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The North-South Divide Of
School District 28
In the last issue (May 1999), I described the strange situation in Community School District 28 (in Queens) where the school board had decided to spend federal magnet school money, intended to promote school integration, on the improvement of schools with heavily non-black populations to increase still further the number of white students. Upon further investigation, it turns out that the patterns of differential treatment in the District have their predictable effect. In late May, the New York State Education Department released the results of a new fourth grade reading test-deemed by most to be far more demanding than the tests previously used. School-by-school test results for each of the city's community school districts indicated how many students performed at each of four levels of proficiency-with the top two levels considered satisfactory. In any case, the performance in District 28's twenty-two elementary schools varied considerably. At one school, PS 196, 88% of the students performed at or above the standard expected of fourth graders (and 19% performed at the highest level-considered to be advanced). At PS 101 and PS 175, 61% performed satisfactorily. And at PS 144, one of the schools targeted for magnet school funding, 56% of the students did so. That's the northern side, the white side, of the story. But, at the same time, only 9% of the fourth graders at PS 30 performed at a satisfactory level. At PS 40, the figure was 15%. At those two schools, apparently not one student performed at the highest level. That's the south side or the black side. These results are startling, but not surprising. District 28 has long been a leader in educational inequality. Several years ago a study by ACORN, a grass-roots community organization, revealed that District 28 sent many more of its students on to the two elite high schools in the city than most other districts. The authors of the study concluded that taking an advanced math class in eighth grade was all but indispensable to success on the exam for admission to those high schools. But in District 28's Junior High School 8 (which had a 97% black and Hispanic enrollment), the course was not even offered. At the same time, at Junior High School 190 (which enrolled only 26.5% black and Hispanic children), 176 children took the advanced course. The tale of unequal education has been told many times before, but its usual telling too often suggests that it is the character or the socio-economic standing of children and their parents that makes educational achievement so difficult for black students. But Community School District 28 knows that the schools for black students are failing and they still want to spend more on those schools that are succeeding. That tells us a great deal about the character and the whiteness of the school board and the district leadership. It also suggests that inequality is deeply rooted in the normal workings of the school system and that it will not be reversed without disruptions of that system. |
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