LIKE a city unto itself,
Stuyvesant High School,
in Lower Manhattan, is broken into neighborhoods, official and
otherwise. The math department is on the 4th of its 10 floors; biology
is on the 7th. Seniors congregate by the curved mint wall off the
second-floor atrium, next to lockers that are such prime real estate
that students trade them for $100 or more. Sophomores are relegated to
the sixth floor.
In Stuyvesant slang, the hangouts are known as “bars.” Some years ago,
the black students took over the radiators outside the fifth-floor
cafeteria, and the place soon came to be known as the “chocolate bar,”
lending it an air of legitimacy in the school’s labyrinth of cliques and
turfs.
It did not last long. This year, Asian freshmen displaced the black
students in a strength-in-numbers coup in which whispers of indignation
were the sole expression of resistance. There was no point arguing, said
Rudi-Ann Miller, a 17-year-old senior who came to New York from Jamaica
and likes to style her hair in a bun, slick and straight, like the
ballerina she once dreamed of becoming.
“The Asian kids, they’re just everywhere,” she said.
When the bell rings and the school’s 3,295 students spill out of
classrooms into the maze of hallways, escalators and stairs like ants in
a farm, blacks stand out because they are so rare. Rudi was one of 64
black students four years ago when she entered Stuyvesant, long
considered New York City’s flagship public school. She is now one of 40.
Asians, on the other hand, make up 72.5 percent of Stuyvesant’s student
body (they are 13.7 percent of the city’s overall public school
population), a staggering increase from 1970, when they were 6 percent
of Stuyvesant students, according to state enrollment statistics. Back
then, white students made up 79 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment; this
year, they are 24 percent, and 14.9 percent systemwide.
Hispanic students are 40.3 percent of the system. Currently, they make
up 2.4 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment, while blacks, who make up 32
percent of the city’s public school students, are 1.2 percent.
New York City has eight specialized high schools whose admission is
based entirely on the results of an entrance exam, a meritocratic system
that does not consider race or ethnicity. The top score on the exam is
800. In recent years, the cutoff for Stuyvesant has been around 560;
Rudi scored 594.
Earning a spot at Stuyvesant is unquestionably a badge of honor, sort of
a secret knock to an exclusive club. As high school admissions
decisions are revealed across the city in the coming week, many people
are concerned that it is a club that black students — and, to a similar
extent, Latinos — have an increasingly hard time cracking.
No one claims that the disparity is caused by overt discrimination. But
in a school that is devised to attract the best of the best, parents and
educators alike find the demographics troubling. It has become a
question of perception as to who belongs.
The school’s parent coordinator, Harvey Blumm, said that when he visited
middle schools whose enrollments were overwhelmingly black and Latino,
it was not uncommon to find students who had never heard about the
specialized high school exam; or to meet students who had signed up for
the exam, but had never thought of taking a practice test or prep course
— something common among white and Asian students; or to have guidance
counselors tell him that Stuyvesant “isn’t for our kids.”
RUDI, who lives in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, attended sixth
and seventh grades in Jamaica, and eighth grade in Mount Vernon, a
Westchester County suburb. Her father, Donovan Miller, a director of
accounting at Bronx Community College, recalled asking a colleague for
advice about enrolling Rudi, the youngest of his three children, in “the
best New York City high school.” The colleague advised Mr. Miller that
he had to sign her up for the specialized high school exam and, if he
wanted to improve her odds, to have her take some kind of test
preparation program.
Many Stuyvesant students start preparing for the exam months, even
years, in advance. There are after-school, weekend and summer classes
run by large companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review, as well as by
neighborhood outfits like
Aim Academy, in the predominantly Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens, and the
Khan’s Tutorial branch in nearby Jackson Heights, home to thousands of families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Rudi took Kaplan’s 12-week program, which met on Saturdays at Fordham
University, at a cost of $750, the summer after seventh grade. (Students
take the exam in October of their eighth-grade year.) Her tutor, a
Stuyvesant graduate, persuaded her to make the school her first choice.
Her mother, Annmarie Miller, a nursing assistant at a hospital in the
Bronx, recalled a cousin’s reaction when she mentioned Rudi’s pick: “You
have to be Chinese or Indian to get in there.” A co-worker, also black,
“said the exam is built to exclude blacks because it’s heavy on math,
and black people can’t do math,” Mrs. Miller said.
Rudi said she has never felt uncomfortable at Stuyvesant, but she has
felt puzzled. She has been the only black person in most of her classes,
and often goes hours without seeing another. The school’s attendance
sheets have names and pictures of the students, and she said teachers
were quick to learn who she is; there are few others like her, she said.
For Rudi, being black at Stuyvesant has been a journey of
self-discovery. In Jamaica, as in parts of the Bronx, it is not skin
color that distinguishes people, she said, but the car they drive, the
neighborhood they live in or the job they have.
