New York Schools: Fifty Years After Brown

by Gail Robinson

Even parents who can afford private schools send their
children to P.S. 6 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The
school offers instruction in political cartooning and
foreign language and a joint program with the Museum of
Natural History. And all the innovation apparently pays
off. More than 92 percent of the students at the school
meet the state standards in reading and math for their
grade level.

But there is another P.S. 6 in New York City, this one
in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Despite a
well-regarded principal, only 40 percent of its
students meet the state standards in reading and less
than a third in math.

The Manhattan P.S. 6 is overwhelmingly white and
includes only a smattering of poor students. Its East
Flatbush counterpart is more than 92 percent black,
with almost 90 percent of its students from families
with low enough incomes to qualify the children for a
free school lunch.

The differences between these schools reflect the state
of education in New York City public schools today, 50
years after the Supreme Court outlawed legally enforced
school segregation in the United States. Despite a far
greater ethnic diversity, with an increasing number of
Asian and Hispanic students, New York City public
schools are among the most segregated in the country.
But, if integration has not been achieved, few New
Yorkers seem to see it anymore as the most important
goal in education.

THE BROWN DECISION

On May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its
unanimous ruling in the case of Brown v. the Board of
Education of Topeka, Kansas, legalized segregation in
the country had just started to crumble in the wake of
World War II. But separate and decidedly unequal still
held sway across much of the country, particularly the
South, with black Americans forced to sit in the back
of the bus, drink at different fountains, and sit in
separate train cars. They were barred from Woolworth
lunch counters and could not try on clothes in
department stores. Poll taxes, tests with arcane
questions and intimidation prevented them from voting.

Linda Brown, a black third grader in Topeka, Kansas,
had to attend a school a mile from her home, even
though a white elementary school was only seven blocks
away. The principal of the white school refused to
admit Linda, setting in motion the events that would
lead to the historic court ruling.

In defense of its dual school systems, the Topeka
school board argued that segregated schools prepared
youngsters for the segregated society in which they
would live and were not harmful to black youngsters.

After years of argument and deliberation, the Supreme
Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, rejected those
claims. In the decision, Warren wrote, "Segregation of
white and colored children in public schools has a
detrimental effect upon the colored children. The
impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law,
for the policy of separating the races is usually
interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro
group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of
a child to learn."

Brown and a related ruling "reflected and encouraged
developments that would soon spark the burst of humane,
bold and heroic action that we now know as the civil
rights movement," Eric Foner and Randall Kennedy wrote
in a special issue of The Nation magazine commemorating
the Brown decision.

Some predicted all schools would be integrated within
five years. But change came slowly. In 1955, the
Supreme Court ruled that desegregation could proceed
"with all deliberate speed," a phrase that many school
districts took to mean "as slowly as possible." And so
a decade after Brown, less than two percent of black
youngsters in the South attended integrated schools.

But the civil rights movement helped change that. And
by 1974, 20 years after Brown, almost half of all black
children throughout the nation went to white-majority
schools. Despite what many call the ’resegregation’ of
the last few decades, some of that change remains,
including in Topeka, the city that gave birth to Brown.

But this is not the story in New York City, where the
racial composition of schools today almost resembles
those in the South of the 1950s.

Indeed, the city’s schools were not much more
integrated than Southern schools when the Brown
decision was issued — even though Governor Theodore
Roosevelt had directed the New York State Legislature
to abolish the last two officially black schools in New
York City way back in 1900. But as recounted by Diane
Ravitch in her book The Great School Wars in 1954,
Kenneth Clark, a psychologist whose research bolstered
the NAACP arguments in the Brown case, issued another
report concluding that New York City had a segregated
school system and that black children received an
inferior education. The head of the New York City Board
of Education then, Arthur Levitt, said the segregation
had not "been deliberately imposed by legislation" but
was nonetheless "not good educational policy."

At the same time, the population of the school system
was undergoing a huge change, as many whites left the
city for the suburbs, and more and more Hispanics moved
to New York. There were many subsequent efforts to
address the segregation in the city — some sincere,
some cosmetic, few successful.

NEW YORK’S SEGREGATED SYSTEM

Today, of the approximately 1.1 million students in New
York City public schools, about 13 percent are Asian,
15 percent white, 32 percent black and 40 percent
Hispanic. Given the makeup of the student body, one
reason for segregation of New York City schools, said
Pedro Noguera, a professor at New York University’s
Steinhardt School of Education, is that "there are no
kids to integrate with."

But the population of many schools is even more skewed
than the student population as a whole. Some 60 percent
of all black students in New York State, including
those in New York City, attend schools that are at
least 90 percent black, according to a recent study by
the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University; more
Latinos in New York State than in any other state go to
schools that are 90 percent or more Latino.

