Since 2002, the number of students in Bed-Stuy’s District 16 has dropped by more than half. There’s no single reason why this is happening, but the year 2002 is a clue: that’s when Michael Bloomberg became the Mayor, abolished local school boards, and took over the New York City school system.
In this episode, we’ll meet parents trying to reassert collective power and local accountability in District 16 after years of neglect from the Department of Education; parents trying to save their school from being closed for persistently low enrollment; and parents trying to do what they believe is best for their children by leaving the district altogether.
In a Black community that has struggled for self-determination through education for nearly 200 years, what does self-determination look like today?
CREDITS
Producers / Hosts: Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman
Editing & Sound Design: Elyse Blennerhassett
Production Support: Jaya Sundaresh, Ilana Levinson
Music: avery r. young and de deacon board, Chris Zabriskie, Blue Dot Sessions
Featured in this episode: Kamality Guzman, NeQuan McLean, Natasha Capers, Felicia Alexander, Clara Hemphill, Dr. Lester Young, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Faraji Hannah-Jones, Andre Farrell, Kayann Stephens, Dascy Griffin, Crystal Williams, Leonie Haimson.
School Colors is a production of Brooklyn Deep, the citizen journalism project of the Brooklyn Movement Center. Made possible by support from the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
TRANSCRIPT
MARK WINSTON GRIFFITH: Previously on “School Colors.”
DOLORES TORRES: The plan for community control was.
REV. C. HERBERT OLIVER: We knew that Black people were capable of running schools.
ALBERT SHANKER: They will burn the city down.
CHARLIE ISAACS: It was a beautiful thing that got destroyed.
NATASHA CAPERS: We changed y’all whole world. You welcome.
ADELAIDE SANFORD: But that change was resisted with passion with tenacity with money.
SEGUN SHABAKA: The government was hostile.
CLEASTER COTTON: The pressure that we went through as children killed many of us.
ANNETTE ROBINSON: Everybody was not corrupt.
MAMA FELA: It was perfect. It was perfect for my mind body and spirit. To be able to be someplace where I could feel like a human.
LESTER YOUNG: This is what goes on when you let them run the schools.
MARK: You’re hearing the music of Eubie Blake, the legendary ragtime and jazz composer who lived most of his life right here in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Eubie Blake has a school named after him in Bed-Stuy’s Community School District 16: P.S. 25. And P.S. 25 is in crisis.
MAX FREEDMAN: P.S. 25 was built for a thousand students. Last year, there were less than a hundred. So the New York City Department of Education decided to shut it down.
STUDENTS: Save our school! Save our school! Save our school!
MARK: No, you’re not having deja vu, we’ve been here before -- this is where we started our series. On a cold February night in 2018, in the auditorium at P.S. 25. You heard officials from the DOE making their case for why the school should be closed:
PHIL WEINBERG: The NYC DOE is proposing the closure of P.S. 25 based on its persistently low enrollment and lack of demand from students and families in the neighborhood.
MAX: You heard outspoken parents from the school making their case for why the school should stay open:
KAMALITY GUZMAN: These kids been here since pre-K. These kids been here since they were young their parents. You know we see the same people over and over you know just grow accustomed to it. They know what your kids need. They know what they lack.
MARK: And you heard students marching around the auditorium, holding up bright yellow handwritten protest signs:
STUDENTS: Save our school! Save our school! Save our school!
MARK: During the three terms of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the DOE closed more than 150 schools across the city, often over the objections of parents. But under our current Mayor, Bill de Blasio, that’s mostly stopped. Which is what makes P.S. 25 so unusual.
MAX: And what makes P.S. 25 even more unusual is that these parents are going up against not only the DOE, but the official parent leadership for the district.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: My name is NeQuan McLean I'm the president of CEC 16 and I come tonight to say that CEC 16 and the local officials of District 16 agrees with the recommendation to close P.S. 25.
MAX: The CECs, or Community Education Councils, replaced the old local school boards. They have almost no formal power. So why would the president of CEC 16 use whatever little bit of influence he might have to go against the wishes of the parents he’s supposed to represent?
MARK: This is “School Colors,” a podcast from Brooklyn Deep about how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools.
MAX: P.S. 25 is just the most extreme example of what’s happening across District 16, which covers the eastern half of Bed-Stuy. Almost every school in the district is hemorrhaging kids. We started this project trying to figure out why. But there isn’t one single answer.
MARK: Ask most people around here what they think is going on and you’ll probably hear about charter schools and gentrification. We’ll get to those in episodes 6 and 7. But the answer that’s a little less obvious is about parent power -- or the lack thereof. And that’s what we’re tackling in this episode. How centralizing the New York City school system has contributed to the slow and steady vanishing of District 16.
MAX: Mayoral Control of public schools has been prescribed to address chronic under-achievement not just in New York but in many of America’s largest cities with predominantly nonwhite student populations -- like Chicago, D.C., and Philadelphia.
MARK: Mayoral Control redefines power. Instead of saying “we the community have the power to change things,” Mayoral Control says “you as an individual -- as a consumer -- have the power to choose a different product.”
MAX: But defining power in terms of consumer choice is like capitalism in a nutshell. And the thing about capitalism is it creates winners and losers, that’s just how it works. And the loser is a school like P.S. 25.
MARK: What’s happening to this district raises a question we’ll be grappling with for the next four episodes: in a community that has struggled for self-determination for nearly 200 years, what does self-determination even look like today? Is it, for example, parents fighting against the system to save their neighborhood school? Is it parent leaders like NeQuan, fighting from within the system, for the good of the district? Or is it parents who leave their neighborhood schools altogether in search of an education that better serves their children? In other words, parents like me?
NEQUAN MCLEAN: This has been a Black and brown community. Failing our students.
ANDRE FARRELL: Some of these schools they look like monsters.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: The faces was like District 16’s here? Like, oh my goodness!
KAYANN STEPHENS: Bed-Stuy is what’s up!
EVA MOSKOWITZ: I’m not sure parents want control.
DASCY GRIFFIN: They want us to be like puppets with our heads down when they say they do stuff but we not having it.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: They looking at me like I’m crazy.
ANDRE FARRELL: What’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with me.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I feel like I was robbed.
DASCY GRIFFIN: Stop taking our kids away. Give us kids. We was promised we would have kids where our kids.
MARK: This is Mark Winston Griffith.
MAX: And Max Freedman.
MARK: Welcome back to “School Colors.”
