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The Ingenuity Of White Folk:
Readin', Writin' And Whiteness in NYC Schools
The great thing about white folks today is their resourcefulness. There seems to be no method for the preservation of white privilege that is beyond their imagination. This resourcefulness is especially on display in educational settings. Recently, The New York Times reported on events in two nominally integrated New York City community school districts. In the first, District 28 (covering the Forest Hills and Jamaica neighborhoods in Queens), the local elected school board has decided to spend five million dollars of federal magnet school funds to improve seven schools in the northern half of the district. One of those schools is PS 144. Its students are said to be 37 percent Asian, 19 percent Hispanic, 4 percent black and 40 percent white. But the school board claims that the magnet funds are needed to increase the white enrollment to 50 percent. According to the local superintendent, Neil Kreinick, the "only way you can succeed in New York City and most big cities" is to attract more white students from the non-public schools. Meanwhile, only two schools in Jamaica (the predominantly black half of the district) are scheduled to receive magnet school funds. So white folks have even figured out how to use money intended to promote school integration to support the maintenance of white privilege. The other story is from District 10 in the Bronx, a district that includes relatively wealthy and white Riverdale and relatively poor and black Marble Hill. In the Riverdale end of the district, Middle School 141 has an enrollment of about 1,400 students, half from Riverdale and half from Marble Hill. A group of Riverdale parents has proposed the redesign of the school so that it would include a new "rigorous" high school. In order to do so, the zone for the middle school would have to be re-drawn, thereby excluding many of the Marble Hill children. What's perfect about this solution is that it's well-known that the public high schools in the Bronx, with the exception of the Bronx High School for Science (a school that admits students from all over the city on the basis of performance on an exam taken in 8th grade), constitute an educational "dead zone." If the plan for a redesigned school is adopted, then the children of Riverdale who don't do well enough on the exam will have an alternative to the educational misery which is the destiny of their age-mates down the road. |
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