Nixon’s education equality act

If you’re like me, you learned of gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon’s interest in public school policy roughly when she took to the airwaves in 2011 for the teachers union-aligned Alliance for Quality Education demanding more school funding.

The commercial featured the actress in a kitchen larger than most New York apartments, reading Gov. Cuomo the riot act while throwing keyboards and arts supplies into a trash can. The only thing as memorable as the ire was the kitchen itself.

Fast forward to today, and candidate Nixon — still bashing Cuomo for failing public school kids — is in the public eye for another reason. Having cast herself as a graduate of and advocate for public education, she is in the middle of a controversy over her own school choices.

Nixon went to Hunter College High School, a highly selective school that is publicly funded, independently run, and overwhelmingly white and Asian. But let’s not hold her teenage self, and her parents’ choices, against her.

More relevant is her own decision as a parent to send one of her children to the Upper West Side’s Center School — a screened middle school where a mix of test scores and other factors determine entrance.

The process for admission is as secret as KFC’s original recipe. Of the formula, education consultant Alina Adams offered that “They have their completely own independent rubric which they don’t have to release or justify. Nobody knows how kids get into that school.”

The school — which is a haven for the children of celebrities, including Samantha Bee, Louis C.K. and Nixon — is also controversial because of its makeup. In a neighborhood struggling with school diversity, it features a very real lack of it.

Sixty-one percent of the school’s students are white; 6% are economically disadvantaged. In a city that prizes the energy stewed in its melting pot, in a community school district that is 32% white and majority black and Hispanic, the Center School is an outlier.

Indeed, the monastic Dartmouth College, which I happen to have attended, is more integrated (57% white) than the Center School. Dartmouth is a great school, but it’s not a very diverse one.

Lots of folks are putting Nixon on blast for choosing a school that exemplifies the privilege and exclusivity district diversity efforts say they’re trying to unwind. Perhaps they should.

It is indeed one thing to talk about diversity as a progressive value while using your own station and influence to insulate your child from that same diversity.

That said, supporting a parent’s right to choose the best fit for his or her child is also a fundamental and far-reaching value that should be respected even if you don’t agree with it. So it is difficult to chastise Nixon for her choice if you believe that parents know their children best and should be empowered to choose the right school for them. That is what I believe. Families in the five boroughs are increasingly making use of choice, including to attend charter schools that teachers unions and the Nixonsupported Alliance for Quality Education consider a threat.

A new report by the Center for New York City Affairs finds that more than half of AfricanAmerican families citywide exercise school choice. Thirty percent of the city’s AfricanAmerican kindergarteners now attend charter schools.

“We have to stop diverting education funding into privately run charter schools,” Nixon has said, while attacking elected officials who support them.

To oppose those schools as threats to public education even as she ensures her own right to decide where her children go to school is textbook hypocrisy.

The city’s 227 charters, unlike the island of whiteness that is the Center School, are an ocean of minority and low-income kids who actually reflect the city around them.

This, despite some of the city’s charters delivering results that surpass all but the most selective of the city’s public schools — schools like Center and Hunter — while admitting kids through the wholly open and transparent process of a lottery.

While the Department of Education fights with Nixon and her compatriots to ration exposure to the city’s small percentage of white students, charters are ensuring a kid of color can show up to a school and get an excellent education regardless of the color of the skin of the child in the next seat. In the city with America’s most segregated public schools, this is something we should be celebrating.

And it’s something a supposedly progressive candidate for governor should be building upon, not undermining.