One High School Student’s Decision to Stay in a Segregated School
Ethan Moskowitz was one of 10 white students who enrolled in a largely Black and Latino school in Park Slope. Now he’s the only one left.
Four years ago, a group of upper-middle class white families from Brooklyn’s District 15 were concerned about what they perceived as the lack of so-called “good” middle school options within their district. The three high-achieving, highly competitive schools in the area were increasingly out of reach, so some started to look for alternatives for their kids.
In 2013, 10 white students from P.S. 321, a high-performing elementary school in Park Slope, decided to enroll their kids in a largely black and Latino middle school. At the time, Park Slope Collegiate, a small school for 6th through 12th graders in the former John Jay High School, had never before had white students in its population.
One of the 10 was Ethan Moskowitz. He grinned as he talked about the 2014 New York Magazine article featuring the school’s integration efforts. “You can see the top of my head. I sat in the back when they took the picture,” said Ethan, who was 12 years old at the time. Now, three years later, ninth grader Ethan is the only white student left from that class.
Last September, the other nine white students, including some of Ethan’s best friends, left middle school to enroll in either private high schools or the most sought-after public schools in the city, such as Brooklyn Technical High School or Millennium Brooklyn High School, a new selective school also located in the former John Jay High School.
Not only was Ethan the only white student who chose to stay, he was the only Jewish child among the 356 students in high school. “It was scary at first,” said Ethan, 15. “I was torn, cause I didn’t have any people that I knew from PS 321 to go along with me.”
He recalled the first few weeks of high school when his classmates asked him where his yarmulke was, “I was really upset, but my mindset is to tell them that there’s not only one type of Judaism,” Ethan said. “There’re tons of beliefs and religions.”
The racial imbalance in the high school was not what Principal Jill Bloomberg intended. It happened slowly. John Jay became known as the “Thug School,” with all the prejudicial overtones that moniker suggests. As it was phased out, the Department of Education merged three existing schools onto the campus in 2001. However, the schools were split again two years later due to the lack of support and chaotic space allocation.
Different from middle schools, New York City’s high school admission process doesn’t have district restraints. Parents can choose to send their kids to any schools in the city. In Park Slope Collegiate, 99 percent of its middle school students live in Brooklyn’s Park Slope District 15, which has become one the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. By contrast, its high school remains highly segregated, with 91 percent of the students Black or Hispanic. Most of its high school students live outside of the district, in more affordable neighborhoods.
When Ethan submitted his high school application form on December 2015, Park Slope Collegiate was his first choice, followed by Edward R. Murrow High School, which he listed only because his best friend was going there. The other 10 blanks were left empty. Ethan said he didn’t really know where he wanted to go, but his mom encouraged him to stay in Park Slope Collegiate. “As a kid, most of your decisions were influenced by your parents,” said Ethan.
Ethan’s mother, Melissa Moskowitz, said she faced some harsh questions by most of her white, middle-class friends. It was hard, she said, and devastating, at first. “People told me they couldn’t believe what I did to my son,” she said. They think schools like Park Slope Collegiate won’t be challenging enough for their kids to get into the top universities.”
The racial segregation in high school admissions is inevitable given current policies. According to research conducted by Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells from Teachers College, Columbia University, the process of sorting students through choice policies leads to self-fulfilling prophecies of the “good” or the “bad” school. Many progressive white parents are bothered by the racial disparity, but they are more anxious to see their children win the “race to the top” of a highly competitive and stratified system.
“Parents want to do what’s best for their child, and their ideas come from the material world,” said Bloomberg. “Everyone believes a school’s bad because of low test scores, and highest-scoring students go to the best schools. It’s the way the system is set up.”
Ethan’s mother said a lot of her friends started to prepare their kids for the Specialized High School Admissions Test right after the elementary school. It’s a competitive test required by the city’s elite high schools, which are notoriously exclusive. Take Brooklyn Technical High School as an example: Only 8 percent of its 5534 students were black in 2015.
“Parents with means are given too much choice. We really need to fight the racism within ourselves,” said Melissa Moskowitz, an assistant principal in a segregated school in lower Manhattan with a large number of students living in public housing. Moskowitz believes that a lot of schools are considered “hidden gems.” In her eyes, some massive, popular schools function like assembly lines without focusing much on students’ social emotional learning, while those hidden gems, though don’t have perfect scores, serve kids in more profound and meaningful ways.
When Ethan first entered high school, he used to question what he’s doing. He’s lost some of his best friends to other high schools and had to adjust to being the only one of his race. Still, he believes the decision was right for him and he will win out in the end, because his world is truly more diverse than his friends’.
Two of Ethan’s best friends at Park Slope Collegiate used to be his middle school classmates, but they were not as close as they are now. “I’m not exposed to only one person,” said Ethan. “I’ve heard people say private schools are diverse. There may be black people, but most of them are rich black people.”
“It’s not only about race, but also about backgrounds,” he added.
Moskowitz’s connections with Park Slope Collegiate started before her son’s enrollment. When Ethan was in fifth grade, Melissa was working for the Department of Education’s School Support Network, and Park Slope Collegiate was among the four schools with which she worked closely. As an educator, Melissa tried not to go into a school with any assumptions, but still noticed quite a number of suspensions as she studied the school’s statistics. However, when she made the first visit, she was “pleasantly surprised.”
“Though the data was not good, there’s way more good things happening,” Moskowitz said. She remembered walking into the school one day after Hurricane Sandy struck the city, and found all the teachers and the principal sitting in a circle. One teacher cried because she had lost her home, while other teachers listened and offered support. “It was a refreshing and beautiful moment for me,” she said.
After working with Park Slope Collegiate for three years as both an administrator and parent, Melissa was amazed by the sense of caring, concern and commitment of the school’s staff, and by the vision of Principal Bloomberg, who later became her mentor and close friend.
Each year, Bloomberg would organize teachers and active parents in a three-day retreat, a learning trip balanced with entertainment. During the day, teachers did presentations on issues such as co-teaching strategies and the history of school segregation. At night, they had dinner together, did drumming and karaoke like a big family.
A lot of the teachers in Park Slope Collegiate have known Ethan for years. After the 4th period on a regular Thursday, Ethan fist bumped each teacher he met in the school’s hallway as he rushed outside the building to get his lunch.
Ethan loves a lot of the courses offered in the school. Every Friday, Ms. Robinson, the English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, would organize her students in a small circle and let them reflect on the high points and low points of the week. Ethan feels comfortable opening up in that way because, as he said, “what happens in the circle always stays in the circle.” He mocked himself as a “chaotic member,” but in Mr. Kuranishi’s Global Study Class, he could concentrate better after doing meditation session at the beginning of the class.
“People’s opinions haven’t changed after so many years. They see me as less of them because I go to a school that was once called Jungle Jay,” said Ethan as he recalled a couple of times when people looked at him with doubts and suspicions as they first knew the name of his school.
“It’s still John Jay building, but in a way, it’s really not,” said Ethan.