MAYORAL CONTROL
MARK: Before he ran for Mayor, Michael Bloomberg was a billionaire CEO. He promised to make the city work again: to make it a place that was safe for capital investment, and safe for the kind of people that capital likes to invest in: upper-middle class and white.
MAX: In other words, if Mayor Giuliani had cleaned up the streets, Mayor Bloomberg was going to pave them with steel and glass.
MARK: He saw New Yorkers as customers. He saw the city as an enterprise. And any good enterprise needs a strong hand at the helm.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Some people claim that mayoral control of the school system is just a power grab. I disagree. This is not about power. This is about accountability in education.
MARK: Come on, Mike. Maybe it wasn’t only about power, but it wasn’t not about power.
MAX: From 1970 to 2002, each of New York City’s 32 school districts had been governed by a local school board. The school boards hadn’t always been effective, but instead of improving them, Bloomberg wanted them gone.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: We do need to create more opportunities for parents to participate in our educational system. But local school boards are just not the way. As many of you know participation in local school board elections is often less than 3 percent. That means more than ninety seven percent of the eligible voters are rejecting the current system of school governance by refusing to participate.
MARK: Okay, okay, you can make a plausible argument for all that.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: The public has clearly said enough. They are saying read our lips. Eliminate the Board of Education and the local school boards. Then give us control over our schools through the mayor.
MARK: People were calling for change, but “give us control of our schools through the mayor”? I never heard anybody say that.
MAX: So once the Mayor had control, he rebranded the Board of Education as the Department of Education. And they got rid of the local school boards.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: We want a diversity of views and opinions. But there's not going to be the public fights we're going to come up with what we think collectively is in the best interests of the students.
MAX: The general attitude of the administration was that parents were part of the problem. You can hear it in the voice of the Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein:
JOEL KLEIN: One of the most entertaining evenings I have had is talking to a group of parents about their schools and whether to have school uniforms and I tell you if I left that decision to the parents they would all have to quit work and they would still be meeting trying to resolve that decision.
MARK: And they claimed that nobody really wanted community control or democratic school governance, anyway.
EVA MOSKOWITZ: I'm not sure parents want control. I don't think they want to manage.
MAX: Bloomberg had a strong advocate for his education agenda on the new york city council, in the form of Eva Moskowitz, who would later found the Success Academy network of charter schools. Here she is on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.
EVA MOSKOWITZ: I think they want a level of responsiveness. They're consumers. I also think they want to be able to leave schools when they're unhappy. Right if you have a fundamental disagreement with the educational philosophy of the principal it’s not very practical to work day in and day out to change that philosophy.
BRIAN LEHRER: But as you must know we have…
MARK: There’s definitely truth to this. But leaving your school is a big deal! Logistically for your family, emotionally for your kids and their friends. This perspective assumes that a school is just a school. It’s not a community, it’s not relationships, it’s not identification. And what I also take issue with is the blanket assumption that parents don’t want to have a say in how their schools are run. The thing is, when you can’t have a say in how your school is run, leaving becomes the only choice you have.
MAX: Dr. Lester Young started his career as a teacher in District 16. Now he sits on the State Board of Regents.
LESTER YOUNG: When people have a sense of hopelessness when when they don't feel that they can effectuate change that impacts their lives that kind of hopelessness just creates a system of winners and losers and that's really what we have right now. And so when you talk to parents you know parents are like look I'm not trying to do system change I'm just trying to find a place for my kid. And if I can do that I'm fine.
MAX: I asked Natasha Capers, director of the New York Coalition for Educational Justice, what precisely are the ways that parents can meaningfully participate in the school system today. In fact, at least on paper, there are a lot of them.
NATASHA CAPERS: It's the alphabet soup of New York City. It really is what we call it. It means like your parent association and your parent teacher associations and parent teacher organizations. School based. District based. SLTs. CECs. FACE right. CPAC which is the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council? I think that's what that acronym stands for.
MAX: There are so many structures that not even Natasha can always keep them straight - and organizing parents is literally her job.
NATASHA CAPERS: Even just talking about that. It's like you just named ten different things. I'm a kindergarten parent. I don't know anyone of you. Like I don't know who any of you people are. And so like there's lots of structures to give input but there's very little like training and there's very few ways for parents to actually push back against the system.
MARK: My organization, the Brooklyn Movement Center, was built on the idea that community change happens when you confront people in power and agitate for what you want. So in 2012, after 10 years of mayoral control, BMC did a study of District 16. We found that parents were on the sidelines, squashed by the bureaucracy, with little sense of their collective power. We even had a hard time identifying more than a handful of functioning PTAs. There were local efforts to train parents to help their children with homework, for instance, or to understand the Common Core. And there were some parents raising money for their schools. But this is pretty much the only kind of parent involvement that the DOE is comfortable with -- what they refer to as “parent engagement” -- because it doesn’t actually involve holding the DOE accountable.
MAX: And holding the DOE accountable is exactly what Felicia Alexander had in mind when she joined the Community Education Council for District 16.
RISE OF THE CEC
MAX: Felicia was born and raised in Bed-Stuy. She’s got four kids, and her oldest son started off at P.S. 262, the El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz School. (That’s the name Malcolm X adopted near the end of his life.) Felicia’s son, like many many kids across the city, wasn’t getting the special education services he needed and was legally entitled to, so she first joined the PTA hoping she could do something about that.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: And when I realized the PTA wasn't worth anything I went and joined the CEC. And when I joined it really wasn't worth nothing either. But I would like to think that I helped push it towards where it’s at now.
MARK: If you live in New York City and you’ve never heard of a CEC -- that’s Community Education Council -- you’re not alone. Felicia had never heard of it either, until she went digging around on the DOE website.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: And like my first meeting I was shell shocked because it was like me and four people and the president is sitting there going nobody ever comes to these meetings back in my day we did this and we did that and I'm sitting there like well I wouldn't come to your meeting either if this is how you're gonna hold the meeting.
MARK: When she started going to citywide meetings to represent District 16, she learned just how forsaken the district had become.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: I signed in and I signed in District 16. And like the faces was like District 16’s here. Like oh my goodness. Y’all have a functioning council and I'm sitting there like um. We're trying to. Like and just going to these DOE meetings DOE is like oh sixteen yeah that's our district that's the problem district we're really trying to work on it.
