negotiate around them or through them is something that every parent has to do, unless you want to waste your children’s precious young lives sticking strictly to “approved literature” and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Some decisions are easy. “The Story of Little Black Sambo,” say, or “Tintin in the Congo.” Hergé himself was deeply embarrassed by the latter book, brushing it off as a youthful error. The British bookstore chain Waterstones removed the book from the shelves of the children’s section. The Brooklyn Public Library has placed “Tintin in the Congo” in a special, by-appointment-only rare-books section. As parents, we know what to do with this stuff: Certainly never show it to young kids.
That decision is made so much easier by the fact that both of those books are lousy. The only memorable part of “Tintin in the Congo” is a scene in which Tintin hunts a rhinoceros by blowing it up with dynamite. And who will mourn Little Black Sambo?
Much trickier is material that is otherwise excellent but contains significant racist passages. Michael Chabon recently wrote about negotiating (and ultimately eliminating) the racial epithets while reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to his kids, following a painful and honest discussion about it with them. I admire his spirit of openness, but I have to admit I would never have had the stomach to imitate him — either in the willful alteration or the discussion about it.
So we’re left wondering how to approach, say, “Dumbo” with its racist-stereotype crows, or the original “Pippi Longstocking” trilogy. The publishers of “Pippi Longstocking” long ago changed certain phrases in the books — the Swedish negerkung was traditionally translated as “Cannibal King” until a 2007 edition, in which the translation became “King of Natives.” But one German theologian has recently proposed explanatory footnotes to turn the most problematic passages — the black children abasing themselves before Pippi, for example — into educational opportunities. Even the most politically correct among us are unwilling to toss “Pippi” out completely; after all, despite her appearance in a book with racist elements, she has become a feminist icon.
Sometimes the racist passages can be excised completely, and our crimes can be covered up. If you really want to upset yourself, go to YouTube and look up the original 1940 “Pastoral Symphony” section from Disney’s “Fantasia.” Sunflower the centaur, an amalgam of antebellum pickaninny stereotypes, polishes the hooves and primps the tails of the pastel-colored female centaurs while they prepare to frolic in the wilderness. The scenario is one of maximum sadness and horror; in the American imagination of 1940, even the world of little-girl centaurs was one of humiliating subjugation. But Disney edited the sequence for rerelease in the ’60s, and all subsequent rereleases, which means that I can show “Fantasia” to my son.
Other classics have been successfully rewritten. In the first edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the Oompa-Loompas were members of an African tribe displaced by Willy Wonka to the northern industrial hinterland. Not quite so funny anymore that his workers worship him like a god, is it? Or that he keeps them scrupulously isolated from the general population? Or that he pays them in cocoa beans? For the second edition in 1973, Dahl changed the Oompa-Loompas from black pygmies into “rosy-white” creatures with long “golden-brown” hair. The 1971 movie made them orange-skinned with green hair. Loompaland is a complicated place.
We rewrite the past to serve the needs of the present. The clarity of history is its great advantage. The racism in “Fantasia” or “Pippi Longstocking” is overt: instantly identifiable by its noxious odor and satisfyingly dismissible with enlightened disgust. More subtle instances may provoke hedging and justification. The “Babar” series of books has long been the subject of ferocious debates about its status as a propagandistic celebration of colonialism. The argument makes complete sense to me — the elephants return to their native land bearing the gifts of civilization learned in the metropolis and make war on the rhinoceroses who don’t share the benefits of acculturation. But as a practical parenting matter, I don’t care. My son won’t be turned into a more effective colonist by stories of elephants riding elevators.
Besides, “Babar” is boring. The influence of the more recent “Star Wars” installments is more profound, and it worries me. I managed to avoid the recent rerelease of “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” in 3-D, but only barely. Every father who loves the original “Star Wars” trilogy eventually runs into the fiasco that is Jar Jar Binks — a character capable of destroying a generation’s worth of affection with a single rustle of his oversize ears. While many have noted Jar Jar as a racist stereotype, it’s unclear exactly which stereotype he is. Is Jar Jar a Rastafarian stoner or a Stepin Fetchit or a Zuluesque savage? Or is he just a Gungan? And what about Watto, also from “The Phantom Menace”? A dark-skinned, hooknosed, greedy slaveholder, he’s an all-purpose anti-Semitic caricature. Or possibly he’s just a hovering bad guy in a fantasy world. The conundrum is how to explain to your kids that Jar Jar and Watto are stereotypes without first introducing the stereotypes that you are hoping to negate.
Even Pixar, which deserves the gratitude of every parent for its nearly unbroken series of classics, indulges a surprising amount of relatively crude stereotyping. In one of my favorites, “Monsters, Inc.,” Sulley and Mike, on the way into the office, happen to pass an orange squidlike grocer with a handlebar mustache who kind of talks-a-like-a-this. Perhaps that kind of stereotype is not as gruesome or upsetting as the one in the original “Fantasia,” but I had the distinct impression, as my son laughed at the scene, that my Italian immigrant grandfather was turning over in his grave.
How am I supposed to explain to a child the superimposition of cultural generalizations onto toy cars and monsters and space aliens? I can barely explain it to myself. Blissfully unaware of what is being promoted, children love those movies. Try convincing any kid under the age of 12 that “The Empire Strikes Back” is a better movie than “The Phantom Menace,” or that “Finding Nemo” is better than “Cars 2.” You’ll be laughed at. Stereotypes are part of what children want from stories, which of course connects to what we all want from stories: simplification. We want all stepmothers to be evil. We want all huntsmen to be heroes. And apparently, for the most part, we want characters’ ethnicities to be equally simplistic, whether the movie is set in a monster world or an ice age or Madagascar. Who knows what the consequences are or whether there are any? Is it because children like the simplification? Or are our minds simplified by exposure to these early stereotypes?
Despite my misgivings, I know that I won’t be able to give up Asterix. My relationship to the comic is too deep; it was made too early, bound up with my own childhood. They were the only comics we were allowed to read in French class in Canada. (The Smurfs were banned because of their limited vocabulary.) When I gashed my knee playing tag in the back alley behind my house and had to have 15 stitches, the treat that I received for being brave was “Asterix in Britain.” And so I’m hedging, cravenly. I believe this is the very definition of white liberal guilt: I feel bad but I won’t change my behavior.
That familiar and insoluble knot of moral difficulty is infinitely complicated by the fact that I’m sharing it with a child. I don’t want to explain the human gorilla and all the chains of horror that went into that caricature because I’m afraid of the follow-up questions. Recently as I was laying down ant traps against the annual spring invasion, my son asked me, “Do ants have souls?” I didn’t have a good answer for that. What is he going to ask when I explain that for 400 years, white people took black people from their homes in Africa, carried them across the ocean in chains, beat them to death as they worked to produce sugar and cotton, separated them from their children and felt entitled to do so because of the difference in the color of their skin? Whatever he asks next, I’m pretty sure I won’t have an adequate reply.
