“Girls, I want to set your expectations now that we are moving to New York City. The caliber of kids in your class is going to be much higher, your homework and tests are going to be more challenging, and you can’t expect to be one of the best students anymore. And the truth is, I’m really excited about that for you.”
We were driving into the city to meet our moving truck, from rural Ohio. For the past two years they had attended a small, private Christian school with dedicated and exceptional teachers. It was a rigorous and nurturing environment, but hardly anyone from the school, much less the town, traveled out of the region for college. The move to NYC was partly professional for me, partly for broader opportunities and worldview for them. Born in Northern Virginia, they had attended Fairfax County Public Schools for some of elementary school, both testing into the local gifted and talented program.
In my journey from urban public education luddite to, today, president of the Citywide Council on High Schools (our quasi-impotent school board), this was my first lesson. Gifted and talented programs are viewed as racist.
To say I was naive about the state of urban public education is an understatement. I was completely, totally, and shockingly ignorant. I believed that in New York City public schools, my kids would be behind their peers and have to struggle to keep up. We had started our own journey when my husband stood in line from midnight in the dead of winter to get our daughter into a preschool at two years old, so I knew that parents made sacrifices for their children’s education choices in the suburbs. However, I had not been paying attention to the state of urban education and assumed that in the greatest city in the world, the financial and creative capital, no one would stand for subpar education.
Aside from some elementary schools, in NYC you generally don’t attend the school in your neighborhood. This is because neighborhood schools are also racist, which was the second lesson in my education.
We arrived in August, less than one month before the start of the school year. Ava was entering middle school, which in NYC is sixth through eighth grade. Ruby was entering the last year of elementary school, fifth grade. Our experience through public school admissions was hard to explain to our friends outside the city.
Ava had missed the middle school admissions cycle, which, like the high school admissions process in New York, is somewhat similar to medical school matching. Since all the schools had already accepted their incoming classes, we ended up wandering around Brooklyn in 105-degree heat, attempting to meet with principals and parent coordinators, most of whom were gone for the summer. At every school we went to, we begged to put her on a wait list. I also learned about charter schools and visited several; apparently they were also considered public schools and ran their own admissions processes and even each had a different school calendar. Public school administrators seemed to really disdain charter schools; I wondered if they were also perpetuating racism, but I didn’t learn until months later that it has to do with the teachers union.
On about our fifth day of visiting schools, after knocking on over 20 doors, I asked a parent coordinator: What if Ava doesn’t get off any of these waitlists? What happens then? She looked me straight in the eye and declared, “You’ll have to homeschool her.” Since I neither had the talent nor the time nor the desire to homeschool my kids, as we had just relocated to the city for my new executive job, I promptly burst into tears in the middle of that office.
Ava started the school year in a middle school that shared a building with two high schools. The first day, it was evacuated due to a student bringing a firearm into the building. She transferred to a charter school two weeks later, and then after a year of politely harassing the principal, she entered a desirable and high-performing school in District 15. Later, as a part of the District 15 equity experiment, “Math” was dropped from the school’s name because they claimed that they could not attract enough girls with that name. So, G&T and neighborhood schools are racist, and math is sexist. I was more confused than ever, but trying to keep up.
On the last day of school, the school counselor took her own life by leaping off the top of the school building. We’re pretty sure, based on the timing, that Ava was the last one to see her alive. No one ever contacted us to check on her.
With Ruby, we had a similarly difficult time finding a school that would allow her to enroll. I first learned about the PS8/PS307 rezoning controversy when I found an article online in a Korean newspaper. It truly was an international news story. I did, at least, understand NIMBYism by now, but the fever pitch on this one seemed to be a stew of equity Jello that had families contorting themselves in very messy ways to rationalize their hypocrisy.
Other than a charter school principal we had met, the principal of PS307 was the only one of the over a dozen schools we visited that told us she would love to have Ruby in her school. The same principal Nikole Hannah-Jones says “regularly wouldn’t engage with us or wasn’t in the building at all” spent time with us, gave us a tour, and promised she would take great care of Ruby.
Our apartment was located in the rezoned neighborhood, but the rezoning had just taken place the year prior, so only the kindergarten and first-grade classes had been rezoned. Ruby and one other girl were the only non-Black students in her class. Ruby was also the only one who did not live in the low-income housing across the street. We told her, “You’re going to get a different kind of education this year.”
