Observing the Outer Limits of Education Inequity
On September 9 and 11, the New York Times published stories devoted to education. They illustrate the outer limits of extreme inequity in U.S. society, an inequity which filters straight down to the youngest among us in a health-and-financial crisis like that we’ve been experiencing the past six months.
Let’s start with the most privileged among us. Wealthy New Yorkers are arriving at agreements with their condominium management to “occupy” (the irony, the irony) luxurious and capacious common spaces and turn them into private (super-private) educational “pods” in 2020-2021. These spaces – which aren’t being used by residents right now – include rooftop gardens and decks, music rooms, meeting rooms, lounges, gyms (“fitness centers”) … you name it, entrepreneurial New Yorkers (mostly mothers) are commandeering it.
Re: Ms. Vanessa Phillips (who re-located in July to One Hundred Barclay in Tribeca):
“Ms. Phillips, 38, finds that she is most appreciative of the roof deck, where her 7-year-old son, Finn, has been able to spread out with other children in the social pods that she has set up for him. Ms. Phillips … has spent the summer connecting with other families in the neighborhood and the building, looking for children interested in joining board-game sessions at the roof deck’s long tables.”
The first gathering happened in early September. She is now working on setting up a learning pod for a group of five to seven children, with plans to hire a tutor once the school year starts at P.S. 234. When the weather cools, she hopes the children will be able to study in an indoor lounge, providing it is open.” [Emphasis added]
“This whole experience with this pandemic has forced me to engage more and to really tap into every possible resource that I have. Because if you have it, use it.’” Indeed.
Building management is being very accommodating:
“And some buildings are stepping in to help, partnering with local arts, sports and education organizations to offer exclusive programming to keep children occupied during the school day and well into the afternoon. Others are setting aside resident lounges where learning pods can gather.”
Mutually-enriching partnerships being forged:
“And 30 Warren, a Tribeca luxury condo, had already partnered with the Church Street School for Music and Art when it opened to residents this month. Condo residents get discounts on the school’s in-person and virtual programming, including a day-care program where, for $120 a day, children can be supervised when school is virtual.”
Re: Kelly Sullivan, lifestyle director of Waterline Square (Riverside Boulevard between 59th and 61st Streets):
The complex disports of “100,000 square feet of shared amenity space, with indoor swimming pools, basketball and squash courts, an indoor soccer field and skate park, and a music studio.”
So far, it’s all been good:
“Ms. Sullivan focused on the complex’s 2.6-acre park for setting up socially distant activities outdoors open to residents and the public, like sunset yoga and cardio kickboxing. With the school year starting, Ms. Sullivan is lining up an activities schedule for the school-age crowd.
Among the activities planned exclusively for residents is a series of classes for children run by Green Food Solutions, an urban farming company. Participants will sit at tables in the park beneath tents and heating lamps and learn to make pickles, cultivate mushrooms, carve pumpkins and make cranberry preserves.” [Emphasis added]
Clearly, these parents (and their oh-so-fortunate offspring) live in residences that provide a superfluity of “amenities” in good times, and in bad times they can take advantage of these to benefit themselves and their children. How many parents fall into this group of super privilege? Perhaps somewhere between one and five percent. (Three-bedroom condos at One Hundred Barclay and at Quay Tower in Brooklyn Heights run for about $4 million).
As Ms. Phillips noted, “Because if you have it, use it.”
Clear your mind of privilege, because we’re now about to encounter its opposite:
On September 9, the Times Magazine published a long-form story on homeless school-age children in the city (at any given time, there are over 110,000, around 10% of the total school population of 1.1 million).
The story’s focus is on several children and their parents, including a 9-year-old boy, Prince, and his 29-year-old mother Fifi. When schools closed in early March, Prince clocked in to his remote classroom from Fifi’s cell phone (this isn’t rare, either for homeless or for poor housed children – the only internet access available to them is via a cell phone subscription). (Note: over the two years this story was being researched and written, the author spoke with/followed over a dozen homeless students and their families to gain an understanding of the hurdles they encounter to find housing and keep their children in school.)
Prince and Fifi have been living the homeless life since Prince was a baby– by the time the pandemic struck, he’d attended five different elementary schools: “For nearly all his life, he had lived under the curfew imposed by homeless shelters, with no visitors or play dates allowed at his home, and had adapted to long, endless waits at city agencies.”
The writer of this feature (Samantha Shapiro, a first-rate investigative reporter) first met Prince in March 2019, when he was in second grade at a school in East Harlem. All his teachers concurred that he was scholastically gifted – school was easy, he was a natural achiever, and his favorite class was Math. But the day the writer met him, he was headed with Fifi and her boyfriend Manuel (Prince calls him “Dad”) to the PATH (= Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing) intake center in the Bronx – think of PATH as the “family homeless services” of NYC. And like the city itself, its ways are labyrinthine.
The stats on homelessness aren’t looking good – and remember, the federal rent moratorium is still in effect:
“The number of homeless New Yorkers has risen to the highest point since the Great Depression, and the largest demographic within the homeless population is children. As a result, the number of homeless students has increased nearly 70 percent over the last decade, according to the Department of Education.” (Note: HUD measures homelessness differently; the NYDOE’s figures are much more accurate and revealing: “A federal law, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, requires that public schools ask incoming students about their housing status; at the end of last year, families in New York City reported that 114,000 school-age children met the McKinney-Vento definition of homelessness: lacking a ‘fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.’”. HUD, on the other hand, uses a system called the “point in time” count – on a single day/night each year – which is out-of-date by the time it’s submitted. Also: families who are homeless try to avoid the streets if at all possible, and many rural areas don’t even have shelters.)