Academic notions of the unspeakability of historical horrors become very immediate in the face of a child. There are many children’s books to help children understand the horror of history, or introduce them to the failure to understand the horror of history. But explaining how those horrors play out in everyday life, through a thousand subtle means, often unexpected, like children’s books, seems nearly impossible. No doubt I want to shelter my son and also myself, but I think, in some vague, indefinable way, I want to shelter the past too. I’m embarrassed for humanity at all this nonsense, and I don’t want to submit the world to the complete and perfect judgment of an innocent.
We all need to grow up, I know. Me, the moviemakers, the audience. The only person who seems mature enough for the situation is the 6-year old. All he sees is a gorilla with some pirates.
With Casino Revenues, Tribes Push to Preserve Languages, and Cultures
The comments to this article, all 28 of them, are fascinating and I suggest everybody read them.
Inside a classroom of some 20 adults and children studying the language of their tribe, a university linguist pointed out that Chukchansi has no “r” sound and that two consonants never follow each other. The comments seemed to stir forgotten childhood memories in Holly Wyatt, 69, the only fluent speaker present, who was serving as a living reference book.
“My mother used to call Richard ‘Lichad,’ ” Ms. Wyatt blurted out, referring to a relative. “It just popped into my head.”
Using revenues from their casino here in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the Chukchansi Indians recently pledged $1 million over five years to California State University, Fresno, to help preserve their unwritten language. Linguists from the university will create a dictionary, assemble texts and help teach the language at weekly courses like the one on a recent evening.
The donation caps efforts in recent years by American Indian tribes across the nation to bring back their tongues before the death of their sole surviving speakers. With coffers flush from casino gambling, dozens of tribes have donated to universities or have directly hired linguists, buttressing the work of researchers dependent on government grants, experts say.
The money has given the tribes greater authority over the study of their language, an often culturally fraught discipline. Some tribes wishing to keep their language from outsiders for cultural or religious reasons have retained researchers on the condition that their findings remain unpublished. The control has also persuaded aging speakers — who grew up in an age when they were often punished at school for speaking their language — to collaborate with outside experts.
“There are more people out there who can talk, but they don’t come forward,” said Ms. Wyatt, who with her sister, Jane Wyatt, 67, meets with linguists twice a week. “I was like that, too. My daughter convinced me I should do it.”
Nearly all the 300 Native American languages once spoken in North America have died or are considered critically endangered. For many tribes, especially the dozens of tiny tribes in California that spoke distinct dialects and experienced dislocation and intermarriage like their counterparts in other states, language is considered central to their identity.
“The whole reason that outsiders even knew we were a people is because we have our own language,” said Kim Lawhon, 30, who organizes the weekly classes and started running an immersion class for prekindergarten and kindergarten students at Coarsegold Elementary School last year. “Really, our sovereignty, the core of it, is language.”
There was also a more practical matter. Tribes have asserted their right to build casinos in areas where their language is spoken, and have used language to try to fend off potential rivals.
The Chukchansi are opposing plans by the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, whose traditional land lies east of here, to build an off-reservation casino about 30 miles southwest of here. In an interview at the Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino here, where he was introducing a new game, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Reggie Lewis, chairman of the Tribal Council, said Chukchansi and other tribes belonging to the Yokut Indian group in this area shared common words.
“But the Mono language, it’s totally unintelligible to us,” Mr. Lewis said. “You have to establish the cultural or ancestral ties to a place to open a casino there, and language is a way to do it.”
The 2,000-slot-machine casino, which opened in 2003, yields $50 million in annual revenues, according to the Tribal Council. Each of the tribe’s 1,200 members receives a $300 monthly stipend, with those 55 and older also getting free health insurance and other benefits.
The gambling revenues have also intensified political infighting here as they have in many other places. Violence erupted early this year after a disputed election for the Tribal Council.
According to the National Indian Gaming Association, 184 tribes with gambling operations took in $29.2 billion in 2010 and made more than $100 million in charitable donations.
Jessica R. Cattelino, an expert on Indian gambling at the University of California, Los Angeles, said it was not “until the late 1990s that with electronic games we begin to see revenues sufficient to allow tribes to explore options for major philanthropy.”
Tribes have become increasingly sophisticated in their gift giving, focusing on their culture and language while often setting the research terms.
“Tribes can control their own intellectual property rights,” said Erin Debenport, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who has worked with Pueblo tribes in the state, including those who do not allow researchers to publish written examples of their language.
The Chukchansi, who had been donating about $200,000 a year to Fresno State’s football program, will reallocate the money to the linguistics department.
“How do we justify supporting athletics when our language is dying?” said Ms. Lawhon, the kindergarten teacher.
Ms. Lawhon had tried to restore the language with the Wyatt sisters and some other community members here, but decided to reach out to Fresno State’s linguistics department for help three years ago.
Chris Golston, who was the department chairman at the time and had been on the faculty for 15 years, had long dreamed of working with one of the local tribes. But given the sensitivity surrounding the research of Indian languages, an older colleague had advised him that the only strategy was to wait to be approached.
“After 15 years, I thought this was possibly the worst advice in the world, but one day three years ago they just called up,” Mr. Golston said.
Four of Fresno’s experts, who had been working with the Chukchansi in their spare time for the past three years, will be able to devote half of their work schedule to the language thanks to the grant, the largest in the department’s history.
On a recent afternoon at Fresno State, Holly Wyatt met with two linguists to try to decipher a five-minute recording that they had found here a month earlier. Two women were heard playing a local game in the 1957 recording, which excited Mr. Golston because it was the “closest to conversation” of the various examples in their possession.
As the linguists played snippets of the tape over and over, Ms. Wyatt slowly made out their meaning. The game revolved around a man climbing up a tree and taking care not to fall.
“What do you get out of that, Holly?” Mr. Golston asked about a difficult word.
“That one word has me confused,” Ms. Wyatt said. “I don’t know what it is.”
She cradled her head in her right hand and shut her eyes.
Maybe some words were already lost. The women on the tape spoke fast, Ms. Wyatt said later. Her hearing was not getting any better, she said, and a hearing aid did not help. The words the linguists kept introducing sounded familiar, but some just refused to be extricated from her mind’s recesses.
“It’s pressure,” she said, “because they’ve come up with a lot of words that I haven’t heard in years.”
For-Profit Private School Is Calling Its Own Shots
Here are a few of the ways that Ronald P. Stewart, co-founder and headmaster of the York Preparatory School, thinks his school is different from other New York City private schools:
It has no board of directors (“why would I hire someone who could fire me?”). It accepts more than half the students who apply (“we do not seek to be the most exclusive school in Manhattan”). And after York takes $36,000 or more from parents each year, Mr. Stewart has no qualms about telling them to back off. “The student is our client,” he says.
Even the school’s origin is evidence that it is a different species. While many schools have century-old histories that began with educational or religious visionaries, Mr. Stewart, a British barrister who once defended Charles Kray, an infamous London mobster, founded the school with his wife because they wanted to work together and have their summers free to spend at a camp in Maine.