MAX: Going to these citywide meetings is also how Felicia learned about everything that CEC were doing in other districts: organizing events, evaluating the superintendent, advocating for certain policies and programs. CEC 16 wasn’t doing any of that.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: I came back to my CEC meeting and I'm like why are we not doing what they're doing. And I was always met with the. We don't have the capacity we don't have the parent involvement. And I'm like But you're not going out and getting it. And so they looking at me like I'm crazy.
MARK: But the complacency of other parents wasn’t her only problem.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: The biggest obstacle to the CEC at that time was the superintendent Like I don't think she wanted the CEC to challenge her or question her She was comfortable collecting her check. And she didn't want to have to do anything extra other than the bare necessities and she didn't want to rock the boat. like challenging DOE or pushing them like if they wanted to bring a charter school in she was just like eh you can't do nothing about that. If they wanted to close the school or they wanted to do this she would like it is what it is you can't do nothing about that.
MARK: To be fair to the former superintendent, Bloomberg had tried to make the city’s 32 local school districts as irrelevant as possible. Each district office still had a superintendent and a desk and a phone, but that was about it. They were like the tonsils of the school system.
MAX: And the Superintendent’s attitude was pervasive. The whole time Felicia was vice president of the CEC, they could not even get the minimum number of members required to make quorum.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: And when I finally became president I was like yes we're going to do some work.
MAX: She went to every school and introduced herself, went to as many PTA meetings as she could, to recruit parents to run for the CEC.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: I remember the first meeting that we had quorum. I went home and I cried cause I was so happy cause I didn't think that was ever going to happen.
MAX: One of the parents she recruited was NeQuan McLean. He eventually took over from Felicia as CEC president.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I was told by a couple of people but my principal was like oh you know it's only one meeting a month you go to the one meeting and everything is fine. It's way more than that.
MARK: Actually, for some CEC presidents, it IS a one-meeting-a-month kinda gig. But for NeQuan, it’s a full-time job: 40 hours a week just for CEC 16, and then when you add on all the other things he does…
MAX: He’s on all these citywide bodies: the Education Council Consortium, the Fair Student Funding Task Force, the School Diversity Advisory Group, the ESSA Committee of Practitioners, I’m probably missing a couple. The week we spoke, he had to prepare the CEC’s budget for the following year, meet with the superintendent about her performance evaluation, meet with the executive superintendent to plan a meet-and-greet, monitor the elections for two other CECs…
NEQUAN MCLEAN: And that's generally how my week looks as an unpaid volunteer.
MARK: Meanwhile, he’s got four kids: one in college, two in high school, one in first grade.
MAX: Have we mentioned he’s thirty-five years old?
MARK: From the beginning, NeQuan saw what Felicia had seen: that as far as the DOE was concerned, District 16 was an afterthought.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I would go to meetings at the beginning of my tenure and they would go 13 14 15 17 18 and they would skip over 16 and I'd be like. Hello. 16 is here.
MARK: The truth is, without somebody with NeQuan’s kind of hustle, there would be no effective parent voice for the district.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Every training that they had I was there. Every time there was a conversation I was there. Because I needed them to understand that District 16. We're back we're here we're visible. And we won’t no longer be set aside we won’t no longer be you know just 16.
MARK: If Felicia helped put District 16 back on the DOE’s radar screen, NeQuan has really shoved the district in their face. So… how?
MAX: Well, NeQuan says the DOE had been approaching District 16 with a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy. They would tell different stakeholders different things, so nobody knew exactly what was going on. So he’s learned to play the inside game: he’s developed strong relationships with elected officials, the community board, etcetera. The downside of the inside game is that it keeps information concentrated within a small group of people. Attendance at the CEC’s monthly public meetings is still not great. The district serves around 4500 elementary and middle school families, but I’ve been to every CEC meeting for the last year and the most I’ve ever seen is 15 or 20 people. NeQuan’s not happy about that, but he also understands this is not unique to District 16.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Families are busy. Families have to work. Families have so many other things. Not saying that their child education is not important but another meeting on another school night is not what they need. Some people don't even know what the CEC is. And some of them feel like we don't have power which we don't have that much power. But we have the bully pulpit where we can shame the DOE into doing certain things that are supposed to be done.
MAX: He certainly has not been afraid to shame the DOE in public. Here’s one of my favorite examples: this recording is from the CEC meeting in June. An official from the DOE was giving a presentation about something - you don’t really need to know the details, but NeQuan was not having it.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: This is nothing new from what we’ve already been hearing. So when they called me today and said that you wanted to present I thought you was coming to present something new about the borough field support office and what the borough field support office is going to do under your leadership. We have seen this kind of presentation and we don't want to see it again. Um.
DOE OFFICIAL: So can I ask you something are you the voice for everyone in the room.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I am the chair. I'm the chair and I'm telling you that this is not. Could you please stop.
DOE OFFICIAL: OK um. So I’m being asked to stop. Is there consensus that I stop the presentation.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: You don't have the you don't have the right to ask for consensus.
DOE OFFICIAL: OK so.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: You are a guest at our meeting.
DOE OFFICIAL: I will respectfully stop the presentation I also have…
MAX: You come at the chair, you best not miss.
MARK: If you haven’t been on the scene, you might not understand how significant it is to hear NeQuan speak this way. He’s saying “Look, I know there’s a way things are done and I don’t care about the way things are done. I want to make sure my parents are respected and you don’t come in here with that garbage.”
MAX: And it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him do this kind of thing.
DOE OFFICIAL: Unfortunately we don’t have that information but I can…
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Which is unacceptable and it's unacceptable because I e-mailed you all over two weeks ago and asked for this information.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: This presentation every year is the same presentation. It looks like it get worse and worse every year.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I knew what it was crap from the beginning but I wanted to really just make it plain to the community.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: And it show once again shows a lack of respect that the DOE has for the communities that they’re supposed to be serving.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: It's unacceptable. For. It's unacceptable for the DOE to continue to do this.
MARK: It’s not just performance. Considering the limits of his formal powers, NeQuan has learned to throw his weight around.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Like we are now visible where decisions are not even being made. Have y’all spoken to NeQuan. I think y’all need to speak to NeQuan. I think you need to speak to CEC 16. That was not happening before. Under no other president.
MAX: NeQuan had the good fortune to join the CEC just after New York City got a new mayor: Bill de Blasio, who ran hard against Bloomberg’s record, though he’s kept mayoral control in place.
MARK: In this new climate, NeQuan and Felicia were able to work behind the scenes to get a new superintendent.
