GET ABOARD OR BE CALLED BIGOT
Carranza bullying parents for his plan
I N hindsight, I should have suspected we had crossed over some bizarre new threshold of weaponized policy rhetoric when the education bureaucrats selling a new middleschool admissions system to an auditorium full of brow-furrowing Brooklyn parents began their PowerPoint slideshow with a black-and-white picture of a family celebrating the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
It was the summer of 2018, after all, not the spring of 1954, in the heart of progressive Park Slope, not Pentecostal Topeka. And most relevantly to how the next 13 months of strategic citizenshaming and preemptive silencing would go, the “segregation” under discussion was not an airtight set of rules created and strictly controlled by government, but rather a dynamic and mostly voluntary clustering and unclustering of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic population subgroups out of and then back into 11 public schools and their environs, in one of the country’s most famously diverse cities.
We were being invited to feel segregationist shame about the distribution of a middle-school population that’s 42 percent Latino, 32 percent white, 12 percent Asian, and 12 percent black.
“While in many ways we feel like we’ve come a long way [since Brown],” Adam Lubinsky of the urban planning /architecture firm WXY Studio said at the presentation (misleadingly billed as a community feedback “discussion”), “there has been a real process since the ’80s of public schools beginning to resegregate. And a lot of that has to do with the way choice policies have been utilized . . . New York City has one of the most segregated school districts in the country.”
Thus in one short paragraph, we leap from the specter of Bull Connor barricading the schoolhouse door to the same basic effect being produced by . . . yuppie parents trying to enroll their kids at the STEM-focused middle school?
But what I failed to initially comprehend on that hot August night is that the progressive sensibility and social-justice sensitivity of the target audience was not grounds for building consensus, but a weakness to exploit in the name of ramming through a divisive policy change with minimal public objection.
In what has become the education playbook for the City of New York, activists, government officials and even journalists are recklessly deploying the scarlet letter of racism to clear out potential dissent.
New York Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza is the uncontested champion of this foul new form. At a contentious City Council meeting in May 2019, when asked about his preference for scrapping the entrance exam to New York’s specialized high schools (which enroll disappointingly few African-Americans and a disproportionate number of Asians), Carranza snarled, “Integration doesn’t lower academic achievement for any student; it improves it. Yet I can’t tell you how many times I hear in this discussion where there’s an equation [of ] diversity and a lowering of academic students. I will call that racist every time I hear it. . . . So if you don’t want me to call you on it, don’t say it.”
Italics mine, to emphasize the message that local parents, educators and politicians are hearing loud and clear. T HE day after Carranza’s outburst, I found myself in a carpool, organized by an angry mom, headed to the first public meeting at which the initial results of our district’s radical new middle-school admissions policy, known as the Diversity Plan, would be presented.
The plan, which the Department of Education hopes will be a model for the whole city, scrapped all consideration of student performance — the Gifted & Talented school no longer screens for gift or talent, the arts school no longer considers aptitude in drawing or music — imposing instead an across-theboard mandate that 52 percent of a school’s incoming class either qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch, speak a language other than English at home, or live in temporary housing.
That 52 percent figure matches the proportions for the district as a whole, but is unevenly distributed throughout neighborhoods and at individual institutions, ranging in the latter from just 20 percent at the math-and-science school to 97 percent in the immigrant-heavy Sunset Park neighborhood.
Middle schools within our District 15 are not residentially zoned; instead, parents rank up to 12 preferences, students are assigned random lottery numbers, and an algorithm is supposed to sort everything out. With the removal of any studentpicking discretion on the school side, that effectively hands first priority at in-demand locations to those in the designated 52 percent. This approach is known as “controlled choice,” as in parents try to choose according to what they think is best for their child, but the district controls the final decision based on a mixture of chance and demographic design.
To the surprise of no one familiar with probabilities, when the first post-Diversity Plan school designations were announced in April 2019, a large chunk of us 48 percenters came out unhappy. Sitting next to me in the carpool was one such woman, herself a schoolteacher of modest means, who was anguished that her son, like a statistically anomalous number of kids from my daughter’s highly regarded and comparatively affluent (and white) elementary school, had been assigned a low-performing middle school 40 minutes away that didn’t even make her top 12.
Angry Mom really wanted Teacher Mom to speak out at the meeting so that district bureaucrats would have to contend with a knowledgeable and sympathetic educator. But the teacher just gave a fatalistic shrug. “White Carroll Gardens mom?” she said ruefully, referring to our expensive brownstone neighborhood. (She would eventually speak very tentatively at the end of a long and heated meeting, with the tension in the room so thick, it drove her to tears . . . but we’ll get to that.) F EAR of being labeled a bigot has animated nearly every one of the now hundreds of conversations I’ve had with local parents about the Diversity Plan and other elements of Carranza’s “equity” agenda. (In addition to my eldest daughter being in the first affected class of incoming sixth-graders, my youngest daughter will enter kindergarten right after a controversial new elementary-school rezoning kicks in. I’ve, uh, been to a lot of meetings.)