“Kids are nicer than psychopaths,” he chirped in his English accent.
In a city where private schools and residents exude ambition, York is an outlier. At a time when the most prestigious schools accept less than 10 percent of applicants, York takes almost 60 percent, some of them having been nudged out of the more selective schools. About a third have diagnoses of learning disabilities, and they are integrated in classes and tracked by ability.
Behind all of it is Mr. Stewart, an impassioned, engagingly bombastic and occasionally loose-tongued leader who is one of the city’s longest-tenured headmasters, a testament not only to his success but also to his unassailability, as he and his wife, Jayme, own the school.
Mr. Stewart was born in Willesden, a poor neighborhood of London, and won a full scholarship to Oxford. There he met Stephen H. Spahn, an American whose parents ran the Tripp Lake summer camp in Maine. Mr. Stewart volunteered to teach sailing there. Along the way, he met and fell for Jayme, Mr. Spahn’s sister. They wed, and after the Kray trial (Kray was acquitted of murder but convicted on accessory to murder), they moved to New York in 1969.
Around that time, Mrs. Stewart’s parents bought what is now the Dwight School for Mr. Spahn to run, and they suggested that she and Mr. Stewart look at the vacated New York College of Music building on East 85th Street. They bought it and over that summer converted it to a school.
One prospective parent asked what Mr. Stewart thought of the SATs. Being English, he had never heard of the tests. Being a lawyer, he answered carefully. “We take them very seriously,” he responded.
The school started with 151 students and a group of camp counselors as teachers.
York, which now has 350 students in grades 6 through 12, and Dwight were two of the city’s earliest for-profit schools — schools that must pay taxes on their property and income, but need not have a board or disclose their financial statements.
And in time, York found success unabashedly catering to students who either could not make it into Dalton or Trinity, or found that schools like those were unable to accommodate their needs.
York welcomes students with learning issues like A.D.H.D. and dyslexia.
“Overcoming obstacles is a terrific model for life,” Mr. Stewart said, noting that many successful chief executives had learning disabilities.
Mrs. Stewart, who is in charge of college counseling, said the first student she helped get into college was David Brinkley’s daughter. Famous graduates have included the actress Liv Tyler and the artist Alexis Rockman, but perhaps none is so recognizable as Robert E. Chambers Jr., the so-called preppy killer, who graduated from York — during the summer — after short stints at Choate and Browning.
“I took him as a favor to a headmaster from a ‘famous’ school because the headmaster, who I thought highly of, gave his recommendation and thought that he had great potential,” Mr. Stewart said in an e-mail. “Who knew?”
In an interview, Mr. Stewart noted repeatedly that some of his seniors would be attending top universities, including Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Cornell. He and Mrs. Stewart write long letters and call colleges on behalf of each student. “There’s no real way of knowing how good a school you really are,” Mr. Stewart said, defending his tendency to drop the names of highly regarded colleges. “You have to see where they start and where they end.”
In 1997, York moved to a building on West 68th Street that had once been a rabbinical college and later a Jewish nursing home; the large stone facade and carved entryway make the school seem older than it is. Most private school headmasters, or public school principals for that matter, are loath to leave reporters alone in their schools, but during a recent visit to York, Mr. Stewart invited this reporter to speak to the graduating seniors alone, without any staff members in the room.
Some students complained about how the school openly ranks them as part of the college application process, and about one of the school’s points of pride: mixing students of different abilities. Others spoke of the scholars’ program, designed for high achievers, saying that some of the students included in the program should not have been. Jump Start, an academic support system in which teachers meet with students every day before and after school to help them get organized, understand assignments and do homework, drew equally contentious opinions. It is mandatory if the school says a student needs it, and it costs extra. “If you are placed in the program and you have no say, it should not be $15,000,” said Harry Dube, a senior.
But Gabe Skoletsky, another senior, offered a different view of Jump Start. “I was an average student and I was able to turn myself around,” he said.
Some said that they were happy with their schooling, and that York and the Stewarts had made them feel welcome. Others expressed frustration at the quality of the teachers, the for-profit nature of the school, and even Mr. Stewart’s unusually forward manner: One student said he referred to a classmate as “stupid” in front of the whole class (the student said Mr. Stewart later apologized).
“Mea culpa,” Mr. Stewart said later, when asked about the comment. “You cannot do this job without making mistakes.”
Both Stewarts refuse to disclose what they earn — it is public information at other private schools, some of which pay headmasters more than $500,000 a year — and they bristle at the notion that they should.
“I don’t think it’s anyone’s business what we make,” Mr. Stewart said.
They own a town house on West 68th Street and recently sold the 118-acre horse farm where they had raised their children, for $11 million. They own some motels around the country.
“People say in front of my face, ‘You make money,’ as if it’s a dirty thing,” Mrs. Stewart said. “We are not extravagant people.”
It comes with pictures
HER bow flopping on her head, Kylie Cao pirouetted alongside her fellow kindergartners in pink tutus and black leotards.
The girls smiled with nervous concentration. They were, unwittingly, performing the delicate dance of desegregation.
One child was white, one was black, and seven girls were Hispanic. Kylie was the only Asian student onstage — and in the kindergarten class this year at Public School 257, a magnet school of the performing arts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“She’s become very, very popular,” her father, Benson Yang, said at the school’s family night in early spring, when the children performed. “She gets a lot of attention.”
Kylie’s mother, Angie Cao, was so pleased with her daughter’s experience that she persuaded some friends to enroll their children at P.S. 257 next year. “Everybody will come here after seeing her,” she said.
If only change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital.
Instead, P.S. 257, where 73 percent of the students are Hispanic, has found integration to be far more intricate. One of four Williamsburg elementary schools to win a 2010 magnet grant from the United States Education Department to spur desegregation, it has struggled to follow a federal model created decades ago while focusing on more urgent battles: for resources, students and, above all, test scores.
Since the mid-1980s, New York’s public schools, which are among the nation’s most segregated, have received millions of dollars in magnet grants from the federal government. In this most recent round of grants, in 2010, the four Williamsburg elementary schools and one middle school, all in District 14, received a total of $10.2 million over three years; schools in Long Island City, Queens, and on the West Side in Manhattan also won grants, for a total of $33 million.
Magnet schools were once the federal government’s favored mechanism to increase diversity and prevent “white flight.” The idea was to create a themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group. Today, as the Williamsburg schools show, integration is an uneven process at best, hampered by geography, legal limits and, critics say, a lack of ideological commitment from the city.
Williamsburg, the epicenter of Brooklyn’s gentrification, where a growing white population is moving into neighborhoods dominated by Hispanics, would seem to have the most favorable conditions in the city for integration. About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3 percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.
Reducing that percentage, as the grant requires, has proved to be a challenge for the three magnet schools in the southeastern parts of District 14, where the socioeconomic and ethnic changes have yet to take hold with the same force as they have in the north.
Although decades of research studies show that children perform better in integrated schools, desegregating New York City’s system has not been a distinct priority for the mayor or his chancellors.