MAX: De Blasio’s biggest education initiative has been rolling out universal Pre-K for four year olds. But when they decided to roll out 3-K -- Pre-K for three year olds -- they announced that only certain districts would get it, and District 16 was not on the list. NeQuan made a stink about it and behold, District 16 got 3-K.
MARK: Under Bloomberg, the DOE had shut down the only Gifted & Talented program (or G&T) in District 16. Under NeQuan’s leadership, they got G&T back.
MAX: But one of the CEC’s most persistent challenges has been school leadership. NeQuan told us that he gets a lot of complaints about principals but there’s not much they can actually do about it.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Since we've been here we have not seen a principal removed.
MARK: Is that a good or a bad thing.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: That's a bad thing for me. And for our parent leaders. You can't tell me that every principal here is doing the best of their ability. We have had principals leave. But we have not seen movement on who we would say are principals of concern.
MARK: Yes, this is a district that has had almost exclusively Black leadership for a long, long time -- but for NeQuan, that’s not good enough.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: People talk about well you know this is a black and brown community and we should have black and brown teachers The classroom should reflect the student. Yes I agree to that for some point. But for over. Fifteen years this has been a black and brown community. Failing our students. The principals the teachers have been black and brown principals black and brown teachers failing our students. So color doesn't matter to me when we're looking at education. what I stand for is the right people before our students making the right decisions making sure that they're here for the right reasons. We're too comfortable in mediocre or we're too comfortable with 25 or 50 percent of our students reading proficiently we're too comfortable with that. That's not good enough. So how do we take it to the next level is what the conversations that we're going to be having.
MAX: But the one and only legally binding decision-making power the CEC has is to say yes or no when the DOE wants to change the boundaries of a school zone. That’s it.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: The CEC real authority is rezoning. We don't have zoning issues in 16. We have uh people leaving issues. So.
MARK: We get into those “people leaving issues” -- after the break.
MIDROLL BREAK #1
ANTHONINE PIERRE: Hi, this is Anthonine from BMC. I’m not here to ask you for money this time, but the donation page on the website is open 24 hours, if you know what I mean… Today I’m trying to get you to spread the word about this podcast you’ve been listening to for the past six weeks! School Colors is citizen journalism at its realest: We don’t have a big media organization behind this. We don’t have an advertising budget. This is all word of mouth. We need you to tell your friends, share on social media, and if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, leave a rating and review! And whether it’s on Apple, Spotify, or on the moon, thanks for listening :)
PEOPLE LEAVING ISSUES
MARK: We’ve interviewed NeQuan at least a half dozen times over the last two years, but the last time, we met him in the playground next to P.S. 309, his alma mater.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I went here from kindergarten to sixth grade. I lived on the next block Madison between Malcolm X and Stuyvesant for 21 years.
MARK: When he was growing up the assumption was, for most people anyway, that you went to your neighborhood school.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: I remember like everyone coming here.
MARK: Everyone coming here right. Right.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: You know we walked to school together. We played in these parks. It was really a public education was very important.
MARK: He went to elementary, middle, and high school in District 16. But that path is increasingly rare.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: A lot of families ran from 16 because there was something lacking but as a kid you don't know that. You come to school get your work do your work. You think everything is fine but it's not until you grow up and you see other districts and how they thrive and you feel like you got robbed. So me as an adult I feel like I was robbed.
MARK: District 16 has the smallest student population of any district in New York City. Now, some of that is just geography: it’s also physically one of the smallest in the city. But the map by itself doesn’t account for how far enrollment has fallen over time. Last year, the total enrollment of elementary and middle schools in the district was just a quarter of what it was 45 years ago.
MAX: Like, I want you to imagine a busy school yard full of kids running around and yelling and laughing. Now imagine three out of every four of those kids just vanish. Of course, those kids didn’t disappear all at once. Since 1973, when the district got its current shape, there have been two big drops in enrollment.
MARK: Between 1970 and 1980, the number of kids living in this area dropped by almost half, and school enrollment fell off accordingly. As the city was crumbling, there was a mass exodus from Black Brooklyn, and my own family was part of that.
MAX: But starting in the early 80s enrollment held steady for a while. But the second big drop in enrollment came around 2002 -- the year Michael Bloomberg became the Mayor.
MARK: Like we said at the start of this episode, in the Bloomberg era, power was redefined as choice. So they made it easier to choose a school outside of your zone or district, and they created more choices by opening new schools.
MAX: At the high school level: admissions have become completely divorced from geography. Nowadays, with some exceptions in the more suburban pockets of New York City, there’s very little expectation that you’ll attend high school where you live. So for that reason, we’re not going to talk about high school much at all.
MARK: But even for elementary and middle school, given the choice, a lot of people have not chosen District 16. In the 2017-18 school year, just a third of students who lived in this district actually went to school here.
MAX: To break down those numbers another way: 62% of kids left the district for elementary school. 74% left for middle school. Where are they going? A combination of traditional public schools in other districts, and privately-managed public charter schools, both inside and outside the district.
MARK: If you’re inclined to believe that the problem with our education system is that kids are stuck in bad schools in bad neighborhoods, then these numbers are a good thing. It means kids are escaping. And the idea that District 16 is a place you need to escape from has been around for a while.
MAX: Clara Hemphill is the founding editor of InsideSchools, a website that publishes data and reviews for every public school in New York City.
CLARA HEMPHILL: When I started this work we're talking twenty five years ago now. There were districts that were really good. There were districts that were not good. But if a good principal happened to stumble along they wouldn't mess with her. And then there were districts that systematically destroyed anything good that was going on. And that was District 16.
MARK: Wow. That’s heavy coming from someone with such an influential platform. If you Google a school, nine times out of ten, Clara’s website, InsideSchools, is the first page that comes up. And whatever InsideSchools has to say, chances are that reputation will stick. I’ve seen it first-hand. Of course, they use multiple indicators to evaluate schools. But I think we have to be careful when reducing schools to “good” or “bad.” It’s easy for biases to get baked into those labels. I mean, when’s the last time you heard a mostly white school referred to as “bad?”
MAX: Before she had the website, Clara started writing these parents’ guides to the Best Public Schools in New York City. While we were talking, she pulled out the very first edition to show me the entry for a school in District 16.