At school, she embraced her racial identity, becoming president last May
of the Black Students League, the smallest of the school’s four
diversity clubs, which usually draws fewer than 10 regulars to its
weekly meetings. She had run unopposed.
Rudi said the league wasn’t “about black power or anything like that,”
but to “make Stuy aware of our community and our culture.”
It has been a frustrating task.
As part of Black History Month, the league screened an hourlong
documentary, “Slavery and the Law,” which chronicles the status of
blacks from colonial times through the civil rights era. There were 100
chairs in front of the pull-down screen at Stuyvesant’s sixth-floor
library; 15 students showed up.
“We’ve just never had the numbers to make it work,” Rudi lamented.
Rudi’s paternal grandfather arrived in America in 1968 and ultimately
became a citizen. He paved the way for her parents, who arrived in 2006
to build their future — in a house in the suburbs at first, then just
over the city line in a suburban-seeming slice of the Bronx, on a street
of children-at-play signs and matching brick homes. Rudi stayed behind
in Jamaica to finish seventh grade, on a government scholarship at
Campion College, a school her father described as the best in Jamaica,
with her sister, Nadia, who was finishing college. (They have an older
brother, who still lives there.)
Rudi landed at Kennedy International Airport on July 4, 2007, to live
her parents’ American dream. Nadia, who arrived a year later, gave
modeling a try, and graduated from flight school before she discovered
she was afraid of heights. Now she works at a bank and is considering
medical school.
“Have you ever seen a doctor who’s unemployed?” Nadia, 25, asked their mother one night before dinner.
Rudi said, “My sister is definitely smarter than me.” Nadia said Rudi worked harder.
In January, a week before her midyear exams, Rudi e-mailed a friend,
“I’m STRESSED and SLEEP DEPRIVED! In fact, I won’t be going to sleep
tonight (second night in a row. ... Oh, well!)”
By then, she had already been accepted via early admission to Yale, her
first choice. Nadia could not understand why Rudi did not just coast
until graduation.
“I don’t want to be an embarrassment to my teachers,” Rudi said.
She has also had enough of the grumbling at Stuyvesant that black
students do better in the college-admissions game because of their skin
color.
YEAR after year, certain middle schools in New York —
Mark Twain Gifted and Talented in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and the
Christa McAuliffe Middle School
in nearby Bensonhurst — send dozens of students to Stuyvesant,
according to Mr. Blumm, the parent coordinator. (Last year, 112 students
from Mark Twain and 85 from Christa McAuliffe enrolled at Stuyvesant,
he said.) But years can go by without a single student from District 7,
in a poor and heavily immigrant section of the South Bronx, earning
admission.
Sometimes, Mr. Blumm said, blacks and Latinos who do well enough on the
entrance exam to get into Stuyvesant are lured away by prestigious
private high schools, which offer them full scholarships and none of the
issues that even elite public schools have to contend with, like tight
budgets and overcrowding. Last year, 11 black students enrolled. Eleanor
Archie, an assistant principal who is black, said it was the fewest she
can recall in her more than 20 years at Stuyvesant.
“That’s what we keep worrying about,” Ms. Archie said. “It keeps getting smaller and smaller.”
Opraha Miles, who was president of the Black Students League before her
graduation from Stuyvesant in 2010, said she feared the club would
disappear for lack of members and interest. She said she used to have to
“hunt people down,” dragging them from the chocolate bar to the
league’s meetings to ensure a quorum.
Ms. Miles, now 19 and a sophomore at Wesleyan University, remembered a
discussion the league hosted when she was at Stuyvesant on the school’s
demographics, during which an Asian boy said, she recalled, “Something
to the effect that it wasn’t our fault, but that blacks aren’t smart
enough; they don’t work hard enough” to get in.
“It still stings,” she said.
In a separate discussion about their dwindling ranks, Ms. Miles said, a
black student suggested, “Why not go to the middle schools people like
us attend and tell the kids about Stuyvesant?”
Stanley Teitel, the school principal, excused Ms. Miles and several
others from class for a few hours so they could visit a school in
Canarsie, Brooklyn, where the group spoke to an auditorium packed with
sixth and seventh graders, fielding questions about what it was like to
go to a school that was the stuff of legend, and if it was really that hard to get in.
The city does not track the race and ethnicity of students who take the
specialized high school exam, only of those who receive offers from one
of the schools, said a spokesman for the city’s Education Department. In
2010, 28,280 students took the test; 5,404 scored high enough to earn a
slot. The department did not have race or ethnicity information for 979
of those with sufficiently high scores because they came from private
schools or from outside the city, and questions of race and ethnicity
are not part of the exam application. But of the remainder, 47 percent
were Asian, 23 percent were white, 6 percent were Hispanic, and 5
percent were black, according to city records.