In Virginia and Ohio, back-to-school night was a very busy, standing-room-only event where parents meet the teacher and learn about school routines and expectations, preview what the kids are learning, and try to make a good impression on the staff.
At PS307 parent night, we were the only parents who showed up. The only other person present was the Chinese grandmother of the only other non-Black student in the class. She didn’t speak English, though, so we had a private session with the teacher. This teacher was an absolute angel. She was older, Black, and loved her students. She had moved up with the class from fourth to fifth grade, giving her two years with many of the same children. We were impressed then, and she proved during the year to be an excellent teacher under some challenging circumstances. Later in the year when Ruby performed in a community theater production on the Upper West Side, she gathered a group of other teachers to cross boroughs and fawned over Ruby with flowers.
The day Ruby found out she didn’t get into her first-choice middle school, her teacher and the principal both sat with her as she cried. While the rest of her classmates were headed to two local, underperforming middle schools (one was the school where the firearm incident had happened), what Ruby didn’t realize at the time is that she was headed to one of the most desirable middle schools in the city. So the teacher and the principal could have been irritated by her tears, but instead they were incredibly kind and compassionate, and very excited for her.
The first day it rained, no one came to class. The kids generally didn’t attend if there was inclement weather. Or, sometimes, nice weather. These were some of Ruby’s favorite days as the few that showed up received much more personalized instruction, at a pace and level that suited them better. Many lived multi-generationally and others had a parent or two who were incarcerated. Hardly any were living with both parents. Parent assemblies, more crowded than parent night, smelled like weed and Colt 45. One of her friends was shocked when she brought a plum to school in her lunch and ate the peel: “Grrrl, you savage!” became a family mantra.
Her dad and I were worried Ruby might be bullied because the teachers said a lot of things that probably sounded to kids like “be more like Ruby.” She was the fastest girl in the school and loved her PE teacher—a wiry, gregarious, middle-aged Black man. A lot of her classmates were unable to run one lap around the track. One day, her teacher had to step out of the classroom, and she asked Ruby to teach the math lesson. But she was embraced by her classmates, elected school president, won some awards, and graduated as valedictorian.
When we talked about her classmates, race was not a topic, aside from when we noticed that her one Chinese classmate was named Vivian, and everyone we know named Vivian is Chinese. Ruby is half White and half Korean. But it really didn’t come up other than when she tried to explain to her friends that Korea is not in Japan. We didn’t find that any of the issues we noticed at school had to do with race, and most of the staff were Black.
It turns out that Ruby was at 307 at the same time as Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter Najya. In retrospect, I didn’t experience how her presence as a NYT reporter “f*cking change(d) the school” as she claimed she would. When we had complaints, we approached it a little differently—mainly by helping give Ruby tools and speaking respectfully and collaboratively with the principal and teachers. I had no delusions that I could solve kids from across the street missing class on rainy days and overall abysmal absenteeism. Or incarcerated and unemployed parents. Or kids showing up without any school supplies.
We only had one year at PS307, so I wonder…if we had entered the school system in kindergarten, knowing what I know now, would we have stayed at PS307? If she had more teachers like her fifth-grade teacher, I believe we would have. We would definitely have been supplementing with tutoring and extra work outside the classroom. But we probably would have done that anyway. I suppose we could have been accused of exercising our privilege or somehow being racist. But as a non-white parent, during Covid, when I joined parents trying to get schools opened, I was called white supremacist, so these tropes had become meaningless. Especially when we later learned that school closures were most damaging to Black children.
A couple of years ago, mostly White parents who had first lost the rezoning battle successfully petitioned to oust the Black principal for being racist (at least NHJ cannot be accused of being a hypocrite like these families). The rezoning had effectively addressed “segregation” in one of the already highest-funded schools in the district, but did not solve the issues of chronic absenteeism, family instability, low academic performance, and school culture. It does not surprise me, as I have always found the idea that having more White families would solve this to be mystifying, and further reinforcing of the equity warriors’ soft bigotry of low expectations.
Now that our family has been through school types from suburban and urban public to rural private to charter to NYC Specialized High Schools, I realize that Ruby’s year at PS307 did turn out to be a very different education not just for her but also for me. From never having been on a PTA to being elected president of the NYCPS Citywide Council on High Schools, I learned more in that one year about the challenges of urban schooling than I ever imagined I would.