Another study, this one by the Lewis Mumford Center at
the State University of New York at Albany, found that
Asians and Hispanics are more segregated from whites in
New York schools than in any other school system in the
country. For black-white segregation, New York ranks
third.

The Mumford study also found that, in 2000, the typical
black student attended a school where only five percent
of the other students were white, a sharp drop from
1970.

This segregation has a different cause than that in the
South of the 1950s. In New York, "the segregation in
the schools reflects segregation in the housing
market," said John Logan, who conducted the Mumford
center study. While New Yorkers think of this as a
progressive city, it is Logan, said, "one of the most
segregated cities in the country in terms of blacks and
whites."

But the city has had little success implementing
policies that might reduce the effects that housing
segregation has on schools.

Particularly at the high school level, the city
established schools with special programs around the
city, in an effort to encourage students to leave their
neighborhoods. But the effort has not done much to
improve integration. Although some of the individual
school programs are good, "I don’t believe school
choice has made New York a less segregated city," said
Jill Chaifetz, executive director of Advocates for
Children, which works on school issues.

In another attempt to encourage diversity, the city
requires that some high schools with special programs
admit the same number of students who do poorly on
standardized tests as those who score substantially
above average. But this gives the lowest scoring
students a better chance at admission because far fewer
of that group applies. And some parents, many of them
white, complain that their children are being unfairly
denied a place in these schools.

Partly in response, white parents in several
communities have lobbied to bring back the neighborhood
high school, at least in their communities. "Despite
paying the highest tax rates in New York City, we don’t
have a school that will prepare our children to go to
the superior colleges they are qualified to attend," a
proposal by East Side parents said.

The parents won creation of the new Eleanor Roosevelt
High School on East 76th Street, but the school admits
children from a broad swath of Manhattan, not just the
immediate neighborhood, as the parents had wanted.
Eleanor Roosevelt, now in its first year of existence,
is 10 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 35 percent
Asian, and 40 percent white.

Parents in the white, affluent Park Slope section of
Brooklyn fought to revamp John Jay, a high school
attended largely by black and Hispanic students from
outside the community. They believed that three new
small schools, with grades 6 through 12, would enable
more Park Slope kids to attend high school in their
neighborhood. They won their fight but may have
achieved a Pyrrhic victory. Top students from Park
Slope have been slow to embrace the three new schools
and at least one is plagued by discipline problems and
a poor reputation in the area.

THE EFFECTS OF SEGREGATION

If the schools are still segregated, does segregation
still matter? Some would argue that it does.

Claude Steele, a professor at Stanford University,
listed some effects segregation has on black students.
"They are more likely to go to poorly funded schools in
run-down buildings and more likely to be taught by
uncertified and poorly trained teachers," he wrote.
"They are likely to be counseled with lower
expectations. They are more likely to go to schools
with few or no Advanced Placement courses, and they are
likely to have less access to test-prep courses and
related tutorials."

Although there are exceptions, schools in New York City
with higher test scores tend to have greater numbers of
white and Asian students, while struggling schools are
more likely to be composed primarily of black and
Hispanic students.

In the 1990s, the community group ACORN charged that
many junior high schools in predominantly black and
Hispanic areas did not teach students what they needed
to know in order to do well on the test for the
selective specialized high schools, such as Stuyvesant.
In response, rather than improve the program for all
youngsters, the city began offering special instruction
for selected students. Despite the classes, less than
10 percent of students at Stuyvesant are black or
Hispanic.

Black and Hispanic students score significantly lower
than whites and Asians on virtually all standardized
tests and are less likely to finish high school. About
94 percent of white youngsters in New York State who
started high school in 1999 were seniors in June 2003,
but only 61 percent of Hispanic children and 65 percent
of black students were.

As New York increasingly relies on standardized tests,
some critics worry that black and Hispanic students
will be most affected. For example, most students at
Taft High School and Bushwick High School, both of
which are 98 percent black and Hispanic, did not pass
even one of the five Regents tests required for
graduation. "On the 50th anniversary of Brown, we’ve
come full circle," said Jane Hirschmann of Timeout From
Testing. Relying so much on Regents and other tests,
she said, "is very unequal and very unfair."

Test proponents argue, however, that the lack of firm
standards in education has been discriminatory,
awarding black and Hispanic students diplomas but
without giving them the skills they need to earn a
living or function in society.

Black and Hispanic students also bear the brunt of
discipline in the city schools. More than 90 percent of
students at Second Opportunity Schools for students
serving lengthy suspensions were black or Hispanic,
according to Advocates for Children.

