The high stakes of high school admissions in New York — and the lengths some go to get any small advantage.

NY TIMES

There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall.

Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.

On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.

Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.

Tens of thousands of eligible families were not there at all.

Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place.

Beacon’s admissions rate is roughly akin to Yale’s: there were over 5,800 applicants for 360 ninth-grade seats last year.

The lines that surround Beacon and other elite high schools are a living symbol of the anxiety, competition and inequality that define New York’s segregated public school system. High school admissions are seen as perhaps the most egregious example of how city policies end up dividing privileged parents from vulnerable families.

That dynamic was on display outside of Beacon’s two fall open houses.

“I am my son’s administrative assistant, that’s the best way to put it,” said Laura Kosik, who lined up early with her son, thanks to a tip from the newsletter, created by the consultant Elissa Stein.

Ms. Kosik, who is white and lives in Manhattan near Union Square, had also met with a different schools consultant who charges $240 an hour to dispense advice about the process. “I feel like this is a job,” she said.

Lakisha Moore and her son stood several hundred people behind Ms. Kosik.

“I didn’t know that I should have come early,” said Ms. Moore, who had arrived about a half an hour before the scheduled start, hoping to make it inside quickly. “I wish they had put that on the website,” added Ms. Moore, who is black and lives in Queens.

Though New York’s school system is mostly black and Hispanic, its highest-performing schools are largely white and Asian. Beacon’s student population was half white last year, and about a quarter of its students were low-income, compared to about three-quarters of the district as a whole.

A debate over how to make the city’s top schools more representative of the city itself has reached a fever pitch over the last year.

In March, a tiny number of black students got into the ultra-selective Stuyvesant High School, which has more low-income students than Beacon but a much smaller percentage of black and Hispanic students. In August, a panel commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio to study desegregation recommended that the city eliminate its mostly white and Asian elementary school gifted-and-talented classes.

Interviews with three dozen parents, students and educators revealed how high the stakes of the high school admissions process in particular feel to many families — and how easy it is for some children to get left behind.

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Beacon administrators take great pride in the long lines for its open houses.Credit...Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

“You only get one chance to figure out four years of your kid’s education,” said Alisa Kriegel, who joined Beacon’s line early after reading Ms. Stein’s newsletter. She waited with three other white mothers who met at their children’s TriBeCa middle school.

The four women had created an informal admissions support group, complete with a shared Google calendar, a robust group text and the promise of company on long waits to tour schools. “We’ve been going through hell,” Ms. Kriegel said.

“The Department of Education should be doing what Elissa Stein is doing, for free,” said Jill Taddeo, who was part of Ms. Kriegel’s crew.

Ms. Stein said about 500 families have signed up for her newsletter this fall, but noted that about 80,000 students are currently applying to high school. Ms. Stein said she offers reduced rates to low-income families and has signed some people up for free. “It shouldn’t be this hard to go to high school,” she said.

Under a school choice system created by Michael R. Bloomberg when he was mayor, the city allows students to apply to up to 12 high schools anywhere in New York, and an algorithm matches children with one school. Some parents said the ranking process was so daunting that they turned to YouTube for strategies.

Though there is no penalty for students who do not attend a tour, Beacon’s two open houses provide the only opportunity most families have to see inside the school. The Department of Education said that school also organizes small student tours that are not advertised.

Beacon, unlike Stuyvesant, does not have an admissions test. But to win a spot, students must have high standardized test scores and grades, along with a strong portfolio of middle school work and admissions essays. Students are much less likely to be accepted if they do not list Beacon as their top choice.

A teacher at the school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some at the school believe that enrollment, “reflects income, and where kids grew up, and not necessarily academic ability.”

The teacher also said that the school’s administrators brag about the huge open house lines, and consider the turnout “a source of pride.”

Beacon is not the only selective school that makes it difficult to take a tour.

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“I do feel like you have to give yourself over to the process of how psychotic it is, how insane it really, truly is,” said Nicole Schaffer, a mother waiting on a Beacon open house line.Credit...Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

Stuyvesant usually has two fall open houses that parents queue up for, and Bronx Science, another specialized school, has only one.

Other selective schools have tried to avoid lines by allowing parents to register for tours online. But the tours are booked within a few minutes; Ms. Stein’s newsletter sends reminders to register the moment slots are available.

