Hypocrisy, thy name is “progressive” Brooklyn.
The ostensibly liberal parents of successful, and overcrowded, PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights have complained loudly about their school-district lines potentially being redrawn — because the new district would send kids from the super affluent, mostly white area of Dumbo to PS 307, a failing school which draws many of its students from the nearby projects, Farragut Houses.
The fact that the racial makeup of PS 307 is 90 percent black and Hispanic is frequently noted.
In a city like New York, though, is the issue actually about race — or is it more about class?
If PS 307 had a majority of white kids who were low-income, would the parents of PS 8 fight any less to stop their children being switched to a failing school? Unlikely. If wealthy black people moved en masse to Brooklyn Heights, would the white parents at PS 8 have any issue welcoming their children to the school? Probably not.
New Yorkers are generally fine with racial integration; it’s economic integration that makes them uneasy.
Are they entirely in the wrong? Studies have long shown that wealthier children do better in school. At a time when test scores are everything, of course people want to send their children to a high-performing school.
In a 2013 column in The New York Times, provocatively titled “No Rich Child Left Behind,” Stanford professor Sean F. Reardon noted, “Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.”
When I was a poor kid growing up in Brooklyn, my parents openly wanted me to be around richer kids and so sacrificed a lot to send me to private school despite not being entirely able to afford it.
A current PS 8 parent, who is white and asked to remain anonymous, challenged the idea that concerns about the rezoning are about race. “I went to very [racially and socioeconomically] diverse schools my whole life, but I wouldn’t want to send my kids to a school where half the kids are from a housing project. It’s a safety issue more than anything. I grew up near the projects, and I purposefully moved to an area that is not near the projects, and I do not want my kids having playdates in the projects.”
Tim Pratt, an African-American dad who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, agreed. “There are many other instances of real racism in NYC, and to lump this into the ‘racism’ bucket does a disservice to those people who are fighting against the real instances of racism,” he said. “This isn’t anything more than parents wanting the best for their kids.”
What frequently goes unnoted in the PS 8/PS 307 brouhaha is that PS 307 parents are also upset about the lines being redrawn. Their school might have failing test scores but they have hope it will improve and aren’t looking for an influx of rich students and their pushy parents to change things.
The economic divide between the kids who live in the new glass towers complete with doormen and fancy playrooms and those who live in the Farragut Houses would be stark.
A prospective PS 8 dad, who grew up in the area and returned to it in 2014 shortly after he and his wife had their first child, says it was “naive to imagine PS 307 parents would say, ‘Sure, come right in.’ The loudest voices in the room [in August, when rezoning was announced] were 307 parents.” He also complains, “The way the story is being portrayed is loaded,” and notes that several articles about the situation mention “hipsters.” “It’s not 1993, there aren’t hipsters in Dumbo anymore.”
With the explosion of the Brooklyn real-estate market in the last decade, and the continuing construction happening all over the borough, this is far from the last time the issue of overcrowded schools — and economic disparity — will have to be addressed.
As Mayor de Blasio celebrates the success of his Universal Pre-K program, it’s easy to wonder if the money spent on adding pre-K classes could have been better applied to building and opening more schools in areas where the population continues to skyrocket. The cost to educate each student in city schools is over $20,000 a year. That amount should buy some fairness in education.