There’s a lot of ‘rithmetic in rezoning. Time to study!
The city’s plan to rezone schools on the Upper West Side failed last fall. But the underlying problems that the rezoning tried to address aren’t going away, and it’s likely that the city and school board will try another rezoning this year.
They’re also poised to tackle segregation in Upper West Side public schools, and are looking at some innovative tactics that could have major implications for parents. So they’re holding two information session next month to teach parents the basics of the rezoning process, and explain ideas like controlled choice. See the info below:
SAVE THE DATE:
School Zones, School Choice
District 3 Information Session for ParentsTuesday Mar 1, 2016
PS145
150 West 105th Street, Auditorium
6:30-8:30 PMTuesday Mar 15, 2016
PS87
160 West 78th Street, Auditorium
6:30-8:30 PM
Mark your calendar for an information session on public elementary school enrollment in District 3 schools – Manhattan’s Upper West Side and lower Harlem – some of the best schools in New York City but also some of the most segregated schools in the city. You will learn all about neighborhood schools, traditional school zones and the factors that generate changes made to school zone lines. You will also learn about controlled choice, an admissions policy that removes zone lines and admits students by factors that consider diversity, poverty level, and English language learning (among others).Panelists will include educational experts and parent leaders from District 3 and other school districts, which have implemented or considered controlled choice or other progressive enrollment policies for their schools.
The same session will be offered on both dates in the two locations.
Please save the date and pass along the word!
Whatever one thinks about the school rezoning plans the most incredible thing is the absence of any elected politicians taking a stance in this debate.
Where is Helen Rosenthal, Linda Rosenthal, Brad Hoylman or Gale Brewer? Even DeBlasio is silent.
All these lefty politicians realize that getting involved in this controversy will only hurt them politically and they’re all too cowardly to take any position.
So much for the Upper West Side’s “progressive” values.
It isn’t easy. Whoever came up with the idea or putting all the poor people in large complexes must have wanted it this way. Now we have schools for the haves and schools for the have nots. If you split up the neighborhood schools by having gerrymandered zone lines or if you have controlled choice you lose the neighborhood feel of schools. I don’t know that wanting your child to go to school with neighbors is against progressive values.
Anon – using the fig leaf “going to school with your neighbors” is quite pathetic. Have you looked at the zones for 191 v 199 before commenting? Your definition of neighbor seems quite narrow-minded to justify a selfish outcome.
Sherman – those Upper West Side “progressive” values many of us proudly remember are looooong gone….
The broader neighborhood should have one, unified zone with seats randomly determined by lottery.
what’s the broader neighborhood? For the 199/191 zone I would agree but this article implies they want to tackle all of D3. Making it all one big zone would require 4 year old kids to potentially travel too far to get to kindergarten.
Sherman, its not that people don’t want to be progressive. I think that people are starting to question in a very real sense whether ANY of the polcies of integration, housing, etc., are doing any good or whether they are actually harming people. Look around, do you like what you see?
Senyc, glad that you look fondly at those “long gone” progressive values, but I don’t. What I remember is NYC becoming a hell hole, with neighborhood watch groups, broken car windows left and right, drug dealing and prostitution in the 80’s, muggings all over the place, window washers, etc., until guilliani came along and then bloomberg and cleaned up the city, making it a decent place to live. The VALUES that i like are the values of respect of others and their property and those are the values that were given top billing in both administrations. You want the old time values, give de blasio a few more years. i’m already seeing people drinking beer sitting down on sidewalks in front of schools (not so much now that the winter has come)…, enjoy…
Aside from parent convenience with siblings attending the same school, why not divide up the schools so one is K-2 and the other 3-5 or (6) ? That way, ALL the kids will be integrated, and higher-income families will be motivated to support the new principal in the school that was originally lower-performing.
Can someone explain to me why the term “segregation” is being used throughout and in the info materials? New York City does not have a policy of segregated schools and neither does any other place in the US. Segregation is ENFORCED separation. School which happen to be majority chinese, white, black, etc., are NOT segregated, they merely reflect zoning.
Can you elaborate further on how diving elementary schools in such a fashion would integrate kids from different socio-economic strata? Legitimate question, I’m genuinely interested.
Can you elaborate further on how diving elementary schools in such a fashion would integrate kids from different socio-economic strata? Legitimate question, I’m genuinely interested.
From dictionary.com:
De facto segregation
Racial segregation, especially in public schools, that happens “by fact” rather than by legal requirement. For example, often the concentration of African-Americans in certain neighborhoods produces neighborhood schools that are predominantly black, or segregated in fact ( de facto ), although not by law ( de jure ).
Mark T,
The schools are separate and unequal. They get the same money per student from the government (plus extra for poor Title 1 schools) but the rich schools PTAs raise $1,000,000 to provide assistant teachers in every classroom, music, chess, art and other enrichment activities that the poorer schools don’t get.
It is de facto segregation. It is enforced through real estate values, not state authority. Whether one is worse than the other is a point of personal perspective. The outcome is still the same.
Parker, first of all, the article does not mention “de facto segregation”, it mentions “segregation”. Second, de facto segregation means nothing if it is not attached to INTENTIONAL segregation. The term was developed to describe the practice of achieving segregation without legislating it. Nobody, for example, would claim that Japan’s schools are segregated, de facto or otherwise. The use of the word “segregation” is ridiculous in the context of the article.
Want to know something even worse than the dispartiy enabled by rich district parents donating to their schools? I’ll tell you about something that NOBODY discusses: kids in school today CANNOT, with few exceptions, do well in school without the assistance of a parent or tutors. The homework demands and level of complexity today make it absolutely necessary that a parent be involved daily, and don’t think for a second that the parents of PS199 aren’t, because they are. Children of single parents and hard working parents don’t have a chance, and that is a VERY big inequality, DE FACTO.