“We have a private school admissions system set up with public school resources,” said Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of Inside Schools, a website that reviews local public schools.

Still, she said, “the schools that care about equity and access have found a way around this.”

Bard High School Early College, which typically has about 7,000 applicants for 300 freshman seats at its two diverse campuses, offers weekly school tours and holds events for families to learn about the school in all five boroughs.

Another highly selective school, Manhattan Hunter Science High School, halted its open houses after the lines became too unwieldy. The school now posts virtual tours on its website.

Bedford Academy, a high-performing, mostly black school in Brooklyn, holds its open houses on Saturdays.

The free-for-all lines at Beacon and at LaGuardia High School, a competitive performing arts school, felt intimidating for some parents.

Joan Bann and her son shuffled past a taxi inspection depot near the West Side Highway to join a line of at least 1,000 people outside Beacon last month.

“I’m saying, ‘What is it about this school that you have this long line?’” said Ms. Bann, who is black and lives in Harlem. “What are my chances, how many seats can they possibly fill?”

She added, “I should be able to get a good school in my own community.”

Many families echoed the sentiment that there were not enough good options. Ms. Hemphill said the city could take action by expanding the number of seats at high-performing high schools that do not have strict academic requirements for admission. “It’s a no-brainer,” she said.

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Parents and children caught up on work during the waits. One mother who was typing on a laptop said she would have to take a conference call while in line.Credit...Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

Mr. de Blasio has taken steps to try to make admissions more equitable. Earlier this year, the city said it would replace the second round of high school applications with wait lists in an attempt to streamline the process. The city has also scrapped a policy that allowed some schools to give preference to students who attended a school fair or open house.

“We’re taking a hard look at our admissions processes,” said schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza, who has said desegregation is a top priority.

Halley Potter, who studies school integration at the Century Foundation, said the current system was deeply flawed: “There’s a good reason why that’s not the way that most other cities and districts approach high school.”

In the meantime, families are left scrambling for any edge they can find.

Maxwell Damoah and Paulina Arhin, both immigrants from Ghana, stood on one of last month’s Beacon lines as drizzle turned into a steady rain. They said they were grateful that their daughters were enrolled in Breakthrough, a local program for low-income students that offers mentoring through the high school admissions process and reminders about open houses, among other services.

Mr. Damoah, who works an overnight shift at a nearby Hilton hotel, said he wanted to give his daughter the best opportunities. “I want her to not be like me, working in the night,” he said. “It has been very stressful, but I’m hoping at the end of the day, better things will come to our side.”

Ms. Arhin said her daughter was excelling at a Bronx charter school and hoped to attend a high-performing school like Beacon.

“We wish for Beacon,” said Ms. Arhin. But without Breakthrough, she added, “maybe I wouldn’t know about this school.”

THE BLOOMBERG YEARS II: THE MAYOR OF WALL STREET

GINIA BELLAFANTE N.Y TIMES

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No mayor in New York’s history has done more to consolidate the city’s identity with Wall Street. Mr. Bloomberg obviously does not bear responsibility for the creation of the indecipherable, huckster financial instruments that resulted in our economic crisis and the litany of personal miseries that followed, but he was one of the country’s most impassioned and nurturing supporters of Wall Street during its most ethically unhinged hour.

....A political figure rarely afraid of expressing reproach — someone whose administration stigmatized fat people, poor teenage mothers, members of the teachers’ union — Mr. Bloomberg seems to imagine that any impulse short of adulation will shoo Wall Street away. Several weeks ago he publicly denounced Eliot Spitzer, not for his domestic failings but for his wish to curtail the worst instincts of the banks and to maximize their utilitarian value. (“This is our industry,” the mayor said. “We’d appreciate it if someone recognized that this is our tax base.”)
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Wall Street has benefited under Mayor Bloomberg much more than other industries, as evidenced by the pronounced inequality felt all over the country and experienced most dramatically here.

The average salary in the securities industry in 2011 was $362,900, according to the state comptroller’s office, an average higher than before the financial crisis and more than five times the average in the rest of the city’s private sector. As a share of private sector wages, the securities industry grew from 21 percent at the beginning of Mayor Bloomberg’s first term to 28 percent early in his second, while never accounting for more than 6 percent of jobs.

