Posted on 09/24/2015 7:16:47 AM PDT by grundle
Progressive parents fight integration in their children’s public schools.
I live in a small slice of Brooklyn wedged between Brooklyn Heights, one of New York’s most prosperous neighborhoods, Dumbo, a relatively new neighborhood that is essentially a forest of condominiums catering to financiers, techies, and “creative professionals,” and Farragut Houses, a sprawling public-housing complex that borders the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Though you won’t find gated communities in this part of Brooklyn, you will find buildings with doormen, which is of course a quite similar phenomenon. The retail establishments catering to affluent professionals don’t formally exclude poor residents, but their high prices do the work of explaining who is welcome and who is not. Very rich people and very poor people live side by side in this part of Brooklyn, yet their lives rarely intersect. Rich Brooklynites and poor Brooklynites do, however, share their local public schools. And as you can imagine, not all of Brooklyn’s bourgeois parents are thrilled about this fact.
Kate Taylor of the New York Times has written a fascinating report on a school rezoning in my part of town. Basically, Public School 8 in Brooklyn Heights is massively oversubscribed while Public School 307 in Vinegar Hill, right by the Farragut Houses, is undersubscribed. The city has thus proposed shifting Dumbo families from P.S. 8 to P.S. 307, which seems sensible enough. So why are parents in Dumbo so outraged? Taylor explains:
P.S. 307’s population is 90 percent black and Hispanic, and 90 percent of the students’ families receive some form of public assistance. Its state test scores, while below the citywide averages, are closer to average for black and Hispanic students, with 20 percent of its students passing the math tests and 12 percent passing the reading tests this past year. At P.S. 8, whose population is 59 percent white, with only 15 percent receiving assistance, scores are considerably above the city averages. Almost two-thirds of its students passed each test.
Taylor cites evidence that blacks and Hispanics benefit from attending integrated schools. What she does not address is whether white and Asian students attending these schools also fare better, which is the chief concern of the largely white Dumbo parents subject to this rezoning. My first instinct in reading Taylor’s story, and in observing the anguished reaction from Dumbo parents who see themselves as committed progressives, is to note their hypocrisy. As Laurie Lin recently remarked, it’s easy to imagine how these Dumbo progressives might have reacted had this story unfolded in Atlanta or Birmingham — they’d surely chalk up resistance to the rezoning to racism.
More than one Dumbo parent has tried to explain to me how they’re totally different from other people who fight against integration. They explain that what they really want is a better world in which we spend far more on our public schools, not mentioning, or perhaps not knowing, that New York city spends $20,331 per pupil, almost twice as much as the national average of $10,700, and that much of this money is spent very inefficiently. Of course they want integration, they’ll tell you, but only if it entails no sacrifice on their part. “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children,” says one Dumbo parent. Well, yes, it is more complicated, and that is exactly what every parent believes, whether they are in Brooklyn or South Boston or Kansas City.
In fairness to the progressive parents of Dumbo, their concerns are not entirely unfounded. Poor students tend to fare worse than better-off students academically, for a variety of reasons. They are also more likely to have serious behavioral problems, which is really the more pressing concern. According to Robert Cherry of Brooklyn College, these behavioral problems flow from the fact that these children face serious stresses that no child should ever have to face. Poor families are far more likely than better-off families to experience multiple-partner fertility, in which mothers have children with more than one father. Though children in some multi-partner-fertility families thrive, Cherry has observed that multi-partner fertility is associated with high levels of father abandonment and child maltreatment. Boys with absent fathers are far more likely to engage in aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency than boys living with both parents, and they are also far more likely to face multiple suspensions. (Indeed, these problems are so pronounced for boys raised in single-mother-headed households that one wonders whether single-sex schools staffed with teachers with specialized training might be the best way to give these boys a fighting chance at succeeding in school.)
Disruptive behavior is a far more potent problem among adolescents than it is among elementary schoolers, to be sure. But the central challenge facing teachers and administrators in high-poverty schools is that many of their students are raised in chaotic households, and these students need a great deal of individualized care and attention. When students from stable families learn alongside students from unstable families, there is good reason to believe that students from the latter backgrounds benefit. It is also true, however, that teachers with students from difficult backgrounds often have no choice but to devote less time to instruction and more time to maintaining order and discipline in their classrooms than is ideal.
The effects of being raised in a chaotic household can last for a lifetime. In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough describes the work of researchers at Kaiser Permanente who found a powerful correlation between the health status of adults and whether or not the adults in question had experienced various traumas as children. Adults who had been abused as children, or who had lived through a divorce or with a parent who was incarcerated or addicted to drugs or alcohol, were more likely to suffer from heart disease, depression, and alcoholism, among other maladies. And of course these health problems are difficult and expensive to treat. Our failure to seriously address the problem of family breakdown is having baleful consequences not just for children attending our public schools — it will be a problem for decades to come, as these children age and as they carry their childhood traumas with them through life.