Academics, educators and politicians endlessly debate
the reasons for these disparities. But one factor could
be that, along with the achievement gap, there is a
resource gap. Predominantly black and Hispanic New York
City spends $10,500 per pupil, about half the $21,000
that the rich — and largely white — Long Island
suburb of Manhasset spends, Jonathan Kozol has noted.
At the same time, many senior teachers avoid poor,
minority schools in the city in favor of richer
schools.

The gap to some extent reflects the fact that much of
the money for schools comes from local tax revenues,
and more affluent — usually white — communities have
more money to spend than the black and Hispanic
communities that tend to be less affluent.

But critics charge that New York State does nothing to
erase the gap, and some things that make it worse.
According to David Jones, president of the Community
Service Society, in New York State "school districts
with the highest percentage of minority students
receive over $2,000 annually less than school districts
with the lowest percentage of minority students." He
blames the state’s method of allocating funds to
districts.

THE BENEFITS OF INTEGRATION

The demand for integration is not purely academic.
Students who attended the more integrated schools of
the 1970s, and those who attend the segregated schools
of today, apparently see the value of diversity.

A recent study by Columbia University Teachers College
looked at people who had attended school in the peak
integration years of the 1970s before courts began
rolling back orders requiring busing and other
integration measures. While the integration may not
have completely reformed society, it did change
individual members of the class of 1980.

The study concluded that the integrated schools did
more than any other institution, except perhaps the
military, to "bring people of different racial/ethnic
backgrounds together and foster equal opportunity."
And, the people interviewed said they found attending
mixed schools "to be one of the most meaningful
experiences of their lives, the best — and sometimes
the only — opportunity to meet and interact regularly
with people of different backgrounds."

Today’s school children seem to want a similar chance.
Advocates for Children conducted an essay contest to
mark the Brown anniversary, asking students to write
about such topics as whether integration is important.

In the essays, some of which will be on the group’s web
site later his month, students wrote about the value of
diversity, said Deborah Apsel of the group. "There were
kids who said we really wish our school had more
Caucasian students or kids from outside our
neighborhood," she said. "A lot of kids talked about
"tolerance" or "about how integration in the classroom
builds on the learning and can add a different
dimension to discussions."

LESS AGAINST "SEPARATE", MORE FOR "EQUAL"

But experts debate the value of integration.

Derek Bell, a former civil rights lawyer who teaches at
NYU law school, said that in some respects Brown was "a
disaster." Those who cheered the decision at the time
failed to recognize how entrenched segregation and
white racism was in America, he said. Rather than
trying to do away with separate schools, Bell has
argued, the Supreme Court "might have been better off"
if it had set out steps, such as monitoring and
enforcement, to ensure that black youngsters attended
schools truly equal to those for white students.

Others who support integration, such as Gary Orfield,
author of the Harvard Civil Rights Project study,
question whether meaningful segregation can take place
without crossing boundaries between city and suburb.
But in 1974 — 20 years after Brown — the Supreme
Court in Milliken v. Bradley ruled that school
integration efforts did not have to cross government
boundaries — in that case between predominantly black
Detroit and its white suburbs.

Faced with that and other court decisions that have
chipped away at efforts to integrate schools, activists
in New York have shifted their efforts to trying to get
more funding to improve the schools that black and
Hispanic youngsters attend.

In one, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity challenged the
formula New York State uses to determine how much money
the state gives each local school district. Activists
in other states have also argued that poorer school
districts need more money to help their students meet
new state standards.

In the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, the state’s
highest court ruled that Albany’s funding formula
denied students in New York City and other cities in
the state their right to a "sound, basic education,"
and ordered that the situation be corrected. But the
issue remains entangled in politics and disputes about
the amount of money required. Neither Governor George
Pataki nor the legislature — nor localities — have
come up with a means to fund the court’s mandate. The
governor suggested using funds from electronic gambling
machines.

Elise Boddie of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said she
hates to choose between fighting for integration and
struggling for more money. But she admitted that in
light of legal rulings and hostile courts, "Funding
equity cases may be our only hope."

That funding, said Pedro Noguera, can lead to better
schools and maybe even more integrated ones: "If you
can get really outstanding teachers into high-need
areas and really outstanding programs . . . then you’re
going to attract middle-class kids of all races," he
said. "Quality is what is ultimately going to bring
people in, — whites and Asians as well as middle-class
black and Hispanics."

But it will be a long hard road. And many experts,
while recognizing the promise of Brown, see few reasons
for optimism on its much-observed anniversary.

GothamGazette.Com

http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/200
40517/200/981