The top 1 percent of earners in New York make nearly 40 percent of the total income of city residents, nearly twice the national figure. This number has grown. At the beginning of Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure in 2002, the top 1 percent of earners in New York made 27 percent of the income.

It is worth considering these numbers in the context of the previous gilded age, the era of Oliver Stone’s first “Wall Street,” in 1985, when the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers made 15 percent of the city’s income, virtually in line with the national figure at the time.

 

During a presentation to the American Sociological Association last week, James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit research and education group, offered a look at income polarization in the city that included this startling statistic, culled from census data: while real median family incomes were flat from 2000 to 2010, median family incomes rose an average of 55 percent in eight high-income neighborhoods, including TriBeCa and the Upper East Side, the home ZIP codes of the financial industry.

To what extent can we hold Mr. Bloomberg responsible for these gulfs? For the fact that the poverty ratio has remained essentially unchanged in New York since his first days in office, with roughly a fifth of the city’s residents living below the federal poverty level?

Certainly, some of the disparity would exist without him, and the poverty rate has been more or less intractable for the past 30 years. But it is easy to envision that we might have arrived at a better place with someone who had paid more visceral attention to inequity than with someone who felt the need to sue the City Council to block a measure mandating a living wage (the suit was thrown out of court).

And still, it is not fair to paint the mayor as a Dickensian ogre who utterly ignored the poor. His Young Men’s Initiative, to which he contributed $30 million of his own money, seeks to improve the lives of young underprivileged black and Latino men. The administration’s efforts to expand education and job training in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for example have led to higher high school graduation rates and lower rates of unemployment. A network of organizations and agencies called NEON, an innovation of the Department of Probation, puts probation offices in neighborhoods where rates of incarceration have been high so that those in the criminal justice system are saved long commutes to mandatory meetings with their officers. Instead they are encouraged to use their time productively.

 

Probation Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi plans to open satellite offices in neighborhoods, where probationers can get their cases seen faster, in exchange for local outreach work.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/probation-department-open-local-offices-exchange-community-service-anti-crime-work-article-1.470893#ixzz2cmFyFGh4

 

 

What’s striking about a recent report delivered by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, which examines demographic data neighborhood by neighborhood, is that poverty actually declined between 2000 and 2011, though by no means hugely, in some of the most afflicted places in the city — in Brownsville and in various enclaves of the South Bronx.

Where poverty has crept up are those places where income levels hover around the city’s median of $55,000 — neighborhoods like the Fresh Meadows, Hillcrest and Elmhurst sections of Queens and Stapleton and St. George on Staten Island. Job losses, rent increases and foreclosures have brought those previously able to sustain themselves to precarious new lows.

 

One legacy of the Bloomberg era is that it has redefined our economic and social categories — giving us a universe of superrich that have assumed a great share of our psychic space, and replacing a working class with an artisan class. The mayor spoke this month on his fiscal legacy at the former Pfizer pharmaceutical factory in Brooklyn, making this explicit.

The building had served as a manufacturing plant for 150 years, the mayor told his audience. Five years ago, executives closed it. “But today, as you can see, this is once again a manufacturing hub,” he continued. “Only now it’s an incubator for a new generation of craftsmen and women, who are making everything from furniture and fashion designs to kimchi and cookies, to software and 3-D printers.”

 

 

Mayor Bloomberg, who did nothing to elevate the status of teachers, an exercise that might have helped draw the most talented to that profession, has done a lot to elevate the status of people who make things, or rather the people who make the right things intended to be sold to the right MacBook-carrying-Martha’s Vineyard-vacationing people.

 

Workers leave the Bronx factory Stella D'oro.

 

To the graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who can create $13,000 copper bathtubs (of the kind the mayor recently imported from France for his home) or cerused cocktail tables commissioned by uptown decorators, New York is an increasingly hospitable place. If what you make is more pedestrian, Stella D’oro cookies once sold in places like Key Food, instead of $6-a-piece shortbread of the type you might find at Chelsea Market, the mayor’s subliminal message winnows down to this: “Good luck, and send us a postcard from Ohio.”

De Blasio Asks City to Address Its Inequalities

Bill de Blasio, left, at Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem with his wife, Chirlane McCray, and State Senator Bill Perkins

N.Y. TIMES

In a mayor’s race crammed with celebrity razzle-dazzle, historic candidacies and tabloid turns, a gangly liberal from Brooklyn is quietly surging into the top tier of the field by talking about decidedly unglamorous topics: neglected hospitals, a swelling poverty rate and a broken prekindergarten system.

