School Choice
A neighborhood investigates a Columbia University-funded school
The first time I met Sanayi Beckles-Canton, I noticed her use of the first-person possessive. It did not strike me as proprietorial so much as protective. When she discussed her work on a Harlem education council, she frequently used the phrase “my district” to describe School District 5. She said “my community,” “my parents,” and “my public school system.”
Beckles-Canton is the president of Community Education Council 5, or CEC5, an education policy advisory committee composed primarily of parents. She was first elected to the board in the fall of 2015. Since then, she has often been one of the first points of contact for disgruntled District 5 parents.
“Around May or June,” said Sanayi Beckles-Canton, “parents will come in complaining: ‘My child didn’t get picked. I don’t know why. My kids had threes and fours, my kids had the grades.’” Threes and fours are the highest possible scores on state-administered English and math tests. “That is how the investigation started: with a few years of parents coming to us complaining about CSS not having a clear enrollment process.”
CSS is shorthand for Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering, a public middle and high school in Harlem. The school was opened in 2007 on 123rd Street, just north of Morningside Park, in a building already occupied by two schools. With funds and support from nearby Columbia University, it was a token of good will to those impacted by the Ivy’s expansion into Manhattanville, a section of Harlem. While Columbia Secondary quickly established itself as one of the best in the city, it was even more exceptional for its neighborhood. CSS students were 91% and 93% proficient in English and math respectively, compared to District 5 students who were 31% and 25% proficient, according to 2019 state assessment data. Columbia Secondary is also the only school in the district with an endowment.
But the school was not without its formidable detractors. Beckles-Canton is a 46-year-old black woman who wears tortoise-rimmed glasses and pearl earrings. In addition to her role as the president of the council, she has been a psychotherapist in Harlem and the Bronx. She has master’s degrees from Fordham University in Social Work and Bank Street Graduate School in Early Childhood Education. She is a full-time director at Round the Clock Nursery and an ordained minister at St. Luke A.M.E. Church, both in Harlem.
In her office at CEC5, directly across 123rd Street from Columbia Secondary, she kept hearing from District 5 parents whose high-performing children were not getting into Columbia Secondary’s middle school. In 2016, she took her concerns to Gale Reeves, the middle school District 5 superintendent at the time. But Reeves was unresponsive. According to Beckles-Canton, this was par for the course. She was “a plant for the status quo” and “very laissez-faire about her leadership,” Beckles-Canton said. (Around the same time, a group of local parents petitioned the schools chancellor to remove Reeves from her post.)
“When I couldn’t get a good response from her,” said Beckles-Canton, “I said to parents, as a CEC president, I have some power and authority here, too. I will investigate. I will put this to a committee, and I can get the data.” Beckles-Canton formed a committee within the education council to investigate middle school admissions at Columbia Secondary.
Manhattanville, or West Harlem, got its name in 1806 as a village just north of what was then New York City’s boundaries, according to Columbia’s website for the new campus. A waterfront settlement, commerce, and transportation bolstered the area’s industrial growth, with dairy, automobile, and meatpacking warehouses and factories. However, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression brought about the end of Manhattanville’s rapid growth. Trucking became the preferred mode of cargo shipping, and the waterfront’s Hudson River access was no longer advantageous. In the 1950s, the city built the Manhattanville and Grant public housing projects and the Morningside Gardens cooperative. Throughout recent decades, warehouses, parking lots, and gas stations have dominated the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Columbia University was in a predicament. To remain competitive with comparable research universities, Columbia needed to extend its campus. “Our science departments have lab conditions that don’t compare to what other top universities have,” Lee Bollinger, the school’s president, told The New York Times. A 1998 survey from the provost’s office found that Columbia had 194 square feet per student, compared to Princeton’s 561, University of Pennsylvania’s 440, and Harvard’s 368. Because Columbia is located in a dense and expensive city, expansion proved difficult. In the 1960s, the university had developed plans to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park. The project was dubbed “Gym Crow” because it involved taking a public space, used by a mostly black community, and giving it to the predominantly white Columbia student body. In the spring of 1968, police beat and arrested student-protesters, injuring nearly 200. Columbia axed the project and did not pursue an expansion into Harlem for over three decades.