“I can’t remember the last time anyone in a leadership position said anything about desegregation,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University.
“That sends a signal,” she added. “They talk about choice.”
The sweeping changes initiated under Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein focused on the creation of new schools, notably charters and high schools.
The current chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said the administration’s priority was to “provide a richness in quality education” for all the city’s students; there are 1.1 million, three-quarters of whom are either Hispanic or black.
The magnet program, Mr. Walcott said, is one element of the system that promotes choice.
“If you have choice without civil rights policies, it stratifies the system,” said Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A., a research organization that recently published a study hailing the benefits of integrated schools. “People who have the most power and information get the best choices,” he added.
Among the policies needed in New York, Dr. Orfield said, were citywide efforts to educate parents about magnet schools, transportation options to help children get to schools outside their often-segregated neighborhoods and accountability for diversity.
New York is not alone in operating its school system without a cohesive integration plan, Dr. Orfield said, adding that the same could be said of other major cities, like Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
“I am focused on having high-quality schools in all neighborhoods,” Mr. Walcott said. “That’s the ultimate civil rights policy.”
For the magnet schools’ principals, the administration’s priorities are unequivocal: “The bottom line is, if you don’t hit your academic targets, they will put you on the turnaround list,” Brian Leavy-DeVale, P.S. 257’s principal, said, referring to the process of reorganizing a failing school.
In late May, P.S. 257 was one of two high-performing elementary schools from District 14 to be investigated by the Education Department over accusations of cheating on the annual New York State exams, after some of the students’ scores plummeted when they reached middle school.
It is possible that the scope of the investigation could include other elementary magnet schools in District 14, according to one person with knowledge of the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the process was still in its early stages. During the Bloomberg administration, about 1,250 claims of cheating have been received, most of which have gone unproven. But this investigation has clouded P.S. 257’s immediate future.
With the school year coming to a close, it is still too early to judge how much progress P.S. 257 and the other District 14 schools that received grants have made in desegregation. According to the Education Department, two elementary schools made incremental steps toward reducing the large percentage of Hispanic students, one stayed the same, and one actually increased its Hispanic population.
Those numbers do not tell the full story; the schools are rich in programming, and all have waiting lists for kindergarten next year, said Joseph Gallagher, District 14’s magnet project director. “It’s a good foundation to build on,” he said.
But magnet schools have a short window to create lasting diversity. After the 2010 grants end, schools may recruit from outside their attendance zones for only three more years, unless the Education Department approves an extension. There are currently 39 schools operating as magnets in New York City.
“Ultimately, the big issue comes down to how important this is to the people in charge,” Dr. Ravitch, the education historian, said. “Given the demography,” she added, “the question is, do you do something about it, or do you do nothing about it?”
Hurdles to Diversity
At P.S. 257, music jumps in the hallways. In the second-floor gym one afternoon, a drum line crashed out a beat, trumpets blared, and flute players bounced from side to side, as the marching band built a joyful crescendo. Already seasoned performers at Puerto Rican Day parades, the band members were practicing to play for the governor in Albany.
On Friday mornings this year, the chorus sang the national anthem over the public address system. In the piano room, the twins Antonio and Christian Mendoza, second graders, spent weeks practicing a Mozart piano sonata in Robert Siegel’s music class.
P.S. 257, also known as the John F. Hylan School, received an A on its last school progress report. It has used its magnet money to build an arts-based curriculum, enrich its after-school programs and “make school fun” for its 632 students. That is the refrain of the school’s tirelessly chirpy assistant principal, Melvin Martinez, a former club promoter who designed the school’s program while he was studying for his master’s degree in education.
Even before the Education Department and District 14 administrators chose his school for the grant, Mr. Martinez was looking for extra sources of money for the school. He had parents and students recycle cans and bottles, then used the refunds to buy the school’s first set of drums.
Now, thanks to about $520,000 a year in magnet money, the marching band performs in spiffy navy and gold uniforms made by the same company that outfits big college programs. A new sound system and an air-conditioner turned the cafeteria into a second performance space. Two performing-arts teachers were hired.
Part of the mission of the federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program is rallying teachers and students around a theme. Some themes seem to blend more fluidly than others with the citywide curriculum requirements.
But integration is still the magnet grant’s primary purpose, and this presents a geographic challenge in District 14. As it stretches from Greenpoint to Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, the district becomes more segregated, ethnically and socioeconomically.
P.S. 257 is a Title I school, meaning that it has a high level of poverty and offers free lunches, as the other three elementary magnet schools in Brooklyn do.
Given that the elementary-school-age population in its area is 65 percent Hispanic, traditionally Puerto Rican, the key to desegregation is drawing white and Asian students from outside the attendance borders. According to recent federal guidelines, enrolling black students also counts toward progress in reducing Hispanic isolation. (There is no box to check for multiracial heritages on District 14’s magnet application.)
But P.S. 257’s location, some 20 blocks southeast of the condominium and artisan enclaves of Williamsburg, surrounded by sprawling public-housing projects and in the shadow of Woodhull hospital, makes it a tough sell.
Nora Barnes, the longtime principal at another of the magnets, Public School 250, the George H. Lindsay School, which is seven blocks north of P.S. 257 and 77 percent Hispanic, acknowledged that drawing white families was difficult.
“They don’t come to a school that’s basically a Hispanic school because it’s like everybody else — they’re looking for a school that looks like them,” she said.
After the first year of its grant, P.S. 250’s student population was 10.4 percent Asian, higher than most schools in Williamsburg, in part because a growing number of Asian families live in the nearby Lindsay Park Houses. But the Hispanic population at the school remained unchanged.
“Whatever people think about minority-populated schools,” Ms. Barnes said, “on a number of levels it’s hard to convince white families to come to a school like this. And then, a lot are looking for gifted and talented programs.”
Because magnet schools are prohibited from using academic screening, they are not allowed to offer gifted and talented programs.
Applying to an elementary magnet school is not a simple process for students who live outside the school’s zone. Parents must submit an application for a lottery, listing the district magnet schools they wish their child to attend.
The principals then determine how many lottery slots they will have available — the majority of the magnet students enter in kindergarten — making sure to reserve seats for all students who live in their zones. To draw diverse applicants, Mr. Martinez, at P.S. 257, recruited at community centers in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in neighborhoods in Greenpoint (where he lives with his Irish-American wife and two children). He pitched the school at Head Start nursery programs and bodegas in Hispanic areas, and even flagged down prospective parents jogging on the track at McCarren Park.
The percentage of Hispanic students at P.S. 257 decreased to 73 percent in the 2011-12 school year, from 75 percent the year before. And the progress seems likely to continue. Preliminary enrollment figures for P.S. 257’s incoming kindergarten class show that out of nearly 100 children, 4 are white, 3 are Asian, and 16 are black — all coming from outside the attendance zone.
“It is a major influx for us; we’ve never had that,” Mr. Martinez said.