CLARA HEMPHILL: Alright here's my review from nineteen ninety seven of P.S. thirty five. Despite some fine programs teachers feel under siege. The school had nine principals in four years. One was forced out after she she handcuffed a child to a stair rail. Parents say the board insists on sending to the school teachers and principals who don't share its philosophy. Some of the best teachers have left in frustration. The ever changing parade of principals has undermined teachers authority and exacerbated problems of morale and discipline. It's pretty funny that I put this in the best. But. That was the best in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
CLARA HEMPHILL: The parents are voting with their feet in huge numbers in Bedford-Stuyvesant and I mean I said I'm a big defender of neighborhood schools but the schools have to figure out what they're doing. That makes the parents want to leave.
MAX: Of course, the schools do need to figure out what they’re doing that makes the parents want to leave. But a lot of this is about perception.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: The stigmas that our schools get. It's unfortunate how long it take it takes so quickly to get those stigmas but then it takes so long to change those stigmas.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: I have a big issue with people constantly saying District 16 schools suck they suck they suck. No they don't. They equate that with those test scores and I think that does a disservice to our schools because of a lot of our schools are doing wonderful things have great programming and are doing magnificent with these kids. District 16 has challenges where you have a school like P.S. 5 who has been persistently failing but they have a high population of homeless students that transfer in and out repeatedly. So you can't take that and then test those students who spent six months in the Bronx and then you come here and you're teaching something different and then you throw them at the state test and of course they only get a one or two. So now you're like oh this is a failing school. So that I think is like a big narrative that needs to change.
MARK: It wasn’t until the Brooklyn Movement Center wrote that report in 2012 that we discovered how far and how fast enrollment was falling. But no one in the district seemed concerned about it. That’s partly because there was no discernible district-wide strategy or guiding spirit. It was just a collection of 20 something schools kind of doing their own thing.
FELICIA ALEXANDER: Each principal thought their school was an island. And nobody talked to each other. They wasn't calling each other they weren't sharing practices everything was secret in their school. So I'm like for a district to go up you have to work together as a whole. You can't keep working in your individual schools. That's never going to bring the district up together.
MARK: But “bringing the district up together” was not on the agenda. In fact, the Bloomberg administration had done everything they could to decouple education from community. By many accounts, they flooded the system with teachers and principals who were not from the neighborhoods in which they served. Instead of districts, schools were organized into networks that had nothing to do with geography and often had very little supervision. And so ten years into Mayoral Control, there was little evidence of an in-district pipeline, of students moving from elementary, to middle, to high school in the same district. It was a free-for-all: parents competing for schools, schools competing for parents, survival of the fittest.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: You know as soon as you move to New York if you have a child and she was one then people are automatically that’s the first thing they want to know is what are you going to do about the schools.
MARK: Nikole Hannah-Jones is probably the foremost journalist on the school segregation beat working today. You might know her as the creative mastermind of the 1619 Project for the New York Times. She and her husband Faraji also happen to live in Bed-Stuy.
FARAJI HANNAH-JONES: The schools that were being told to us is. You know go to the montessori school or go to this charter school go to this private school and there was no mention of of public schools and you know all the public schools are bad so. The thought of even considering a public school in this neighborhood in our neighborhood was unheard of. No one would ever think about doing anything like that.
MAX: Let me ask you a question. Um. The parents who said to you you can’t even consider the local schools were they mostly white.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: No they were black and white. But they were all middle class. Or upper middle class.
FARAJI HANNAH-JONES: Yeah.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Bed Stuy is a high poverty neighborhood, but it actually has a significant Black middle class but the schools are not reflective of that either. The schools are almost entirely poor even though the neighborhood is not.
MAX: Why is that.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: I think that middle class parents don’t choose to go to neighborhood schools, and I think the reasons for black middle class parents versus white middle class parents are very different. For most black middle class parents they are just one foot into the middle class themselves and this is not something they can risk. And for most white middle class parents I think that they have a lot of fear about putting their kids in school with poor black kids.
MARK: We’ll talk more about white families in a future episode. But it’s like the worst kept secret in Central Brooklyn that most middle class Black families have avoided the local schools for a while now.
MAX: For example: Andre Farrell. Andre grew up here in Bed-Stuy. He told me he lived on the same block as Biggie.
ANDRE FARRELL: P.S. 56 was. Was rough. It was a rough school. Like the the Good School at that time was P.S. 11. So it was like really smart kids got to P.S. 11. And you know like the bad kids were in like P.S. 56. And I always remember the principal there at the time we were in the schoolyard and he was like This is crazy this is a school for the damned. Like that's what he said. You know at that time I'll always remember that.
MARK: That a principal would say that within listening distance of a child… that’s deep.
ANDRE FARRELL: So as a parent you also don't want your kid to have to struggle like that right. That's the way that you come up it's like. This was my life. Your life doesn't have to be like that. So we're going to do whatever is necessary to make sure that you have the best of the best.
MAX: Still, when Andre and his wife Kayann, also a Brooklyn native, were looking to establish themselves and raise a family, there was no question that they wanted to be in Bed-Stuy.
KAYANN STEPHENS: I was like Bed-Stuy is what's up.
ANDRE FARRELL: Bed-Stuy for me is home.
KAYANN STEPHENS: It felt very young very vibrant.
ANDRE FARRELL: I'm a Brooklyn boy. I want my kid to grow up the same way.
KAYANN STEPHENS: It felt very family like.
ANDRE FARRELL: My dream was like I want to reinvest in my community I want to make the changes that I want to see here.
MAX: Andre was an accountant; Kayann is a nurse. They were able to buy a brownstone in the neighborhood. Actually, that brownstone is where I live. Andre and Kayann are my landlords. But by the time their son Taylor was old enough for Pre-K -- this is about 10 years ago now -- they had more or less ruled out their local school district, District 16.
ANDRE FARRELL: There were not a lot of options here like zero.
MAX: Almost all of the middle class families we spoke with, Black or white, named the same three or four schools that everybody’s trying to get into in the district next door.
ANDRE FARRELL: District 13 was like the district you want to be in you're going to get quality educational programming. Coming here you know some of these schools they look like monsters you know like just bad. It wasn't even that we physically were there it was just based upon our research you know looking at test scores looking at the gradings at that time you know F.
MARK: For a while, the DOE literally gave each school a letter grade.
MAX: But it was also word of mouth. Andre and Kayann talked to families on the block who were struggling to make changes in their zoned school -- which would be my zoned school, too, if I had kids.
MARK: Folks like Felicia and NeQuan might tell you to stick around, fight for the school to be better. But like Nikole Hannah-Jones said, a lot of families don’t feel like they can take the risk.