Over the years, there have been
a host of efforts to increase the number
of black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and the other large
specialized high schools in the city, Bronx High School of Science and
Brooklyn Technical High School, like making interviews and grade-point
averages part of the admissions process. At Brooklyn Tech, 10 percent of
the 5,332 students today are black — sizable in the realm of
specialized high schools, but also a big drop from 1999-2000, when 24
percent were black. At Bronx Science, 3.5 percent of the 3,013 students
are black, down from 9 percent in 1999-2000.
The number of blacks at Stuyvesant peaked in 1975, when they made up 12
percent of the school’s enrollment, or 303 of the school’s 2,536
students. In 1980, there were 212 black students; in 1990, 147; in 2000,
109; and in 2005, 66, state records show.
Lisa Mullins, who graduated from Stuyvesant in 1977 and is among the
core members of its Black Alumni Association, suggested in an interview
that the schools should automatically accept the valedictorian and
salutatorian of every city middle school, an echo of the Texas program
that grants admission to the state’s flagship public university to the
top 10 percent of graduates of every high school. Last week, the
United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Texas program from a white student who said she had been rejected because of her race.
Ms. Miles, for her part, said the city needed do a better job
disseminating information about the test and the free preparatory
programs available.
The city’s Education Department has been offering such a program, with
weekend and summer coaching sessions to promising but disadvantaged
sixth graders — and, this year only, seventh graders — for more than 20
years. Its original mission was to increase the number of blacks and
Latinos, but after a legal challenge in 2007, income became its main
eligibility criteria. Since then, however, the program has shrunk —
2,800 students attended in 2008, down from 3,800 two years before
— and even among those who participated, black and Latino students were
far less likely to take the entrance exam than Asians and whites. This
year, Stuyvesant’s Black Alumni Association started offering a more
modest version of the tutoring program, benefiting about 100 students.
(How they fared will not be known until this week’s admissions letters
are sent out.) The middle school visits by the Black Students League and
others from Stuyvesant’s diversity clubs have become an annual
tradition.
About 10 years ago, Stuyvesant opted out of a program established in the
1970s to give disadvantaged students with exam scores just below the
cutoff level a chance to study over the summer and earn a slot at the
school.
Mr. Teitel, the principal, declined to comment for this article, but
explained his decision last year, at a forum that was held after a video
by a group of white students rapping racist and otherwise offensive
lyrics made its way to YouTube. He said that a change in Education
Department policies meant he could take into the program only students
who scored too low for admission to any of the city’s specialized
schools, but not those who missed Stuyvesant’s cutoff and got in
somewhere else.
That would have most likely meant that students in the target group
would have tested 80 or 90 points below the lowest-scoring student
Stuyvesant had admitted — a gap, he said, too wide for most of them to
overcome.
“They would find it incredibly difficult to succeed,” Mr. Blumm, the parent coordinator, said in an interview. ABOUT three-quarters of Stuyvesant’s students are immigrants or children
of immigrants. Yet Ángel Colón, a portly Puerto Rican who serves as
adviser to the schools’ diversity and community-service student groups,
said he realized one day that there was a problem with the colorful
brochures the black students brought to the middle schools they visited:
“There wasn’t a black or brown face in the crowd,” he said.
Mr. Colón, 44, whose formal education ended upon graduation from high
school in the Bronx, has turned his office, on the seventh floor at
Stuyvesant, into a kind of refuge for the school’s gay, Latino and black
students, drawing them partly with a generous supply of cookies and
Rice Krispie Treats. The students seek him out for his simple wisdom —
“You’ve got to be happy with who you are,” he might tell them — and his
nonjudgmental ear.
A lot of black students, he said, have confided, “If I could do it all
over again, I don’t know if I would have come here.” “There’s something very isolating,” Mr. Colón said, “about being one of the very few.” Rudi has never harbored regrets. There have been disappointing and
enraging moments, she said, like when a good friend, the only black
senior in Stuyvesant’s esteemed speech-and-debate team, was given a book
on rap lyrics as a holiday gift from a white boy she had been
mentoring.
Like many of her white and Asian classmates who make lengthy treks from
the outer reaches of Brooklyn and Queens to Stuyvesant’s campus near the
site of ground zero, Rudi begins each day before dawn. She sets the
alarm on her cellphone for 5:30 a.m., and puts it at the edge of her bed
so she has to get up to turn it off. At 6:15, she rouses her father,
who drives her to the Wakefield/241st Street stop on the No. 2 train to
Manhattan.
One recent morning on the train, she rested her head on an environmental
science book as thick and heavy as an encyclopedia volume, squeezed on
each side by strangers drinking coffee and nodding off. Blue earphones
piped in Bob Marley and U2 tunes, her antidote against the rattle of the
hourlong ride.
After exiting at Chambers Street, she quick-stepped west, then across a
pedestrian bridge and into the exclusive club, book pressed against her
chest like armor as she lost herself in a sea of arriving students. Hers
was the only black face in sight.
Robert Gebeloff and Hiten Samtani contributed reporting.
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It's interesting to read these articles while we take classes of cultural diversity at school. society still deals with differences.
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