NYC is the only city in the U.S. which has a “right to shelter,” but the sheer numbers of people involved make the system impossible to navigate efficiently: “In New York, this right has created a … sprawling, incoherent megaplex that involves at least six city departments, which sometimes work at odds with one another, and has a presence in hundreds of buildings in the city, offering very different levels of supervision and support.”
There’s an unfathomable amount of bureaucracy involved just in qualifying for shelter under PATH’s restrictive requirements – all kinds of documentation stretching back for years. In 2018, 40% of applicants didn’t even qualify for assistance because they couldn’t provide the paperwork. Infuriatingly, school-age children must accompany their parents to PATH appointments, even if they’re missing school – that week in March 2019, Prince was at PATH with his mother rather than at his beloved East Harlem school.
And even when they are “sheltered” (in a shelter proper, or camped out in a relative’s apartment, which is where Prince, Fifi and Manuel stayed for several nights while trying to get a new housing assignment), homeless children are chronically absent – too far from their assigned school to get there easily [a bus assignment can take months to be fulfilled], forced to go to social services appointments with their guardians, or simply exhausted from the stress of a continually nomadic life – 43% are chronically absent (= more than 10 days without an official excuse), compared to 16% of students not living in poverty.
Because homeless children miss so much school (and change schools so frequently) they tend to get further and further behind, which contributes to their dropping out early. Only 62% of homeless students in NYC finish high school, compared to 77% citywide (a percentage that isn’t anything to write home about). Failure to graduate from high school increases likelihood of ending up homeless as a young adult by a factor of 4.5.
Things are only going to get worse when the moratorium expires on January 1:
“According to data compiled by the N.Y.U. Furman Center, whose research focuses on housing, 239,000 very-low-income renter households are at ‘high risk’ of becoming homeless. If they experienced job loss because of the pandemic, they’re currently protected by an eviction moratorium, which has been extended to the end of the year, but they are most likely amassing unpaid back rent.”
The NYC shelter system is already at capacity for families. What’s going to happen in January when tens of thousands of additional families join the already-homeless? And this will occur in January, one of NYC’s coldest months.
Following a series of heartbreaking misadventures at PATH (remember, Prince and Fifi are just one mother and her only child – multiply the heartbreak by 114,000 to get some idea of the suffering among homeless families in New York City), which included a mistaken assignment to a shelter in Queens, where they couldn’t be assigned (Prince’s abusive biological father and his family are in Queens), they were back at PATH the following week.
And Prince was hungry. He “could not stomach the food he’d had in the past at PATH — a still-frozen bologna sandwich and a small cup of warm juice with a foil lid, which ‘tasted like medicine.’ He focused all his boredom and frustration on this matter. ‘Mommy, can you get me something to eat?’ he pleaded and whined over and over as the day passed. ‘Mommy, please, can you get me something to eat?'”
(Note: Remember our first example above, that of Ms. Vanessa Phillips? She’s the CEO of a company called “Feel Good Foods,” gluten-free meals and snacks in frozen form – her company will be providing food throughout the day to the 7-year-olds in her son’s “pod.”)
If you want to read what happened when Fifi ran out to buy some McDonald’s chicken Mcnuggets for Prince after realizing he hadn’t eaten anything since the previous night, link to the full piece and search “McDonald’s” – it’s just too heartbreaking to re-convey here.
The family ended up getting a “placement” in a “cluster house” in the Bronx, which, thankfully, was an easy subway ride to Prince’s old school. They were overjoyed – it was a place of their own with a bedroom (Fifi and Manuel slept in the living room), the oven worked, and there were no rats under the radiator.
The rise in homeless individuals and families in NYC since 1970 (when there were somewhere between 250 and 1000) has been phenomenal, and not in a good way. Much of the rise can be attributed to drastic cuts by the Reagan Administration, including slashing the budget of the federal agency charged with funding and overseeing low-income housing, HUD.
One might well wonder “What’s happened to this population of 100,000 since NYC schools closed in March?” It’s been so, so hard. Homeless advocates tried to persuade the city to allow homeless students to attend regional enrichment centers set up for the children of essential workers – that failed. Only around 21% of homeless children’s needs were being met in the spring. One – exemplary, given the circumstances – group of homeless shelters set up classrooms for remote learning, but the DOE changed the ipad password for the platform and “forgot” to inform the shelter.
The writer, Samantha Shapiro, had a young son who’d started kindergarten while the research for this piece was ongoing, and his best friend was a boy who became homeless in the course of the year (as a result of gentrification). His mother’s desperate search for an affordable (Section 8) apartment landed them, eventually, in Staten Island – but the first place they moved to there had black mold, so they ended up in another apartment.
Shapiro’s concluding thoughts:
“School was an exposure to the wider world of our city in unanticipated ways; to the truth that there was no place for a family that had lived in our neighborhood for generations amid the new, understated charcoal-gray houses, and that more broadly, the enormous wealth of the city would not insulate its vulnerable citizens but rather accelerate their destabilization, and that the adults involved, myself included, were seemingly powerless to help children no different from our own.”
America cares about some of its children, but it doesn’t care about its poorest children, its dispossessed children. All demonstrations of concern are “performative” at this point, nothing more.
We can’t change that – would that we could – all we can do is read about and contemplate a shameful negligence, a lack of caring and compassion and empathy (not by all those involved – the story does contain vignettes of people who care deeply), and summarize its contents – and our thoughts on same .
What have we become? Is this who we are as a people, a nation? And what will happen in January when 50,000 or 100,000 more homeless people are forced to exercise their “right to shelter” in a city which has no more shelter, and no more compassion, to give?