ANDRE FARRELL: We didn't want our kids to be the guinea pig right to make that change. So we were like we got to send him to a school where he's going to thrive and do well.
MAX: Andre and Kayann hustled to get their son Taylor into one of these prized few schools: P.S. 9. When P.S. 9 became overcrowded because of the high demand, they hustled again to get Taylor into another one of the gems: Arts & Letters.
MARK: Every parent who’s gotten a spot out of district, and I’m one of them, has a story about pulling strings, knowing somebody, or just nagging the administrator. Obviously, not everybody has the social capital or even the time to do all that.
MAX: It wasn’t only the academics the Andre and Kayann were after. They were looking for diversity. Or, to be more specific: they wanted Taylor to have the experience of going to school with white kids -- an experience he’s still unlikely to get in District 16.
ANDRE FARRELL: We don't want him to now go out there in the world and he's in an environment where he may be the only black person there. And he's like Oh my God I don't know I don't feel confident. I don't know what to do.
MARK: But the flip side of choosing a school that’s majority white is that it puts Taylor in the minority. And the older he gets, the more of a problem that becomes. As the neighborhood has changed, the school has changed, too. As the student population has become whiter, so has the staff.
ANDRE FARRELL: Right now at our son's school what we're experiencing is just a lack of understanding of you know black kids.
MARK: Arts & Letters is a K through 8 school and now that Taylor’s in the 7th grade, his parents have seen Taylor and the other Black boys in the school getting unfairly punished for what they see as normal adolescent behavior.
KAYANN STEPHENS: When you have a black and a brown boy screaming across the schoolyard they’re looked at and they are you know naughty boys or they are bad boys and keep your eye on this boy.
KAYANN STEPHENS: Black and brown boys playing pranks on each other. They're too rough. You guys are being too wild. Whereas you have white boys doing the same thing.
ANDRE FARRELL: It was like it took away their innocence you know and made them feel lesser of themselves. Why am I being targeted. This guy. He's doing the same thing and nothing is happening to him. And when I do something that's just a natural reaction for me at you know eleven twelve years old I'm being penalized for these natural feelings what's what's wrong with me. What's wrong with me.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: One of the things I always say is that for black parents and black children there will be a struggle, it’s just which one.
MARK: Nikole Hannah-Jones is an outspoken advocate for school integration, but she knows as well as anyone that integration can involve a difficult calculus for Black families.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: You can send your children to a predominantly white school, and because of the way that race and resources have always been connected in this country that means that your kid will probably get a better education, but socially and culturally it’s going to be very challenging for your child. Uh. Or you can send your child to a black school, and inferior facilities, but socially and culturally it’s going to be very nurturing for your child. There’s not really in this country um I think a perfect educational setting for black children. I don’t think that we have created that.
MAX: Andre and Kayann have considered finding a school closer to home for their son.
KAYANN STEPHENS: We would love to do District 16 but.
MAX: But she seems to be worried as much about the other children in these schools as about the schools themselves.
KAYANN STEPHENS: They're already exposed to smoking. They're probably exposed to cutting schools. Sexual behavior violence gangs you know drugs. Those are just things we talk to Taylor about but the exposure for a 10 and eleven year old seeing that here in District 16 is real. That's everyday for them. And just for our kid I didn't I didn't think Taylor would be able to handle that environment. I think education wise he can go in but social wise. I don't know. If he's tough enough for that environment I don't know if he's you know going to be savvy or fast enough to kick it with these boys and girls in the schools so I choose not to socially to put him in in some of the schools here for District 16 for middle school.
MARK: It’s hard for me to hear that. It lays bare a class division in Bed-Stuy that the Brooklyn Movement Center has tried to overcome with its organizing. But, if I’m going to be painfully transparent and own my shit, it also taps into my own Black middle-class guilt, a feeling which I suspect is quietly operating in the background of many of these stories. So let me speak for myself: I don’t live in District 16, but I’m a home-owning, third generation Central Brooklynite. Everybody knows I ride or die for my community. But by two sons have never gone to their own neighborhood schools. I can’t help feeling as though I’ve internalized the self-hating notion that the school around the corner from my house, the school I attended myself, is not good enough for my own children. But I’ve never felt like I had the luxury to let my politics or even my own conscience override what I think is best for my kids. There’s an idea that Black people have more of an obligation to each other than white people do to each other. Which is silly, of course. But it’s also so real. It’s how we survive.
MAX: Despite the advice they got from other parents in the neighborhood, Nikole and Faraji Hannah-Jones were determined to choose a public school for their daughter that was majority Black, majority low-income.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: I have choice. I if tomorrow I decide the segregated school I put my daughter in is hurting my daughter, I can pull her out and take her somewhere else. All the other parents, they can’t do that. They don’t have choice. This is the school they’re going to get.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: I get this question a lot. If you believe in integration why would you put your child in a segregated school. And my point is if we’re going to have integration then those of us who have choice have to send our kids to these schools. That‘s the only way the system comes down, is we have to make a different choice for our own children.
MAX: But the segregated school she chose would not be the school she was zoned for in District 16. She looked it up online, but she didn’t like what she saw.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: I was never worried about test scores, because I understand why high poverty schools test scores are low. Um but. When you looked at the rating of like what the environment is like. Like what teachers say the environment is like and what parents say the environment was like um. It was really low. And I had like fundamental concerns about that.
MAX: That school, her zoned school, was P.S. 25.
STUDENTS: Save our school! Save our school!
MARK: And the story of P.S. 25 takes a surprising turn… after the break.
MIDROLL BREAK #2
MAX: Hey, Max here. Did you know that Mark and I both work on other podcasts you can listen to? I’m one of the producers of Unsettled, a podcast about Israel-Palestine and the Jewish diaspora.
MARK: And if you’re enjoying School Colors, check out Third Rail, a talk show from Brooklyn Deep where I invite activists and advocates to discuss pressing issues in Central Brooklyn and beyond. The next episode will be a behind-the-scenes look at the making of School Colors.
MAX: You can find Third Rail and Unsettled on any podcast app. And make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
MARK: Okay, back to the show.
P.S. 25
MAX: So District 16 schools are under-enrolled. What’s the big deal? Fifty years ago, schools like P.S. 25 were so overcrowded that students had to go to school in shifts. If fewer students means smaller class sizes and more individualized attention from teachers, isn’t that a good thing?
MARK: CEC president NeQuan McLean says class size isn’t the issue. It’s the size of the school.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Money goes by numbers. It's hard. It's you know some people don't like to say but. Dollars are generated by bodies. And if we don't have enough of bodies then we're not going to have enough of dollars to properly educate those students.