That was until 2003, when Columbia initiated plans for a Manhattanville campus. The 17-acre expansion would reach from 125th to 133rd Street between Broadway and 12th Avenue, and extend east of Broadway from 131st to 134th Street. At the time, Columbia owned more than 40% of the selected area. In order to get the rest, Columbia would have to clear the land.
The public’s response was not unlike that of 1968. Students formed a group called the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification and rallied against the plans. Local business owners established an alliance, the West Harlem Business Group, and pledged not to sell. But as time went on, more than three dozen businesses accepted buyouts and residents relocated. By late 2007, Columbia owned about 90% of the property. Only a couple holdouts remained: Nicholas Sprayregen, the proprietor of Tuck-it-Away Storage facilities, and Gurnam Singh, the owner of two Manhattanville gas stations for 25 years. While Sprayregen was a wealthy business owner who seemed to relish the controversy over his property, Singh appeared to take the matter very much to heart. “This is everything I have,” he told the New York Times. “This business is like part of my family. Money is not everything. You don’t sell your children.” He said he was so stressed about the situation that he was hospitalized for exhaustion for 18 days. His wife, Parminder Kaur, developed stress-related shingles.
Columbia asked for the state’s assistance. Using eminent domain, the power vested in state government to take private property for public use, New York could seize the land and sell it to Columbia, a private third party. The idea behind eminent domain is that displacement can be justified by the greater good a new development could bring. Columbia argued that the Manhattanville campus met these qualifications. The state sided with Columbia. New York’s Empire State Development Corporation voted unanimously to use eminent domain to seize Manhattanville property.
But Columbia had sought, and partly gained, local support for the project. To appease the critics, the university formulated a community benefits agreement with the West Harlem Development Corporation and the Declaration of Covenants and Restrictions with Empire State Development. In the documents, Columbia agreed to assist the local community in several sectors, including education, housing, economic development, and transportation. One of the university’s commitments was to the creation and ongoing support of a new public secondary school, specializing in science, math, and engineering. “Priority,” Columbia announced in a press release, “will be given to high performing local students.” That school became Columbia Secondary.
Columbia Secondary was conceived as a screened school. That means rather than accept students by zone or lottery, admissions are competitive and based on set criteria. The middle school is open to applicants from northern Manhattan, or Districts 3, 4, 5, and 6. In December, students complete the city’s middle school application and rank their top-choice schools. They also submit recent standardized test results, report cards, and attendance records. Columbia Secondary ranks the applicants and invites 600 students to take a three-hour test in January. The exam is based on fourth and fifth grade New York state math and English curricula, but it also assesses students’ thought processes with open-ended questions. Based on test scores, CSS produces a second-round ranking of the applicants. The city’s education department matches students and schools, taking into account both parties’ preferences.
As Beckles-Canton began to look into who was and was not getting into Columbia Secondary, she found some things easier to find out than others. Enrollment demographics on race and gender were readily available on the internet, but not students’ sending-school or residential districts. Furthermore, the online data was based on who CSS enrolled, not who it ranked (before the Department of Education matches schools and students). It was hard to see, in other words, who the school was actually trying to accept, and where they came from. But as Beckles-Canton knew, under the New York Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, the public is guaranteed access to public records of the state’s governmental bodies, including public schools. Beckles-Canton drafted a FOIL request, asking for the breakdowns by district and race, of applicants, ranked applicants, and admitted students. She submitted it in 2016 and waited. And waited.
When the silence persisted, she followed up with a succession of phone calls. “The problem then was,” said Beckles-Canton, “for whatever reason, they needed more time to run around — circles, circles, circles — for a few years. It was a circus.”
