LOOK BEYOND STUYVESANT
High schools across the city show that black and Latino students can excel in the right environments, with the right leaders
Nearly 330,000 young people in New York attend 600 high schools — a fascinating, often bewildering mix of learning environments. Many are borough or neighborhood schools that take all comers. Some are for youngsters with significant cognitive or emotional challenges. Several dozen specialize in the arts (dramatics, music, film/video), or STEM, or humanities, and select students based on artistic ability, grades and interviews.
And then there is Stuyvesant, along with seven others, including Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech, that use the much-criticized SHSAT (Specialized High Schools Admissions Test) to determine admissions. Stuyvesant offers places to about 895 freshman a year and has a total enrollment of 3,325 — barely 1% of the total high school enrollment in the city.
Yet from the recent statements of Mayor de Blasio, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, various elected officials and the hyperbole of editorial writers, the fact that only seven of next year’s Stuyvesant freshmen will be black appears to be the biggest crisis facing the New York City educational system. It is not.
The real failure of the Department of Education continues to be the unacceptable performance of many elementary and middle schools serving Latino and black children in the South Bronx, Brownsville and other poor neighborhoods. Of the city’s 32 regular school districts, three of the six worst-performing are in the Bronx, one is in Manhattan (Central Harlem), and two are in Brooklyn (Brownsville and East New York).
In these districts, as many as 75% of elementary and middle school children are deficient in basic literacy and mathematical skills, making it hard for them to do well in any high school, let alone in Stuyvesant. Whatever the flaws of the SHSAT — and yes, it should be augmented with other admission criteria — there’s one sure way for Stuyvesant to better reflect the ethnic makeup of the DOE student population, which is currently nearly 70% Latino and black. That is for the city to improve the quality of elementary and middle schools, from pre-K through eighth grade, class by class and school by school.
Unlike tinkering with the Stuyvesant admission criteria, there is no way this can happen overnight.
In the meantime, the heated rhetoric of the mayor and other public officials, with their cries of racism and segregation, only fuel the perception that there is little opportunity for black and Latino students to excel in
city high schools today. Wrong again.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve talked with or visited principals of three high schools among many whose very existence and stellar record of achievement show how absurd this notion is. The schools are East Side Community High School (ESCHS) on the Lower East Side, Manhattan Village Academy (MVA) in Chelsea and Central Park East High School (CPEHS) in East Harlem. Though all happen to be in Manhattan, their students come from all over the city.
All three have student bodies that range from 73% to 82% Latino and black, on par with the racial and ethnic breakdown of the school system as a whole. All enroll students from mostly poor families. Yet all have four-year graduation rates approaching 100%, compared to a city average of 72% (and rates in the city are significantly lower for Latino and black students). More than 90% of high school graduates at these three schools go on to two or four-year colleges.
All three are small, 500 students or fewer, yet manage a rich offering of athletics, after-school clubs and activities. CPE’s football team (which also includes students from four other schools that make up the East Harlem Pride consortium) last year won its division with a 9-0 record.
East Side Community’s chess team has won national competitions. In 2018, the school was one of three winners of the Library of Congress Literacy Award (including a $50,000 check) for its independent reading program, “where students read on average over 40 books each year, improve literacy skills…and fall in love with reading.”
And at Manhattan Village Academy, with an enrollment of only 456, students take nine Regents exams, rather than the required five, there are 17 AP classes offered and students finish with 56 to 63 high school credits, compared to the standard 44. All three schools have a cadre of loyal teachers, some there for a dozen or more years. And all have long-serving,
exceptional principals. At Central Park East, Bennett Lieberman, formerly a social studies and English teacher, became principal in 2005 when the graduation rate was in the 30s, and the school barely received 200 applications for its 125 to 130 freshman places. Today the graduation rate is 97%, 95% go on to four- or two-year colleges, and this fall, CPEHS received 5,400 applications. The student body is 52% Latino, 27% black, 14% Asian and 5% white.
Lieberman, 50, is reflective and low-key, with a wry sense of humor. He jokes that “I’ve actually been principal of three schools, a failing school from 2005 to 2008, a so-so school from 2009 to 2011 or 2012, and now a successful school.” CPEHS pays little attention to the standardized test scores of those applying. Instead, it looks at grades and attendance.
Like CPEHS and East Side Community, MVA had its origins in the progressive school movement of the 1980s and 1990s. But performance had plummeted by the time Hector Geager became principal in February 1999. Since then the school’s results have climbed year after year. He’s a demanding, voluble leader, alive with energy and ideas (“A leader should be thinking five, 10 even 20 years ahead,” he tells me).
On DOE’s Dashboard chart comparing hundreds of high schools, MVA is a standout: a 2018 graduation rate of 100%, a college readiness index of 98% and a student attendance rate of 97%. The numbers match those of Stuyvesant — except that MVA is 68% Hispanic and 14% black and most of its students come from poor families.
Geager says the key factor in his admission decisions is attendance. He wants students who show up every day prepared to work hard. If an entering freshman is below eighth-grade levels in reading or math, MVA offers intensive prep. Every admitted student must spend four weeks in July, before freshman year, at MVA’s Critical Thinking Academy. Before you can learn, you better learn how to learn.
“Grit” is what Geager is looking for, and grit is what he gets.
At East Side Community High School, most of its 385 high school students come from the school’s middle school, and the 15 or 20 open spots every year draw hundreds of applicants. East Side’s students are 52% Latino, 21% black, and 27% Asian and white. Mark Federman, 48, principal since 2001, has seen graduation rates rise steadily during his tenure to the current 97%. And DOE data show exceptionally high levels of trust in Federman by teachers and families.
Other small (non-DOE) schools also offer significant opportunity for minority students. Founded in 2013. Math, Engineering and Science Academy (MESA) Charter High School in Bushwick, Brooklyn (Arthur Samuels, executive director; Pagee Cheung, principal), is 79% Latino, 15% black, and boasts a 93% graduation rate. vs. 64% for district schools. Cristo Rey Brooklyn, a Catholic school that opened in 2008, has a student body that is 70% black, 26% Latino. Its demanding work-study model features four extra-long days of class, and one full day of work a week at various business partners. Of last year’s 71 graduates, says principal Joseph Dugan, 100% were accepted to fouryear colleges, and each got at least one full scholarship offer.
Leaders like Geager, Lieberman and Federman are scattered here and there in the elementary and middle schools in the city’s tough neighborhoods. But there are too few of them.
Instead of appreciating the crucial role of principals, mayors focus their attention on hiring the school chancellor, usually some heralded miracle worker from out of town who is supposed to transform the school system from above. In fact, since 1993, a period of 26 years, there have been eight school chancellors with an average tenure of just over three years. And yet it can take the right principal five years or more to turn around a failing school.
So, instead of the inevitable hunt in 2021 or 2022 for the next chancellor, how about conducting an annual, nationwide search for 25 exceptional principals to serve in the city’s neediest schools? Some of them can be found right here in New York. Each would be hired for five years and given free rein to assemble the teaching staff they needed.
Imagine the impact that 100 such principals could have. And then, for those black and Latino kids who really prefer Stuyvesant to the superb education at Central Park East, Manhattan Village Academy or East Side Community, imagine how the student body at the city’s elite schools might actually begin to change.