MARK: Declining enrollment is self-perpetuating. Fewer students means less funding. Less funding means you have less to offer students and families, like enrichment, extracurriculars, and after-school. With less to offer, you get fewer students -- and the cycle continues.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: The Chancellor has clearly said any school that's under two hundred and fifty students is not considered a school it’s considered a program. So in 16 we don't have really that many schools. We have a bunch of programs. If you go with what the Chancellor says.
MAX: Using this math, last year District 16 only had 6 schools and 13 programs. As far as NeQuan is concerned, that’s a crisis. So what are they going to do about it?
NEQUAN MCLEAN: We're going to make our schools stronger. And one of the ways that we've done that is we have worked closely with the superintendent to say you know what. Let us minimize to maximize. Let us look at what schools are working very well. What schools that are not working very well. And let us consolidate them.
MAX: Closing schools was one of the most controversial aspects of the Bloomberg administration’s approach to education, especially with parents. So under Mayor Bill de Blasio, that’s mostly stopped. Instead of closing the most severely under-enrolled schools, District 16 has tried to merge them.
MARK: So if the official policy is to do everything you can to not close a school, what happened with P.S. 25? Well, NeQuan says closing the school was not his first choice.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: So our first recommendation was let's remove the principal.
MARK: But he was told it wasn’t that easy. The contracts were too solid, the politics were too hard…
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Oh no we can't do that. It's so many things that we have to do and. OK.
MARK: But enrollment kept going down to the point where he felt like it was too late even for leadership change.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: It was dead it's dead like nobody there now. So.
MARK: So the CEC’s position was that the only option left was to close the school before the school closed itself. And that’s what they recommended.
STUDENTS: Save our school! Save our school!
MAX: So on that night in February 2018 when the DOE officially announced their plans to close P.S. 25, NeQuan was up there on the dais, looking grim.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: My name is NeQuan McLean I'm the president of CEC 16 and I come tonight to say that CEC 16 and the local officials of District 16 agrees with the recommendation to close P.S. 25.
MAX: Now, if I didn’t know NeQuan and I was at this hearing, I would have seen him as just another part of the system. The students and parents at P.S. 25 certainly saw him that way. When the hearing was over, I spoke to Dascy Griffin, president of the PTA at the time.
MAX: What did you think about the meeting tonight.
DASCY GRIFFIN: I just hopefully that they will try to make progress and understand our kids and how our kid is learning. This school is our goldmine. This school is for our. Did you hear me?
MAX: Yeah.
DASCY GRIFFIN: This school is for our kids to learn. To succeed not to fail.
MAX: And if the school closes what are you. What are you going to do where is your younger son going to go.
DASCY GRIFFIN: Not in District 16. They won't get them funding.
MAX: Why not District 16.
DASCY GRIFFIN: For what. They close our school they close our kids goldmine. Why support them they can't support us. So they won’t get these kids in here I’ll make sure of that. If we got to protest in front of the DOE we will do so.
MAX: Parents from P.S. 25 did more than protest the DOE. They sued them.
DASCY GRIFFIN: They don't like that. We have parents fighting for our kids school. They don't like to see that they want us to be like puppets with our heads down when they say they do stuff but we not having it not here at 25.
MAX: Dascy Griffin was one of the plaintiffs.
DASCY GRIFFIN: When I had my first child before he graduated everybody talk good about 25 about the academics. I did not care about how many kids inside the school I just cared about the education.
MARK: Many advocates like Nikole Hannah-Jones say that school choice is sort of a lie. Most parents still don’t really have choice at all.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: They don’t have choice. This is the school they’re going to get.
MARK: Maybe that’s true on a macro level, but Dascy Griffin would like you to know she is exactly where she wants to be.
DASCY GRIFFIN: They told me this not my son zoned school. I fought for my child to come to the school.
MARK: And so she was prepared to fight for the school to stay open.
DASCY GRIFFIN: They prepare them for everything. My son had low self-esteem when he came in here. He walked out of here with his head up. I couldn't do it at home. When he came out here for graduation his head was up.
MAX: Dascy doesn't blame the principal or the teachers for the low enrollment, Dascy blames the DOE. There used to be a middle school upstairs that was a draw for families: you could go to school all the way to eighth grade in the same building. That middle school was merged with another middle school and moved offsite and then closed altogether and then replaced with a charter school. A charter elementary school, meaning it was competing directly with P.S. 25 for students.
DASCY GRIFFIN: Stop. Stop taking our kids away. Give us kids. We was promised we would have kids. Where are our kids. We was promised a pre-K 3 program. Where is it at. Where is it at. They so concerned about their district sixteen. Be concerned about P.S. 25 and their children.
MARK: Another plaintiff in the lawsuit was Crystal Williams.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: This school used to be off the chain. Fighting. Everything. It was crazy it was crazy. But it calmed down. It calmed down a lot. Nobody is fighting no more. Like everybody is like family now everybody is together. It’s it’s very warm it's a warm comfort in here.
MARK: That warm comfort is especially important for Crystal and her family. They’ve been through a lot.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: I used to live upstate. But then I came back home. And I was in a shelter. I was in a shelter round the corner on Kosciuszko. And that’s how I found out about the school because they take all kinds of people that’s in shelters or not in shelters so. That's how I found out about 25.
MARK: And she’s committed to this school. She must be, because getting to P.S. 25 every day is not easy. She has eleven children… and they live on Staten Island.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: Well I catch the boat and then train. So usually I'll be here like around nine. 9:00 I'll be here 9:06 I’ll be here. It depends on the boat on the ferry too.
MARK: A couple of her kids are in college, the youngest is a toddler. But the rest of them:
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: My daughter go to school at fashion school industry so I make sure she gets dropped off by the train over there and my son goes to school South Shore flatlands. So I gotta make sure he gets to his school on time or whatever so my kids is all over.
MAX: So how did she go from Bed-Stuy to Staten Island? It wasn’t entirely by choice. After living in shelters for five years, she finally got a Section 8 voucher for affordable housing but no landlords in Bed-Stuy would take it.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: They turned me down talking about oh we don't take that. Oh we're not taking that program anymore cause some people I was like what?
MAX: It’s illegal not to accept a housing voucher but very very common -- especially in gentrifying neighborhoods where landlords know they can get higher rents. At some point, Crystal accepted that she wasn’t going to be able to keep living in Central Brooklyn.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: I'm not trying to fight and fight and fight over apartment. It's not all that serious. I got a whole house so I'm not complaining.
