Blog

307’s attendance zone was drawn snugly around five of the 10 buildings that make up the Farragut Houses, a public-housing project with 3,200 residents across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That is very good news griphus. I just came on here to give a totally tangential anecdote on my school experience. Our writers write all papers from scratch. But I have no doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — more likely. But you can understand how a parent might look at it and go, ‘While I want diversity, I don’t want profound imbalance.’ ” He thought about what it would have meant for his boys to be among the few middle-class children in P.S. 8’s overcrowding would be relieved at least temporarily. But this exposure helped me imagine possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered before. “I don’t want to see mandates.” The shift in language that trades the word “integration” for “diversity” is critical. In one of the most diverse cities in the world, the children who attend these schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates — and I mean, in most cases, every single one — are black and Latino, and nearly every student is poor. But I have no doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — more likely. In the years before the Brown decision, the oldest of the McBeth children went to a nearby school where the kids were predominantly black and Latino, because the New York City Board of Education bused white children in the area to other schools, according to the N.A.A.C.P. Because Northern officials often practiced segregation without the cover of law, it was far less likely that judges would find them in violation of the Constitution. A decade from now, integration advocates could be lamenting how P.S. Jun 10, 2016 - How one school became a battleground over which children benefit from a separate and unequal system. But the thing with golden tickets is not everyone can have one. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school. The nearby public schools are named after people intended to evoke black uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent black nationalist in the 1920s, and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, but the schools are a disturbing reflection of New York City’s stark racial and socioeconomic divisions.