Despite his left-leaning politics, Mr. de Blasio wants to become the candidate of the overlooked outer boroughs. His campaign is a frontal assault on the Bloomberg era — as being unfair, undemocratic and unfeeling. But his sharp critique of the mayor also doubles as an attack on Ms. Quinn, Mr. Bloomberg’s partner in government and Mr. de Blasio’s chief rival for the liberal white vote. For him to succeed, she must fail. Watch for him to portray her as an unprincipled Bloomberg-lite.

Now that Anthony D. Weiner’s campaign has imploded, Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, is drawing new energy and voter interest to a candidacy that presents the most sweeping rejection of what New York City has become in the past 12 years — a city, he says, that is defined by its yawning inequities.  

    

“We are not, by our nature, an elitist city,” he told a group of young Democrats a few nights ago at a cramped bar in Brooklyn. “We are not a city for the chosen few.”

It is the campaign season’s riskiest calculation: that New Yorkers, who have become comfortably accustomed to the smooth-running, highly efficient apparatus of government under Michael R. Bloomberg, are prepared to embrace a much different agenda for City Hall — taxing the rich, elevating the poor and rethinking a Manhattan-centric approach to city services.

In a city that is endlessly congratulating itself for its modern renaissance — record-low crime, unmatched crowds of tourists, streets refashioned in European style — a day on the campaign trail with Mr. de Blasio is a reminder of unaddressed grievances and glaring disparities.

Describing what he calls a “tale of two cities,” rife with inequalities in housing, early childhood education and police tactics, he promised those gathered at the Brooklyn bar that this year’s mayoral race was “going to be a reset moment. A major reset.”

Mr. de Blasio [has] climbed to No. 2 behind Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, in the latest poll by Quinnipiac University of likely Democratic voters.
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Mr. de Blasio’s message, despite the excitement it has drawn from liberal luminaries like Alec Baldwin and Howard Dean, has alarmed many business leaders and Bloomberg aides, who see him as lacking a sophisticated understanding of the city’s economic success and displaying a naïveté about how quickly it can unravel.
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Beyond that, Mr. de Blasio’s electoral path remains uncertain in a race against better-known Democrats. William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller, holds a natural appeal to the city’s fast-growing minority electorate, and Ms. Quinn is trying to capitalize on her history-making chance to become the city’s first lesbian mayor. In many ways, Mr. de Blasio, 52, is a man without a built-in voter base.
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At the heart of Mr. de Blasio’s appeal, according to interviews with his supporters and political team, is a willingness to deliver an unvarnished and unstinting critique of the Bloomberg era in spite of polls that show a majority of New Yorkers believe the city is heading in the right direction under the mayor’s leadership.
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Zoning changes have encouraged sky-piercing condominiums with multimillion-dollar price tags, but Mr. Bloomberg vetoed a bill requiring paid sick leave for working-class New Yorkers. By the city’s own measure, 46 percent of residents are poor or near poor, but the mayor scoffed at plans to compel companies that receive city subsidies to pay higher wages. (Mr. de Blasio backs both the wage and paid sick leave measures.)

As he travels the city, Mr. de Blasio can barely contain his fury over what he sees as the central contradiction of the Bloomberg years: a mayor who routinely unleashed the power of government to change New Yorkers’ personal behavior repeatedly balked at harnessing it to change their economic circumstances.

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Mr. de Blasio’s campaign platform is unabashedly interventionist and progressive. His most eye-catching plan would raise the income tax rate to 4.3 percent from 3.87 percent on earnings of over $500,000, to pay for universal access to prekindergarten.

Now, an overcrowded system leaves tens of thousands of lower-income residents without access to full-day programs, setting back the early education of a generation, Mr. de Blasio argues. The campaign says the 11 percent increase in the marginal tax rate would amount to about $2,120 for a family earning $1 million.

In conversations with voters, Mr. de Blasio argues that Ms. Quinn and Mr. Thompson have been either unwilling or unable to sufficiently challenge the legacy of the mayor and the city’s corporations over the past decade.

Back at the bar in Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio’s raw indignation won him a modest electoral victory. When a straw poll of those in the room was completed, around 10 p.m., he had soundly defeated his Democratic rivals.