It was during that waiting period, which lasted three years, that Beckles-Canton’s son applied to Columbia Secondary. “I want to test the process,” explained Beckles-Canton. “My son is coming from a charter school. He’s about a 97 average. He gets threes and fours on his state exams from third grade, all the way up to now. So he’s the ideal candidate, right? Let us apply. We apply, we get a letter to take the test, we come in to take the test.” CSS teachers and leadership write the exam, proctored once in January (with no make-up dates) at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Students hear back from middle schools in March. “Sure enough, I experience the very process that my parents were complaining about. My son doesn’t get in.” Beckles-Canton got hold of Roxana Bosch, the admissions director at Columbia Secondary. Bosch informed Beckles-Canton that her son had not been ranked by the school.
Meanwhile, the Department of Education and District 5 leadership was shifting. In the summer of 2017, Danika Rux replaced Reeves as middle school superintendent in District 5. Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Richard Carranza, previously Superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, New York City’s Schools Chancellor in the winter of 2018. Beckles-Canton believed that these changes would help her get the information she needed.
At a district planning meeting this year, Beckles-Canton asked again for the data. She was referred her to the city’s centralized enrollment officers, who did not respond. At a bi-monthly meeting with Carranza and representatives from all of the city’s 32 school districts, she asked again. “However it worked internally,” said Beckles-Canton, “they spoke to someone who eventually got the data to me. The enrollment person called me personally, the head of enrollment, and said, ‘I apologize. I’ve been really busy. It’s not that I’ve ignored you.’” Beckles-Canton restated her request, and an email with the relevant data promptly appeared in her inbox.
She began to comb through the numbers. The data set listed the number of applicants that Columbia Secondary ranked for admission in 2019. Importantly, values were sorted by sending school district. The breakdown confirmed her suspicions: Columbia Secondary ranked 24% of students who applied from District 3, the Upper West Side, elementary schools. They ranked 21% from District 6, Washington Heights and Inwood, and 19% from District 4, East Harlem. Only 13% of students who applied from District 5 elementary schools were ranked by Columbia Secondary — the smallest percentage of all sending school districts.
Beckles-Canton was appalled by the numbers. “The impact of the eminent domain that Columbia University took was in District 5,” she said. She pronounced Columbia University like the full, proper name of a child who misbehaved. And she was right. District 5 covers most of Central and West Harlem; it includes Manhattanville. “It was not in District 6,” she went on, of the new Columbia campus. “It was not in District 3. It was in District 5.”
Beckles-Canton cross-referenced the numbers with individual accounts. Alongside conversations with frustrated parents, she spoke with elementary school principals in District 5. She asked: “How many of your kids are applying to CSS? Are your kids getting in?” She recalled their responses: “Our kids don’t get in. They don’t take our kids. They take one kid or two kids, or no kids or one kid every other year.”
Last year, 18% of the city’s middle school students attended screened schools. But according to critics, ranking reinforces racial and economic inequalities because admission requirements often disadvantage poor, nonwhite students. In the case of Columbia Secondary, some parents said that by evaluating applicants’ attendance records, the enrollment office discriminated against children in transit housing (of which there are many in District 5).
“I might be a fourth-grade student,” said Beckles-Canton. “I have no control over if I’m going to get to school on time. My mom is taking me there. But if we live in a shelter, moving all around, why should I be penalized and not have an opportunity to a decent education? Because I’m homeless?”
Once she’d figured it all out, Beckles-Canton prepared to share the data with the public. A meeting was scheduled for October 20, 2019; on the agenda, Beckles-Canton listed her committee’s presentation on CSS’s admissions. She remembers that she then received a call from Mark Levine, a City Council member with an 11th grader at Columbia Secondary. She said he asked her for a copy of the report before the meeting. “I said absolutely not,” recalled Beckles-Canton. She said she told the councilman: “I invited you to come. If you can’t come, I’m sorry to hear that. But make sure you send somebody from your office, and I’ll make sure they get a copy of the report.”