Whether the appeal of the school, which has fervent parent support, will fade because of the investigation into cheating accusations is not yet clear. Mr. Leavy-DeVale, the principal, said he had not been notified that his school was under investigation and denied that there had been any cheating. “I stand by my teachers; I have great staff,” he said. “And we have never seen that.”
The investigation began after teachers at Intermediate School 318 received poor evaluations because their students had performed badly on the state tests. While seemingly focused on two schools that feed into I.S. 318 — P.S. 257 and Public School 31 — the inquiry could expand its scope.
Neither Ms. Barnes, at P.S. 250, nor Diane Vitolo, the principal at Public School 380, another of the magnets, said she had been notified that her school was being investigated.
P.S. 380, the John Wayne Elementary School, is a Brooklyn paradox: It is named for a rugged American film star, sits in the middle of a staunchly Hasidic neighborhood in Williamsburg and yet has a student body that is 73 percent Hispanic.
The geographic area the school serves is 5 percent Hispanic and 93 percent white, but the white children are mostly Orthodox Jews, who overwhelmingly attend yeshivas.
In 2009, P.S. 380 won a national academic award, but its enrollment was dwindling. When the magnet grant allowed the school to recruit outside its zone, enrollment grew to 580 from 470, but the Hispanic population went up by 3 percentage points. Ms. Vitolo said that many of her current students had parents or relatives who used to live in the neighborhood before its demographic shifted.
“Although we want to attract — and that’s the goal, to attract — lots of diversity, we just want children,” Ms. Vitolo said. “We don’t necessarily see the different diversity. Children are children to us.”
Mr. Leavy-DeVale, at P.S. 257, was even blunter. “I didn’t get into this just to have 12 European blond English-speaking kids,” he said. “If that’s the mission of it, as long as my kids are getting things, then so be it. Whoever can bring us money, I don’t care if they are liberal, conservative, communists,” he said, adding: “I’ll put a Coca-Cola sign on the door if it brings in dollars and direct services.”
Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion, he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity.
Referring to New York City, Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University, asked, “Is there even a goal in terms of trying to create more diverse educational settings — not just by race?”
She added: “If so, how can policy makers look at the given makeup of a district and, if that’s a goal, make sure that more kids have more access?”
The Education Department said it was addressing the issue by appointing a deputy chancellor in charge of equity and access and offering tutoring for students from low-income families studying for the exam for specialized high schools.
Walking in Both Worlds
Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been able to attract them in droves. It just has not opened yet.
Public School 414, the Brooklyn Arbor School, is to open in September in a building alongside what is left of Public School 19, a failing school whose scheduled closing nonetheless drew strong parental protest. Brooklyn Arbor’s kindergarten class will be mostly white, in a neighborhood that has been predominantly Dominican.
Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor in a prime location to draw families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white middle-class families to try the new school.
“A lot of it is marketing,” Ms. Irizarry said. “It takes a certain person who can walk in both worlds.”
Ms. Irizarry, 34, is white, grew up in the Netherlands, married a man of Puerto Rican heritage and has a school-age son. She also spent the past 11 years teaching at P.S. 257; her assistant principal, Cristina Albarran, 33, did, too. (She was also a student there.)
P.S. 19, the Roberto Clemente School, had originally won the magnet grant, but the Education Department announced this year that it was closing the school. Now, Brooklyn Arbor (beginning with kindergarten, first and second grades) will split the magnet money with P.S. 19 (with third, fourth and fifth grades this year and phasing out one year at a time) and adopt the theme of global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof; her school will be housed in separate wing in the building.
Becoming a magnet school was not part of her original plan, Ms. Irizarry said, but she eagerly adopted the idea when Mr. Gallagher, the magnet program director, told her the school would receive about $1 million over the next two years.
“This money is the perfect thing for us right now to put us in business,” Ms. Irizarry said.
P.S. 19 had no choice but to share the money. The first year of the grant, P.S. 19’s Hispanic population slightly decreased to 92 percent from 95 percent; because the school was to close, it was prohibited from recruiting in the 2011-12 school year.
P.S. 19 finished the year with a depleted roster of teachers and low morale.
When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican neighborhoods.
She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities photographed in green T-shirts.
Ms. Irizarry was interviewed by Joyce Suzflita, who runs a well-known blog, nycschoolhelp. (Mr. Martinez had not heard of the blog.) As of now, the 75-student kindergarten class will have 55 children from outside the school’s zone, most of them white (including a number of new immigrants from Western Europe and Asia who are bilingual); of the 60 first graders, 25 are out of zone. The second grade, with 75 of its 80 students from the zone, is mostly Hispanic.
Celeste Stern, a white parent from Crown Heights, was impressed by Ms. Irizarry’s energy and won over by her approach. She soon told her friends to apply.
Ms. Stern said she was looking for diversity after her daughter Alice was shut out of her neighborhood kindergarten. And yet, at the same time, Ms. Stern wanted there to be a balance.
“I don’t want Alice to be the only white kid,” she said, while registering for Brooklyn Arbor in a classroom at P.S. 257. “I want her to have a chance to have friends from all ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic backgrounds. I think that’s what makes New York so great and so exciting.”
Yaskara Ramirez, 31, registering her son Alejandro the same day, did not care that as a Hispanic child he would be in the minority. “That’s perfectly fine,” she said. “I honestly don’t care about what makes up the kindergarten class. I am just more concerned about the academics.”
Ms. Irizarry, nonetheless, said she was concerned that Hispanic parents might feel they were being pushed out of the school. “I really need to think about ways to address any kind of issues that will come up,” she said.
Brooklyn Arbor is now an alternative to Public School 84, an increasingly popular school in the fastest-changing part of Williamsburg that has become a success in integration.
After P.S. 84 was named a magnet school for the visual arts in 2004, the school struggled to blend its white students with its predominantly Hispanic population. But when a new principal, Sereida Rodriguez, arrived in 2009, she united the parents and infused the school with programs and energy. She said she even discovered supplies left unused from during the magnet grant.
Now the school has an intensely active PTA, led by white parents from Northside. Its Hispanic population decreased to 73 percent from 85 percent this year; 17 percent of its students are white.
Still, Ms. Rodriguez encountered confusion with the Education Department over out-of-zone recruiting. A magnet school can apply for an extension past the six years guaranteed by the grant, though Ms. Rodriguez said she was not initially told that.
But this spring, the department automatically put all her out-of-zone kindergarten applicants on a waiting list for the fall.
“Finally,” Ms. Rodriguez said, “I get white families coming to my school, and I didn’t want to discourage them, but I told them, O.K., we’ll get back to them.” She said the city eventually allowed those applicants.
Increasingly, magnet schools are competing for students against new charter schools that are opening in the district. A vocal group of P.S. 84 parents led a vehement protest against the planned opening of a Citizens of the World Charter School in a portion of the building.
Brooke Parker, a founder of Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools, said advocates for the charter had been looking to attract white families, recruiting in the same places that the more savvy magnet schools had gone. That is unusual for charter schools, which in New York have not often focused on integration as a goal.