MAX: So now that she’s out there on Staten Island, I asked her if she had looked at any schools closer to her new home. She leaned towards the microphone and started rubbing the top of her hand.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: The color of the skin. Some of them is very prejudiced. So nope. I don’t got time. So I want my kids to feel comfortable in school.
MARK: And it’s about more than just feeling comfortable. She believes her son has learned a lot at P.S. 25.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: I'm going to tell you my son when he came from upstate. He didn't know nothing. They just was kept on passing and passing and passing him. But twenty five take their time out with the children and make sure they teach them how to learn. Like you got some kids who barely speak any doggone English but you know what. They speak English now you have a little Russian boy here. He didn’t know how to speak no English but you know why. Because 25 did that. Because we take our time. You know what I’m saying with the children.
MAX: There are a lot of different metrics for parents to look at about schools. One of them is something called an “impact score,” which controls for the background and needs of the student population. It was the impact scores that caught Leonie Haimson’s attention when she looked up the data for P.S. 25.
LEONIE HAIMSON: And what I immediately found about P.S. 25 is that it was the the best elementary school in Brooklyn in terms of its impact rating. And it was the fourth best elementary school in the entire city. And I thought This is crazy. Why are they trying to close a school that's doing so well.
MARK: Leonie Haimson is the founder of the advocacy organization, Class Size Matters. Her whole thing is advocating for small class sizes, and here was a school with tiny class sizes, because it’s a tiny school. She was the one who made calls, found parents at P.S. 25 to act as plaintiffs, and sued the DOE to keep the school open. A civil court judge issued a temporary injunction which kept P.S. 25 open in the fall of 2018. Nobody really knew what would happen next, but NeQuan stood firm.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: Our concern has to be are the babies that's in that building receiving the best education as possible and they were not and they are not. We know the rhetoric that is going around about it being the best middle Elementary School inside of the city and all of this foolishness. I would challenge those people that's outside of this district that has so much to say about this district. Enroll your students there. Enroll your children there. And let's see what what you feel about that. But that's not a viable school.
LEONIE HAIMSON: I respect NeQuan. I think he's really smart. I think he's cares about his district. I think he's hardworking. I find it hard to understand.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: We sometimes have to make hard decisions and every decision that we make is not going to be popular. But once it once we believe that it's the right decision. We're going to stand behind our decision to recommend that 25 be closed.
MAX: I asked Crystal Williams what she thought she would do if the city did close the school.
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS: I don't know cause. Cause this school helped me out a lot and my kids really don't know nobody like that. You know they've been here. So it’s it’s gonna be hard for me to find another school for them so I know they're comfortable. You know.
LEONIE HAIMSON: Do we want to really give kids a real chance to succeed or don't. Do we not. That's the choice. Especially the kids who have been deprived of what they need. The close personal connection and feedback from their teachers. To close a school like P.S. 25 when these kids have already been so disrupted by the fact that they've been essentially pushed out of their homes. To me would be a tragedy.
MAX: A hearing in the lawsuit was finally scheduled for May of this year. As I was leaving my apartment to go to the courthouse, I got an email from Leonie: the DOE had decided to settle the case and keep the school open. By the time I got to the courthouse, I had an email from the CEC: they had decided to support the settlement. I wasn’t allowed to record in the courtroom, but I sat near Crystal in the gallery and she promised to finally give me a tour of the school.
MAX: So a few days later, I met Crystal and Leonie at P.S. 25. When I walked in, there were handwritten signs all over the lobby: THE LITTLE SCHOOL THAT COULD. And honestly… it was a ghost town. The principal, Ms. Coley, never responded to our request for an interview. NeQuan told us he’s received multiple complaints against her, but wouldn’t share them with us. As I was walking around the building with Crystal, she would point out a piece of writing on the wall from one of the kids and Leonie would say how great it was for a fourth grader and I was like… yeah, totally. But the truth is, I didn’t really know what to think.
MAX: This fall, the little school that could was even littler: their numbers had fallen from 82 to 62. I’m happy for Crystal and Dascy and the other parents there, I really am. But I’m not sure what if anything is going to happen to reverse the trend. Without some kind of intervention, the school may still end up phasing itself out.
MARK: But there’s been another character sort of in the shadows of this story. On the top floor of the P.S. 25 building there’s a charter school. A lot of people around here see charter schools as the obvious culprit in the case of the disappearing district.
MAX: Why do you think this is happening.
KAMALITY GUZMAN: Why do I think they’re closing? For charter schools. To bring in more charter schools to make it more stricter to take away public schools. They don’t want public schools they’re for charter schools. They’re against what we’re for.
MARK: One of the ironies of NeQuan’s position on P.S. 25 is that by recommending that the school be closed, he was accused of being in the pocket of charter schools. That really couldn’t be further from the truth.
NEQUAN MCLEAN: We have to do something that what what what New York City has faced around charters is disgusting. It's not fair.
MARK: Either way, very little inspires the kind of emotions in Central Brooklyn like the subject of charter schools.
OMA HOLLOWAY: You know as somebody once told me you know they'd rather be in a room with Palestinians and Israelites who aren't than to be in a room with diehard charter school and traditional public school parents who sometimes stay very entrenched on their sides.
MARK: That’s next time, on “School Colors.”
CREDITS
MARK: School Colors is written and produced by Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman. Editing and sound design by Elyse Blennerhassett.
MAX: Production support from Jaya Sundaresh and Ilana Levinson. Original music by avery r. young and de deacon board.
MARK: Additional music in this episode by Chris Zabriskie and Blue Dot Sessions. Archival material courtesy of WNYC.
MAX: Special thanks to Rahesha Amon-Harrison, Norm Fruchter, Ina Solomon, Kamality Guzman, and Kyamalit Gray.
MARK: School Colors is a production of Brooklyn Deep, made possible by support from the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
MAX: Help other people find the show by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, sharing on social media, or telling a friend. You can also hit us up with questions or comments by writing to contact@brooklyndeep.org, and follow us on social media @bklyndeep.
MARK: Brooklyn Deep is part of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a grassroots organizing hub in Central Brooklyn. Learn more about BMC and become a member at brooklynmovementcenter.org.
MAX: From now on, we’ll be releasing a new episode every other week - so we’ll be back in two weeks, on Friday, November 8. Till then -
MARK: Peace.