School zoning is one of those topics that, if you don’t have kids, works as conversational chloroform; you might as well ask someone to listen to why the credit crunch happened (again), or to the plot of a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. If, however, you live with young children in a high-density neighbourhood, the question of where they will qualify to attend school will be a trigger issue for you, particularly if you fancy yourself a liberal. One minute you’re mocking Donald Trump, the next you are in a public meeting with a bunch of residents of a building with his name above the door, fighting to keep your kids in a school without poor people.
My neighbourhood in New York is the latest to attract national attention over what should be a local issue: school allocation. First, it was Brooklyn Heights, a wealthy neighbourhood in which kids traditionally assigned to a high-performing state primary school were “re-zoned” into a low-performing one. Now, on the Upper West Side, Public School 199, which, as the New York Times pointed out this week, can happily raise $800,000 during the annual parents’ fundraising drive, is overcrowded and kids are being reassigned to a school 10 blocks south – Public School 191.
It’s a national story because, of course, the catchment area of the two schools cleaves along race and class lines: PS 199 is overwhelmingly white, with an 82% pass rate of the state’s standardised maths test. PS 191, classified by the department of education as “persistently dangerous”, is 87% black or Hispanic, drawing its kids largely from a social housing project and with a 9% pass rate. Less than a third of the teachers who work at PS 191 would recommend the school to parents.
The takeaway from this is that the system is broken, and that if the two schools integrate as part of a “super-zone”, investment will eventually trickle from the wealthy to the deprived end of neighbourhood. But that will take time, and parents with kids who are about to start school are, understandably, flipping out. If my kids were older, I would be too.
Less understandably, one of the arguments they’re pursuing is how much they all paid for their apartments. My building, along with the Trump buildings next door, are among those that have been re-zoned, and our lobby is awash with appeals to sign petitions and attend meetings, with the advisory that this is an issue for everyone, not just for those with young children. And that’s not because society would be better off if we all clubbed together, but because if we get zoned out of PS 199 it will devalue our properties.
The New York Times canvassed a parent outside the posh school, who said: “I’m not racist but … we want the best for our children.” Which is fine; doesn’t everyone? He added, “We want the best for our property value” – which is how revolutions start. The school’s motto, by the way, is “Work hard, be kind”.
Absorbed by the cold war
I’m watching back-to-back episodes of The Americans at the moment, the television series set at the height of the cold war, when KGB agents were disguised as suburban Americans. The show has divided critics, but I love it. Unlike Mad Men, the period setting isn’t over-egged and the 1980s are represented by little more than brown cars and aggressively patterned turtlenecks. The protagonists, Elizabeth and Phil Jennings, are charmless, icy and dare you to like them even though they keep bumping people off and hate America. And like them one does, as the American programme-makers intended. It’s a wonderful example of the country’s self-image. There is nothing this culture can’t absorb.
Seeing red
It’s Halloween this weekend. My brown-haired baby will go as a shark, but I also have a red-haired baby, whose costume I’ve narrowed down to either Elizabeth I, Neil Kinnock or Rebekah Brooks – too scary?