I don’t expect the progressive parents of Dumbo to be thrilled about the prospect of sending their children to P.S. 307. But my hope is that they will come to appreciate that their children are no better than the poor children growing up in their midst, and that what these children need, and what all children need, is what their own children tend to take for granted: stable, loving parents who are capable of keeping them safe.
So who’s the Dumbo here?
Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City and her “wife” who is an education advocate in NYC complained some years ago that not enough white people are sending their children to public school. Did she mean there were too many Black, Hispanic and Asian children in public schools?
Btt
I attended a single sex Jesuit high school in Detroit. The Fathers didn’t care what your socioeconomic background was - we were all subject to the same strict rules w/o exception. There were no females to distract from discipline and education and we all wore “uniform” clothes. They drummed logic and a lifelong desire to learn into our skulls full of mush. This is what is needed in ghetto schools. If boys don’t get discipline anywhere they will fail in life. If they at least get it at school they have a chance.
Of course, this will never happen in a publik skrool system as corrupt as NYC or any other large urban area destroyed by democrats.
“I don’t expect the progressive parents of Dumbo to be thrilled about the prospect of sending their children to P.S. 307.”
When elephants fly and all of that?
And as Theodore Dalrymple, the prison psychiatrist noted decades ago in the UK, the “progressives” want the annihilation of the Natural Family which will collapse culture-—for the Communist “utopia”. The very “words” “mother and father, wife and husband” has to be eliminated to destroy all Traditions and History so children can be made so irrational and dumb and removed from Knowing the Natural Family (that “snow is black” Fichte 1810). He who control words/ideas will control the perceptions of the masses and can warp the children more than the little harem boys in Afghanistan who learn to lust after males, boys, and goats and hate and mutilate women and girls. (All behaviors and desires are transmitted by the culture and OUR culture is now as sick as the muslim one with irrational, vile “laws”.
They know that it is only in the Natural Family that children learn autonomy and true self-esteem and initiative. All other forms of artificial “family” is dehumanizing-—reduces man to “group think” and the effects of constant rejection leads to the warping of ALL normal desires-—and the noted parent rejection creates such hate of self (and God) that most children will never be a healthy, independent adult.
Children need positive role models and for a COUNTRY (ALL JUST LAWS) to promote VIRTUE ONLY. That is why Solzhenitsyn stated—just a LITTLE BIT OF SOCIALISM ROTS THE SOUL......taking children OUT from their OWN biological parents is evil......we knew how bad orphanages and the “foster” system is-—how it raises child abuse to astronomical levels. Why? Biology and God’s Design was FOR A PURPOSE-—TO create NATURAL EMOTIONS in a woman and man who will unite and created the most perfect environment with ALL NEEDED ROLE MODELS so children will THRIVE and FLOURISH and be able to relate to all human beings in loving ways.
No family is perfect, but the Natural Family teaches Common Sense
(Real Life experiences which gives understanding of natural roles (it used to when women were nurturers and males weren’t stripped of roles and breadwinning (honor/work)....and totally emasculated (for conditioning boys for Kissinger’s and billionaire friends’ goat-god orgies at the Bohemian Gardens, and the Epstein/Bieber boat orgies)
I grew up in the area the author is referring to. At that time P.S. 8 (a very good school in the affluent area of Brooklyn Heights) was paired with a very bad school in the Farragut area called P.S. 7.
P.S. 7 was used for only grades 5-6, with P.S. 8 used for the lower grades. The Farragut housing project (very bad) was just a block or so down from P.S. 7.
It was truly amazing how most of the liberals deserted the public school system right before fifth grade began. Can’t say I blame them. I remember giving up my lunch money or my homemade lunch on a frequent basis to some young black or hispanic thug or another.
P.S. 7 had back staircases that reeked of urine and vomit from the local junkies who hung out there sometimes. We kids were told to avoid those staircases at all costs.
When fifth grade began I noticed that there were two levels of classes - the advanced class and the “other one”. You can draw your own conclusions there.
In sixth grade a new history curriculum was added- “Afro-American Studies”. The parents of the remaining liberal kids were scandalized during the year-end award ceremonies(held at P.S. 8,so they wouldn’t have to venture to Farragut after dark)when the only kids who got awards in A.A. studies were white!
This was in 1970, so I can imagine what it would be like now. I think P.S. 307 is in a different building, but serves the same population and area as P.S. 7.
Mrs. AV
Still, a rather dumb name to foist upon a neighborhood.
Multiple-Partner-Fertility families?
If the liberals keep changing the language, I will never catch up.
Why can’t they just call them tramps and be done with it.
I know, I know.
Can’t hurt anyones feeelllings.
What a world.
Yes sad...and due to, in large part, the “compassionate” liberals who are really just a bunch of bigots.
Man...that’s when you know every other name in New York was taken.
Well, their neighborhood is named for a flying elephant.
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