At a meeting that lasted almost three hours, Beckles-Canton introduced the committee’s findings with some prepared remarks: “We understand that is uncomfortable to have courageous conversations about the issues that have plagued our public schools for decades, like systematic racism, discrimination, inequity in funding and resources, and the lack of equity in the services our children receive.” She added: “We also understand that it’s absolutely necessary to engage in these conversations so we may have the meaningful change we all seek.” In her presentation, she ran through the concerns that prompted the investigation, Columbia Secondary’s history and screening process, a review of the data, and the committee’s recommendations.
When Beckles-Canton was done, the floor was opened to the audience. Several Columbia Secondary parents responded with enrollment statistics, including the school’s gender and ethnic breakdowns. They questioned why the council would investigate a flourishing diverse school like CSS — where enrollment is more than 60% black and Hispanic. One person who spoke on behalf of Columbia Secondary was a current student’s mother, who is black. She was offended and her tone reflected it. “I am not apologizing for my son being at CSS,” she said.
“I’m not asking for you to apologize for your child to be here,” Beckles-Canton replied. “I want your kid to be here.” In defense of the data-driven presentation, she added, “But there are policies that other kids have been impacted by.” Her response did little to defuse the conflict. Though CSS’s student body is diverse, members of CEC5 said it does not reflect the demographics of the neighborhood in which it is situated. District 5 is 88% black and Hispanic, as of the 2018–19 school year.
There was a third faction at the meeting that fell by the wayside: the P.S. 125 parents. P.S. 125, or The Ralphe Bunche School, is a zoned District 5 public school that shares a building with Columbia Secondary and a charter school. “P.S. 125 is a great school,” said a Ralphe Bunche dad. “It’s a high performing school. The problem is, it’s overcrowded.” Addressing the council, he added: “You have to support good District 5 schools. P.S. 125 is succeeding despite, not because of this building.”
Vernon Bloom, the single dad of a fifth grader at P.S. 125, also found fault with the space. The building boasts impressive facilities, he said, particularly for District 5. But because three schools have to share the space, his daughter hardly gets to take advantage of them. “Go to the pool?” he said. “Can’t go to the pool. Go to the auditorium? Can’t go to the auditorium. It’s getting ridiculous.”
The building was not designed to house three schools, and Columbia Secondary was only supposed to be placed there temporarily. In the original plans, Columbia offered property on 125th Street, rent-free for a 49-year lease, to build CSS. But in an August 2011 letter, Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm turned down the site on behalf of the Department of Education. Members of CEC5 suspect that on top of capital funding limitations, the location was too close to a highway.
Columbia, however, did not offer CSS an alternative site to build the school. “Columbia says that they met their obligation to provide a space because they offered it,” said Anna Minsky, a former CEC5 member and a P.S. 125 parent. “They feel that they are absolved of any responsibility to provide a space for the school.” Instead, the city education department used the funds allocated to the proposed construction to renovate the Ralph Bunche building and another Columbia property, Teachers College Community School at 168 Morningside Avenue.
So Columbia Secondary’s “temporary” 425 West 123rd Street address became permanent. The Ralph Bunche building has five stories. Today, CSS occupies floors three through five and uses facilities on the other floors, including a wide pool and two-storied auditorium. The school is also in the process of expanding into the basement and constructing a sixth-floor cafeteria.
“It’s pushing out a district school,” said Minsky. The irony is inescapable: CSS, a school created to give back to Harlem, overcrowds P.S. 125, a school that already served Harlem well. Minsky also added: “People are particularly sensitive to the fact that a school that is serving more white students and fewer black students is the more well-resourced school.” P.S. 125’s students are 14% white and 76% black and Hispanic, while CSS’s enrollment is 23% white and 64% black and Hispanic, according to state data from 2018–19.