Even with the number of charter schools increasing, and testing as the overarching measure of a school’s success becoming the norm, federally supported magnet schools still resonate with parents like Justin Jones who value diversity as much as test scores. He and his wife moved to Bushwick 12 years ago from Blacksburg, Va., and were one of the few white families in the neighborhood. They were at P.S. 257’s season-ending talent show to watch their daughter, Prairie, 5, one of the school’s nine white children, twirl alongside her classmates in rainbow-colored tutus.
“Ideally,” Mr. Jones said, “I like to think that everyone eventually is going to have to work together to find solutions to fix the world.”
Kindergarten, he said, seems as good a place as any to start.
How to Read a Racist Book to Your Kids
“Dad, why do the pirates have a gorilla?” This unexpected question intruded on a recent intergenerational cultural exchange: I was introducing my 6-year-old son to Asterix the Gaul. The pirates in the “Asterix” comics don’t travel with a gorilla, of course. One of the pirate crew is a grotesque caricature of an African who does indeed more closely resemble a gorilla than a person.
Freeze-frame on this parenting situation. What am I supposed to do? I figure I have three options.
1) Explain that the gorilla is supposed to be a black person.
2) Try to explain the history of French colonialism, how the economics of exploitation in sub-Saharan Africa led to an ideology of racism, which survived in a ghostly transfer even after the conclusion of the French Empire, infecting even silly comics about ancient Gaul.
3) Say, “I don’t know why the pirates have a gorilla” and flip to the next page.
Naturally I chose 3 — the cowardly choice. There will be time enough to explain the cruelties of history later, I figure. Nonetheless I am left with the queasy knowledge that I had better come up with a solution soon, because my lies and obfuscations are washing ever thinner, and the summer movie season is coming as well, with new “Ice Age” and “Madagascar” installments. Their ethnic typologies and attitudes — from Ray Romano as a Brooklyn-fuhgeddaboudit woolly mammoth to Chris Rock as a zebra whose catchphrase is “crackalackin!” — resemble a sort of preglobalization New York. Besides, much of the great old children’s material, like so much of the great old adult material, is either racist to the core or at least has seriously racist bits. Learning to negotiate around them or through them is something that every parent has to do, unless you want to waste your children’s precious young lives sticking strictly to “approved literature” and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Some decisions are easy. “The Story of Little Black Sambo,” say, or “Tintin in the Congo.” Hergé himself was deeply embarrassed by the latter book, brushing it off as a youthful error. The British bookstore chain Waterstones removed the book from the shelves of the children’s section. The Brooklyn Public Library has placed “Tintin in the Congo” in a special, by-appointment-only rare-books section. As parents, we know what to do with this stuff: Certainly never show it to young kids.
That decision is made so much easier by the fact that both of those books are lousy. The only memorable part of “Tintin in the Congo” is a scene in which Tintin hunts a rhinoceros by blowing it up with dynamite. And who will mourn Little Black Sambo?
Much trickier is material that is otherwise excellent but contains significant racist passages. Michael Chabon recently wrote about negotiating (and ultimately eliminating) the racial epithets while reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to his kids, following a painful and honest discussion about it with them. I admire his spirit of openness, but I have to admit I would never have had the stomach to imitate him — either in the willful alteration or the discussion about it.
So we’re left wondering how to approach, say, “Dumbo” with its racist-stereotype crows, or the original “Pippi Longstocking” trilogy. The publishers of “Pippi Longstocking” long ago changed certain phrases in the books — the Swedish negerkung was traditionally translated as “Cannibal King” until a 2007 edition, in which the translation became “King of Natives.” But one German theologian has recently proposed explanatory footnotes to turn the most problematic passages — the black children abasing themselves before Pippi, for example — into educational opportunities. Even the most politically correct among us are unwilling to toss “Pippi” out completely; after all, despite her appearance in a book with racist elements, she has become a feminist icon.
Sometimes the racist passages can be excised completely, and our crimes can be covered up. If you really want to upset yourself, go to YouTube and look up the original 1940 “Pastoral Symphony” section from Disney’s “Fantasia.” Sunflower the centaur, an amalgam of antebellum pickaninny stereotypes, polishes the hooves and primps the tails of the pastel-colored female centaurs while they prepare to frolic in the wilderness. The scenario is one of maximum sadness and horror; in the American imagination of 1940, even the world of little-girl centaurs was one of humiliating subjugation. But Disney edited the sequence for rerelease in the ’60s, and all subsequent rereleases, which means that I can show “Fantasia” to my son.
Other classics have been successfully rewritten. In the first edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the Oompa-Loompas were members of an African tribe displaced by Willy Wonka to the northern industrial hinterland. Not quite so funny anymore that his workers worship him like a god, is it? Or that he keeps them scrupulously isolated from the general population? Or that he pays them in cocoa beans? For the second edition in 1973, Dahl changed the Oompa-Loompas from black pygmies into “rosy-white” creatures with long “golden-brown” hair. The 1971 movie made them orange-skinned with green hair. Loompaland is a complicated place.
We rewrite the past to serve the needs of the present. The clarity of history is its great advantage. The racism in “Fantasia” or “Pippi Longstocking” is overt: instantly identifiable by its noxious odor and satisfyingly dismissible with enlightened disgust. More subtle instances may provoke hedging and justification. The “Babar” series of books has long been the subject of ferocious debates about its status as a propagandistic celebration of colonialism. The argument makes complete sense to me — the elephants return to their native land bearing the gifts of civilization learned in the metropolis and make war on the rhinoceroses who don’t share the benefits of acculturation. But as a practical parenting matter, I don’t care. My son won’t be turned into a more effective colonist by stories of elephants riding elevators.
Besides, “Babar” is boring. The influence of the more recent “Star Wars” installments is more profound, and it worries me. I managed to avoid the recent rerelease of “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” in 3-D, but only barely. Every father who loves the original “Star Wars” trilogy eventually runs into the fiasco that is Jar Jar Binks — a character capable of destroying a generation’s worth of affection with a single rustle of his oversize ears. While many have noted Jar Jar as a racist stereotype, it’s unclear exactly which stereotype he is. Is Jar Jar a Rastafarian stoner or a Stepin Fetchit or a Zuluesque savage? Or is he just a Gungan? And what about Watto, also from “The Phantom Menace”? A dark-skinned, hooknosed, greedy slaveholder, he’s an all-purpose anti-Semitic caricature. Or possibly he’s just a hovering bad guy in a fantasy world. The conundrum is how to explain to your kids that Jar Jar and Watto are stereotypes without first introducing the stereotypes that you are hoping to negate.
Even Pixar, which deserves the gratitude of every parent for its nearly unbroken series of classics, indulges a surprising amount of relatively crude stereotyping. In one of my favorites, “Monsters, Inc.,” Sulley and Mike, on the way into the office, happen to pass an orange squidlike grocer with a handlebar mustache who kind of talks-a-like-a-this. Perhaps that kind of stereotype is not as gruesome or upsetting as the one in the original “Fantasia,” but I had the distinct impression, as my son laughed at the scene, that my Italian immigrant grandfather was turning over in his grave.