Are you suggesting the material isn’t taught in class and the parents need to teach their children?
Hi Anon,
Thank you for the response. I understand what you’re saying but I don’t get what Sue Susman suggested about dividing the schools K-2 and 3-6 so that they will get integrated. Do you know what she means?
oh so I didn’t have a chance? I was schooled at home (using cheap correspondence materials), had parents who worked 65+ hour weeks at cleaning jobs and yet somehow I taught myself Latin, trig, calculus, physics and all the other high school crap and then finished my undergraduate degree at age 22 (college seemed relatively easy after 12 years of home school). A couple years ago at age 28 I finished my graduate degree (all at state schools and without any debt due to scholarships and working 30+ hours/week). Liberals who say things like “have no chance” and who want to blame society ad nauseum dislike me because I am a very normal-person example of achievement under challenging experiences. Work ethic is the key. Look at the amazing achievements (under circumstances far more challenging than mine) of recent immigrants from Ghana or Asia. Many of their parents don’t even speak English and yet they make it and I had a number of them in the classes I taught through CUNY. Each one impressed me thoroughly with their work ethic and desire to learn and succeed.
Relax! First of all I didn’t say EVERYONE, of course there are exceptions. Some kids are precocious and functioning way above the other kids. But the most important thing you MISSED was that I was talking about school NOW, not 20 years ago. Things are VERY different now. We didn’t have 2+ hours of homework a night. 10 year olds now are learning (god know whys) 4 different ways to multiple and divide numbers. ANY parent today will tell you that the homework is much too demanding to be accomplished by a child on their own. EVERY parent that we know helps their child every night with homework. If you don’t think that is a big advantage, then you are just being silly.
Mark T,
PS 199 on W 70th St is mostly middle class and UMC while and Asian kids. The parents are mostly college educated, will make donations to the school, and will do whatever is necessary to get their children a good education. PS 191 on 60th and Amsterdam, only 10 blocks away, draws almost entirely from the Amsterdam Houses. Those children are lower middle class at best, mostly AA and hispanic. The families in the new high rise condos that have been built in the zone either found a way to get into another public school or use private school. PS 191 has virtually no PTA funds (around 30,000 vs PS 199’s million) for extras. The PS 199 kids have much higher test scores than 191. PS 191 is also a much smaller school. If both zones were combined the million dollars would be split, there would only be a few kids from the Amsterdam house is each class and wouldn’t change the overall education for the UMC white kids but would do a world of good for the LMC minority kids. We wouldn’t need a new school building just a designation that one school is lower grades and the other upper grades.
yarnoffs,
I have a 10 year old 5th grader at an excellent school. He’s never had 2 hours of homework in one might (even counting the 30 minutes of reading at bedtime). My only involvement in the homework is saying “do your homework” and glancing over it to make sure it was done. The teachers ask parents every year not to help too much. If the children haven’t learned the material the teacher needs to teach it again. While the tutors and 2 hours of homework might be the case for every student at PS 199 it is not true everywhere.
Anon,
Thanks for taking the time to explain it. I get it now. It does make sense but I would imagine that would be a very tough sale. Let’s see what happens…
I think the author of this article should go out and talk to some real people in the real world. Go and attend the zoning meetings, which I did last year.
This is not about segregation. There is a better school (P.S. 199) where 70%+ of students pass the state ELA test and 80% of student pass the state math test, and there is a worse school (P.S. 191) where 20% of students pass the math tests and less than 15% of students pass the ELA test. Parents who are zoned for the better school don’t want to be moved to the worse school, it’s as simple as that.
https://schools.nyc.gov/Accountability/data/TestResults/ELAandMathTestResults
I have a friend with children at a Success Academy school where most students are minority (black, hispanic). There is no talk of race or segregation there, there is a lottery and waiting list to get into that school.
The schools are segregated so the museum of natural history thinks its a good idea to add a science center to the neighborhood?
Leaving aside the issues of global warming, congestion,etc, doesn’t the museum’s reinforce the segregation?
Now a district stuffed with gifted & talented programs, private schools and nannies will have another ‘world-class’ resource. And, communities of color across the city will still be under-served.
yarnoffs – actually my 10 year old nephew does not have 2+ hours of homework a night and he goes to an excellent public school. He has 30 minutes of reading and about 15 minutes of math and/or ELA questions. His teachers want to know if parents feel like they need to “teach again” at home because if so they feel they can do better during the school day.
40% of PS191 kids are bused from Brooklyn and Bronx. If there is any segregation, it results from the gentrification of the city. Indeed, if any person reading this thinks thinks that parents will send our kids to a school having a persistently dangerous rating by the state of New York, they need to re-think their view. The segregation issue is solely DOE’s fault. When DOE stops busing kids to 191, then, miraculously, the segregation issue will be substantially diminished. Moreover, a grass roots PTA can take hold an 191 will be like the rest of the schools in D3. Indeed, the ne’er-do-wells who don’t have kids in D3 schools spent their time on other issues that truly effect them instead of nosying into the affairs of those who have an equal concern about our kids safety as much as integration.
WSR wrote: “They’re also poised to tackle segregation in Upper West Side public schools, and are looking at some innovative tactics that could have major implications for parents. So they’re holding two information session next month to teach parents the basics of the rezoning process, and explain ideas like controlled choice.”
But, but
Isn’t segregated schools the concern of the entire community, not just those with children currently attending?
Dear WSR,
This article seems to be the last where Replies to Comments are found below the Comment (See #2 above for an example).
Can this feature be restored?
Its a nice shcool