There are no imminent solutions to the congestion, but changes are already underway to open up CSS to more District 5 students than before. Beginning this admissions season, the Department of Education will distribute offers to Columbia Secondary evenly across Districts 3, 4, 5, and 6. In other words, 25 of the 100 seats will go to District 5 applicants. But some parents question if this is enough.
If District 5 includes Manhattanville and contains Columbia Secondary, is proportional enrollment the answer, or should CSS prioritize District 5 students? That depends on who you ask. “You gave something to my community,” said Beckles-Canton, addressing Columbia University. “I recognize that you opened it up to District 3, 4, and 6 because they are part of Harlem in little pieces. But most of Central Harlem is District 5.”
“You took something away from this community, then you’re supposed to give something back to the community,” said Anna Minsky. “But what you created was a school that serves people from outside of the community.”
A public affairs officer from Columbia University declined to comment. “There’s no one who is able to help you with your project,” said the officer.
For the first time this year, Columbia Secondary held fall information sessions to explain the enrollment process to prospective families. Or at least, to families that were aware of the sessions and available when they were offered. The first weekend of November, a crowd diverse in attire, from sweatpants to slacks, filed into the auditorium for one of these meetings. The prospective families varied in ethnicities and spoke different languages.
When the audience was seated, 13 middle school students, seven girls and six boys, walked onto the stage in uniform: Columbia blue polo or long-sleeve button-down shirts with the university’s emblem. Principle Miriam Nightengale began speaking about admissions at 12:47 p.m. She dropped the subject by 12:56 p.m. The rest of the meeting centered around Columbia Secondary’s offerings. Although this session was for middle school, grades six through eight, Nightengale spoke extensively about high school, college, and beyond. (The presumption at Columbia Secondary is that students accepted for middle school will usually stay for high school.)
From sixth grade onward, CSS students are assigned books in their English classes tailored to the AP Literature exam. In Social Studies classes, they learn tools and information to prepare for a large-scale research paper in the tenth grade. In philosophy classes, they read Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, and John Maynard Keynes. Electives and extracurriculars include biking, organic gardening, neuroscience, and underwater robotics. If approved by the school, students can also take courses at Columbia University and are eligible for internships and research opportunities through the university.
Columbia Secondary employs two full-time and one part-time college counselors. The school also offers monthly “college nights” for students and their parents and weekly lunch meetings with college admissions representatives. Graduates have been admitted to top-tier schools, including Columbia, Yale, MIT, and Middlebury.
After the meeting, applicants and their families were invited to explore the school. What became apparent, something that could never come across through facts and figures, was the warmth and closeness of the community. Students were eager — even enlivened — to talk about their friends, teachers (who they call “professors”), and classes. “In engineering,” said one student, “we do a problem-solution project for the Coliseum. But then after that, we get to make our own arches for the Coliseum using stone and cement clay. It’s really fun.”
One couldn’t help thinking that it was, as advertised, a wonderful school. But for the past decade, the neighborhood that CSS was pledged to hardly got to benefit from it. The current changes will make admissions more fair, but the district impacted most by Columbia’s expansion will only constitute a quarter of the students. District 5 must also continue accommodating other districts’ students in one of its overpopulated buildings.
In the meantime, the Manhattanville campus has developed rapidly. To date, Columbia has opened arts and science research facilities, meeting spaces, faculty and graduate student housing, and administrative offices. Columbia Business School is set to move from Morningside Heights to the Manhattanville campus in 2021. Columbia will finally realize its dream of expansion. It can stretch out and relax, knowing it has secured a competitive position amongst comparable research institutions.
But District 5 parents are not all sharing in Columbia’s cheer. “I don’t have very high expectations for Columbia,” said Minsky. “Their goal is to make money, they’re expanding to make money. It’s up to the city to be responsible for the public welfare.”
“I am just very disappointed with Columbia University because they were supposed to support this school and the community,” said Beckles-Canton. Columbia promised restitution for the damage caused in its expansion; Columbia Secondary School was part of that commitment. Beckles-Canton is hard at work to ensure that her District 5 students get to reap the benefits.