Quotes in news articles from skeptical parents are almost always anonymous. Moms worry about being tarred as a “racist from 1950s Alabama”; dads daydream about organizing a “secret resistance” of pseudonymous critics.
“No one wants to be ‘rich white person No. 2’ being publicly shamed,” one of my fellow Brooklyn dads told The Post, in reference to when Carranza had retweeted a Raw Story article (complete with video) that carried the headline: “WEALTHY WHITE MANHATTAN PARENTS ANGRILY RANT AGAINST PLAN TO BRING MORE BLACK KIDS TO THEIR SCHOOLS.”
The chancellor later apologized for the tweet, but the lesson was learned: Offer feedback at a public meeting about a policy that impacts your children, and you may find yourself depicted as a monster on social media, with the help of a government official making $345,000 a year.
“If you’re going to be called a racist every time you’re concerned about your child’s education,” yet another anonymous Brooklyn dad told The Wall Street Journal in May 2019, “it destroys the dialogue.”
A dialogue destroyed is another way of describing a monologue. Which is precisely what I observed during that initial August 2018 presentation on school desegregation.
Scheduled at the last minute, one month before the Diversity Plan was ratified, at the height of get-out-of-town-if-you-canafford-it season in sweltering New York, the gathering still attracted around 175 people at a venue originally suitable for 40. (We moved rooms.)
The meeting’s first public comment — which, not coincidentally, was also the first mention, 45 minutes in — of whether the new system would lead to better outcomes for kids and schools came only because a mom finally butted in to ask.
She was quickly dispatched. Then City Councilman Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) quashed every subsequent attempt to interrupt, telling people instead to wait for smaller breakout groups afterward. In our breakout group, 20 pent-up parents rifled questions at a hapless DOE employee, who rolled her eyes a lot and sporadically tried to reassure us that middle-school parents always get “anxious” about their little ones. No notes were taken. So much for feedback.
“It was like an Iranian presidential election,” an — you guessed it! — anonymous dad told The Post after the meeting. “It didn’t matter what you said or did.”
Afterward, I was astonished to
read these lines in The New York Times, by education reporter Eliza Shapiro. “There has been little public resistance to the District 15 plan,” Shapiro asserted. “Lander said his office has received only a few dozen emails about the proposal, most of them supportive.”
Turns out that if you carefully manage public displays of opinion, you can depict parental reaction any which way, with a helpful assist from the newspaper of record.
The piece, typical of Shapiro’s framing of education issues, was headlined: “De Blasio Is Stalled on School Integration, but Brooklyn Parents Have a Plan,” despite the fact that the main feature of said plan — removing all “screens” related to student performance — was opposed by fully 58 percent of local parents surveyed. (Ah, came the ready rejoinder, that’s because richer, whiter parents had a higher rate of response!) A NY honest conversation about the admissions process of MS 51 and other turnaround successes should, but rarely does, begin with the acknowledgment that the school a few decades back became the first in the district to offer specialization, in a conscious effort to lure back upper-middle-class families who had abandoned the area’s decaying public system. And it worked!
MS 51’s success begat copycats: Soon there was an arts school, then a math-and-science cluster, and before long, a once-shunned district of 11 middle schools began to at least have a “Big Three.” As the rest of the city made similar reforms, and also added charters to the mix, school “uptake” — the percentage of resident K-8 kids enrolled in government-provided educational institutions — jumped from 67 percent in 2000 to 76 percent in 2010. District 15 increased by more than 6,000 students between 2006 and 2016. Test scores went up. The Big Three became more like five or six. Sounds like a win-win, right?
Wrong. The kids coming in were too pale and prosperous, avatars of the gentrification routinely fretted about by local journalists, many of whom are recent Brooklyn transplants themselves.
“By 2017,” the report unveiling the Diversity Plan stated, “the number of white students enrolled in District 15 had almost doubled from 2007 and white students represented 50% or more of the total school population at the [Big Three] schools. When the white student population doubled during this period, 70% of that increase went to those same three school schools.”
Meanwhile, : rejection rates for black and Hispanic students at those schools were disproportionately high.
The main policy recommendation was “controlled choice.” As Lynn Shon, a STEM teacher at one of my district’s Big Three schools, exulted in a press release celebrating the Diversity Plan, “When our schools reflect the diversity of our city, we will ALL face the most urgent problems facing our city and nation . . . Schools should be centers of social change and justice, and we desperately needed this to get everyone on board.” B UT as school-integration advocates learned to their dismay in the 1970s, humans don’t always appreciate being chess pieces in the hands of enlightened planners. The big question about the Diversity Plan was whether parents would accept having their kids shlepped across town to schools they didn’t want.
On April 15, 2019, all fifth-graders in our district received their designations. Straight away, parents in my daughter’s French dual-language program (DLP) started banging out anguished e-mails.