How am I supposed to explain to a child the superimposition of cultural generalizations onto toy cars and monsters and space aliens? I can barely explain it to myself. Blissfully unaware of what is being promoted, children love those movies. Try convincing any kid under the age of 12 that “The Empire Strikes Back” is a better movie than “The Phantom Menace,” or that “Finding Nemo” is better than “Cars 2.” You’ll be laughed at. Stereotypes are part of what children want from stories, which of course connects to what we all want from stories: simplification. We want all stepmothers to be evil. We want all huntsmen to be heroes. And apparently, for the most part, we want characters’ ethnicities to be equally simplistic, whether the movie is set in a monster world or an ice age or Madagascar. Who knows what the consequences are or whether there are any? Is it because children like the simplification? Or are our minds simplified by exposure to these early stereotypes?
Despite my misgivings, I know that I won’t be able to give up Asterix. My relationship to the comic is too deep; it was made too early, bound up with my own childhood. They were the only comics we were allowed to read in French class in Canada. (The Smurfs were banned because of their limited vocabulary.) When I gashed my knee playing tag in the back alley behind my house and had to have 15 stitches, the treat that I received for being brave was “Asterix in Britain.” And so I’m hedging, cravenly. I believe this is the very definition of white liberal guilt: I feel bad but I won’t change my behavior.
That familiar and insoluble knot of moral difficulty is infinitely complicated by the fact that I’m sharing it with a child. I don’t want to explain the human gorilla and all the chains of horror that went into that caricature because I’m afraid of the follow-up questions. Recently as I was laying down ant traps against the annual spring invasion, my son asked me, “Do ants have souls?” I didn’t have a good answer for that. What is he going to ask when I explain that for 400 years, white people took black people from their homes in Africa, carried them across the ocean in chains, beat them to death as they worked to produce sugar and cotton, separated them from their children and felt entitled to do so because of the difference in the color of their skin? Whatever he asks next, I’m pretty sure I won’t have an adequate reply.
Academic notions of the unspeakability of historical horrors become very immediate in the face of a child. There are many children’s books to help children understand the horror of history, or introduce them to the failure to understand the horror of history. But explaining how those horrors play out in everyday life, through a thousand subtle means, often unexpected, like children’s books, seems nearly impossible. No doubt I want to shelter my son and also myself, but I think, in some vague, indefinable way, I want to shelter the past too. I’m embarrassed for humanity at all this nonsense, and I don’t want to submit the world to the complete and perfect judgment of an innocent.
We all need to grow up, I know. Me, the moviemakers, the audience. The only person who seems mature enough for the situation is the 6-year old. All he sees is a gorilla with some pirates.
With Casino Revenues, Tribes Push to Preserve Languages, and Cultures
The comments to this article, all 28 of them, are fascinating and I suggest everybody read them.
Inside a classroom of some 20 adults and children studying the language of their tribe, a university linguist pointed out that Chukchansi has no “r” sound and that two consonants never follow each other. The comments seemed to stir forgotten childhood memories in Holly Wyatt, 69, the only fluent speaker present, who was serving as a living reference book.
“My mother used to call Richard ‘Lichad,’ ” Ms. Wyatt blurted out, referring to a relative. “It just popped into my head.”
Using revenues from their casino here in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the Chukchansi Indians recently pledged $1 million over five years to California State University, Fresno, to help preserve their unwritten language. Linguists from the university will create a dictionary, assemble texts and help teach the language at weekly courses like the one on a recent evening.
The donation caps efforts in recent years by American Indian tribes across the nation to bring back their tongues before the death of their sole surviving speakers. With coffers flush from casino gambling, dozens of tribes have donated to universities or have directly hired linguists, buttressing the work of researchers dependent on government grants, experts say.
The money has given the tribes greater authority over the study of their language, an often culturally fraught discipline. Some tribes wishing to keep their language from outsiders for cultural or religious reasons have retained researchers on the condition that their findings remain unpublished. The control has also persuaded aging speakers — who grew up in an age when they were often punished at school for speaking their language — to collaborate with outside experts.
“There are more people out there who can talk, but they don’t come forward,” said Ms. Wyatt, who with her sister, Jane Wyatt, 67, meets with linguists twice a week. “I was like that, too. My daughter convinced me I should do it.”
Nearly all the 300 Native American languages once spoken in North America have died or are considered critically endangered. For many tribes, especially the dozens of tiny tribes in California that spoke distinct dialects and experienced dislocation and intermarriage like their counterparts in other states, language is considered central to their identity.
“The whole reason that outsiders even knew we were a people is because we have our own language,” said Kim Lawhon, 30, who organizes the weekly classes and started running an immersion class for prekindergarten and kindergarten students at Coarsegold Elementary School last year. “Really, our sovereignty, the core of it, is language.”
There was also a more practical matter. Tribes have asserted their right to build casinos in areas where their language is spoken, and have used language to try to fend off potential rivals.
The Chukchansi are opposing plans by the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, whose traditional land lies east of here, to build an off-reservation casino about 30 miles southwest of here. In an interview at the Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino here, where he was introducing a new game, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Reggie Lewis, chairman of the Tribal Council, said Chukchansi and other tribes belonging to the Yokut Indian group in this area shared common words.
“But the Mono language, it’s totally unintelligible to us,” Mr. Lewis said. “You have to establish the cultural or ancestral ties to a place to open a casino there, and language is a way to do it.”
The 2,000-slot-machine casino, which opened in 2003, yields $50 million in annual revenues, according to the Tribal Council. Each of the tribe’s 1,200 members receives a $300 monthly stipend, with those 55 and older also getting free health insurance and other benefits.
The gambling revenues have also intensified political infighting here as they have in many other places. Violence erupted early this year after a disputed election for the Tribal Council.
According to the National Indian Gaming Association, 184 tribes with gambling operations took in $29.2 billion in 2010 and made more than $100 million in charitable donations.
Jessica R. Cattelino, an expert on Indian gambling at the University of California, Los Angeles, said it was not “until the late 1990s that with electronic games we begin to see revenues sufficient to allow tribes to explore options for major philanthropy.”
Tribes have become increasingly sophisticated in their gift giving, focusing on their culture and language while often setting the research terms.
“Tribes can control their own intellectual property rights,” said Erin Debenport, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who has worked with Pueblo tribes in the state, including those who do not allow researchers to publish written examples of their language.
The Chukchansi, who had been donating about $200,000 a year to Fresno State’s football program, will reallocate the money to the linguistics department.
“How do we justify supporting athletics when our language is dying?” said Ms. Lawhon, the kindergarten teacher.
Ms. Lawhon had tried to restore the language with the Wyatt sisters and some other community members here, but decided to reach out to Fresno State’s linguistics department for help three years ago.