“It’s a disaster for us,” mom Magali Selosse wrote to me. After extensively researching and touring and skipping work to prioritize choices, Selosse was assigned to “a school we never heard of . . . 45 minutes away from home. With the lowest scores you can possibly imagine.”
Like the parents of six other DLP kids who were given schools they didn’t even list, she had zero intention of accepting the assignment.
And yet on April 16, here was the headline atop Eliza Shapiro’s New York Times piece: “Facing Segregated Schools, Parents Took Integration Into Their Own Hands. It’s Working.” When I pointed out to Shapiro on Twitter that we won’t know whether it’s “working” until we hear about how many parents appealed their decisions, how many had those appeals accepted, how many were opting for charters or private schools, and how many were moving out of the district, she replied, inaccurately: “Your point about families fleeing to private schools and charters isn’t quite right, since the enrollment cycles for both those systems are now closed. Have a good one.”
In late June, we started to learn more. Around 450 District 15 fifth-graders, or 17 percent of the incoming class of new middleschoolers, appealed their designations, up from 350 the year before. (Citywide, appeals tend to be at around 12 percent.) And only 14 appeals were approved this year, compared with 59 in 2018. That means the number of objectively disgruntled families increased from around 290 to 435, or from about 11 percent of incoming sixth-graders to 16 percent. That’s a big jump.
One school alone — the Sunset Park destination 40 minutes away that so many of our fellow DLP parents were assigned to — saw appeals jump from 22 to 50.
The District 15 experiment is being watched closely in the rest of the city, and even throughout the country. At the end of August 2019, de Blasio’s handpicked School Diversity Advisory Group came out with a radical set of systemwide changes that basically mimicked our local plan — remove all screens (hell, remove the very words “gifted and talented”), get rid of single-test admissions criteria, and push every school in a given district to have the exact same demographics as the district as a whole within three years, as the borough within five years, and as the whole city within 10.
The sheer logistics of such an enterprise would make ’70s-style busing seem modest.
The District 15 matriculation numbers, still unknown at press time, could have profound implications for the Diversity Plan, for Carranza’s whole equity agenda and even for de Blasio’s longshot presidential campaign. If school uptake goes down measurably, that would impact funding (which is based in part on enrollment numbers) and quell citywide political enthusiasm for heavy-handed integration efforts. The change could, in fact, have the opposite of its intended effect.
“San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation,” ran an April 25, 2019, New York Times headline. “It Made It Worse.”
The article, not written by Eliza Shapiro, was an excellent demonstration project of unintended consequences and the differences between progressive theory and individual practice. The only important detail the piece left out was the name of the schools chief driving that failed integration attempt: Richard Carranza. A T our May 2 meeting about the admissions results, before we knew about the sharp increase in appeals, a dad from my carpool asked a reasonable question about how schools will adjust to different levels and mixes of learning achievement than they are accustomed to.
“I’m sorry, but I find it offensive, I do. It is offensive,” District 15 Community Education Council President Neal Zephyrin said. “Because like Carranza said yesterday when he was speaking in front of the City Council . . . if you say, ‘Oh, I support the plan. I’m not racist, and I support the plan, but the schools are going to be diluted, watered down . . .’ He said: ‘Sorry, that’s racist.’ And that’s what it is!” The room erupted.
After some back and forth, Zephyrin threw his hands up at the whole question about what to do with unhappy families.
“I don’t know how you would address the question without it sounding like, ‘What are you going to do about white flight?’ ” Zephyrin said “Honestly, that is basically what the question is, and I don’t know how you can ask a panel of people who have spent the last two years working on a Diversity Plan how we are going to cater to the parents who reject the idea of diversity . . . I don’t know what to say to you.”
It was about then that Teacher Mom, against her initial judgment, inserted herself into the conversation.
“Sorry, but I just feel like we need to remember that these are . . . this is my 10-year-old,” she said, choking back sobs. “Just remember, we’re all talking about our kids. They go to bed with their stuffed animals, and now they’re getting onto two trains to go to school.”
A few minutes later, to the applause of some CEC board members, a visibly irritated Sunset Park mom directed her ire at the teacher.
“I just want to name, there’s a lot of privilege in being able to be in a space where you can air out your concerns,” she said. “And I also want to name that many of us have lived lives where we don’t have the privilege to be in a space to cry about the things that we have to do on a daily basis.”
On the carpool ride home, Teacher Mom worried with some bitterness about whether there were any reporters in the auditorium who would twist her words to make her sound racist.
Never mind that: Zephyrin was up to the task. According to a Gothamist article after the meeting, the CEC president did acknowledge that at least half the audience expressed disappointment at the Diversity Plan, “but he felt some were using racially ‘coded’ language.” And we all know how racists should be treated.
“There are going to be privileges that are spread out more,” Zephyrin said. “That’s the result of equity.”
And if you don’t want to be called out as a racist, don’t complain.