Chris Golston, who was the department chairman at the time and had been on the faculty for 15 years, had long dreamed of working with one of the local tribes. But given the sensitivity surrounding the research of Indian languages, an older colleague had advised him that the only strategy was to wait to be approached.
“After 15 years, I thought this was possibly the worst advice in the world, but one day three years ago they just called up,” Mr. Golston said.
Four of Fresno’s experts, who had been working with the Chukchansi in their spare time for the past three years, will be able to devote half of their work schedule to the language thanks to the grant, the largest in the department’s history.
On a recent afternoon at Fresno State, Holly Wyatt met with two linguists to try to decipher a five-minute recording that they had found here a month earlier. Two women were heard playing a local game in the 1957 recording, which excited Mr. Golston because it was the “closest to conversation” of the various examples in their possession.
As the linguists played snippets of the tape over and over, Ms. Wyatt slowly made out their meaning. The game revolved around a man climbing up a tree and taking care not to fall.
“What do you get out of that, Holly?” Mr. Golston asked about a difficult word.
“That one word has me confused,” Ms. Wyatt said. “I don’t know what it is.”
She cradled her head in her right hand and shut her eyes.
Maybe some words were already lost. The women on the tape spoke fast, Ms. Wyatt said later. Her hearing was not getting any better, she said, and a hearing aid did not help. The words the linguists kept introducing sounded familiar, but some just refused to be extricated from her mind’s recesses.
“It’s pressure,” she said, “because they’ve come up with a lot of words that I haven’t heard in years.”
For-Profit Private School Is Calling Its Own Shots
Here are a few of the ways that Ronald P. Stewart, co-founder and headmaster of the York Preparatory School, thinks his school is different from other New York City private schools:
It has no board of directors (“why would I hire someone who could fire me?”). It accepts more than half the students who apply (“we do not seek to be the most exclusive school in Manhattan”). And after York takes $36,000 or more from parents each year, Mr. Stewart has no qualms about telling them to back off. “The student is our client,” he says.
Even the school’s origin is evidence that it is a different species. While many schools have century-old histories that began with educational or religious visionaries, Mr. Stewart, a British barrister who once defended Charles Kray, an infamous London mobster, founded the school with his wife because they wanted to work together and have their summers free to spend at a camp in Maine.
“Kids are nicer than psychopaths,” he chirped in his English accent.
In a city where private schools and residents exude ambition, York is an outlier. At a time when the most prestigious schools accept less than 10 percent of applicants, York takes almost 60 percent, some of them having been nudged out of the more selective schools. About a third have diagnoses of learning disabilities, and they are integrated in classes and tracked by ability.
Behind all of it is Mr. Stewart, an impassioned, engagingly bombastic and occasionally loose-tongued leader who is one of the city’s longest-tenured headmasters, a testament not only to his success but also to his unassailability, as he and his wife, Jayme, own the school.
Mr. Stewart was born in Willesden, a poor neighborhood of London, and won a full scholarship to Oxford. There he met Stephen H. Spahn, an American whose parents ran the Tripp Lake summer camp in Maine. Mr. Stewart volunteered to teach sailing there. Along the way, he met and fell for Jayme, Mr. Spahn’s sister. They wed, and after the Kray trial (Kray was acquitted of murder but convicted on accessory to murder), they moved to New York in 1969.
Around that time, Mrs. Stewart’s parents bought what is now the Dwight School for Mr. Spahn to run, and they suggested that she and Mr. Stewart look at the vacated New York College of Music building on East 85th Street. They bought it and over that summer converted it to a school.
One prospective parent asked what Mr. Stewart thought of the SATs. Being English, he had never heard of the tests. Being a lawyer, he answered carefully. “We take them very seriously,” he responded.
The school started with 151 students and a group of camp counselors as teachers.
York, which now has 350 students in grades 6 through 12, and Dwight were two of the city’s earliest for-profit schools — schools that must pay taxes on their property and income, but need not have a board or disclose their financial statements.
And in time, York found success unabashedly catering to students who either could not make it into Dalton or Trinity, or found that schools like those were unable to accommodate their needs.
York welcomes students with learning issues like A.D.H.D. and dyslexia.
“Overcoming obstacles is a terrific model for life,” Mr. Stewart said, noting that many successful chief executives had learning disabilities.
Mrs. Stewart, who is in charge of college counseling, said the first student she helped get into college was David Brinkley’s daughter. Famous graduates have included the actress Liv Tyler and the artist Alexis Rockman, but perhaps none is so recognizable as Robert E. Chambers Jr., the so-called preppy killer, who graduated from York — during the summer — after short stints at Choate and Browning.
“I took him as a favor to a headmaster from a ‘famous’ school because the headmaster, who I thought highly of, gave his recommendation and thought that he had great potential,” Mr. Stewart said in an e-mail. “Who knew?”
In an interview, Mr. Stewart noted repeatedly that some of his seniors would be attending top universities, including Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Cornell. He and Mrs. Stewart write long letters and call colleges on behalf of each student. “There’s no real way of knowing how good a school you really are,” Mr. Stewart said, defending his tendency to drop the names of highly regarded colleges. “You have to see where they start and where they end.”
In 1997, York moved to a building on West 68th Street that had once been a rabbinical college and later a Jewish nursing home; the large stone facade and carved entryway make the school seem older than it is. Most private school headmasters, or public school principals for that matter, are loath to leave reporters alone in their schools, but during a recent visit to York, Mr. Stewart invited this reporter to speak to the graduating seniors alone, without any staff members in the room.
Some students complained about how the school openly ranks them as part of the college application process, and about one of the school’s points of pride: mixing students of different abilities. Others spoke of the scholars’ program, designed for high achievers, saying that some of the students included in the program should not have been. Jump Start, an academic support system in which teachers meet with students every day before and after school to help them get organized, understand assignments and do homework, drew equally contentious opinions. It is mandatory if the school says a student needs it, and it costs extra. “If you are placed in the program and you have no say, it should not be $15,000,” said Harry Dube, a senior.
But Gabe Skoletsky, another senior, offered a different view of Jump Start. “I was an average student and I was able to turn myself around,” he said.
Some said that they were happy with their schooling, and that York and the Stewarts had made them feel welcome. Others expressed frustration at the quality of the teachers, the for-profit nature of the school, and even Mr. Stewart’s unusually forward manner: One student said he referred to a classmate as “stupid” in front of the whole class (the student said Mr. Stewart later apologized).
“Mea culpa,” Mr. Stewart said later, when asked about the comment. “You cannot do this job without making mistakes.”
Both Stewarts refuse to disclose what they earn — it is public information at other private schools, some of which pay headmasters more than $500,000 a year — and they bristle at the notion that they should.
“I don’t think it’s anyone’s business what we make,” Mr. Stewart said.
They own a town house on West 68th Street and recently sold the 118-acre horse farm where they had raised their children, for $11 million. They own some motels around the country.
“People say in front of my face, ‘You make money,’ as if it’s a dirty thing,” Mrs. Stewart said. “We are not extravagant people.”
