Eliza Shapiro

By day, New York’s 114,085 homeless students live in plain sight: They study on the subway and sprint through playgrounds. At night, these children sometimes sleep in squalid, unsafe rooms, often for just a few months until they move again. School is the only stable place they know.

The New York Times followed Darnell and Sandivel for one day, from sunrise to sunset, to capture how much effort, help and luck it takes for homeless children to have a shot at a decent education.

MORNING: ‘I have a lot of people with me, but they comfort me.’

Sandivel gets up just before 6 a.m. She shares a bed with her mother, Maria, and youngest brother, Jonni; three other brothers sleep on a thin mattress on the ground. With no space for a nightstand, the cellphone that doubles as an alarm clock is stashed in the bed.

They have tried to make their space cheerful. The walls, which are painted to look like the sky on a summer day, are plastered with posters of Barack Obama and the Virgin Mary.

Two at a time, the children brush their teeth. Staggering is essential — the family shares the bathroom and the kitchen of the two-bedroom apartment with another family of four.

“I have a lot of people with me, but they comfort me,” says Sandivel, who goes by Sandy.

Sandy has a collection of hair bows lined up on a wall in the bedroom. She picks a different one each morning on her way out.

Maria packs Sandy’s lunch: a bag of cheese puffs, from a huge tub in the kitchen she bought on a recent Costco run. The children make the sign of the cross and head out the door. Ahead of them is an hour commute from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Sandy is one of more than 73,000 homeless students who lived “doubled up” last year. In one place Sandy’s family used to live, a roommate tried to kill a neighbor. In another apartment, the family was barred from using the kitchen by their housemates and had to eat in the bedroom.

Her mother is supporting the family on meager savings and spends each day looking for a steady job, but she is running out of money. Rent for her room is about $700 a month.

Maria commutes with her children to and from school every day, which means she needs to find a job with predictable daytime hours.

On the subway, Sandy looks up from her book and notices an exhausted-looking child standing in front of her. She gives up her seat.

The children enrolled at Public School 188 after Maria fled a relationship she said was abusive and moved into a domestic violence shelter in the neighborhood. Sandy says there was “violence” at home. “We got through it,” she says, pointing her index finger forward, “and we forgot all about it.”

Across the city in Queens, Darnell opens his eyes and knows something is wrong as soon as he sees the brightening sky. It is not yet 6:30, but he is already late.

His mother, Sherine, shouts for the school bus driver to wait, but the driver does not hear. The children slept only a few hours. Sherine’s phone was stolen, and the family spent the evening in a police station. They collapsed into bed after midnight.

Darnell is dreading the 90-minute subway commute from his shelter in Jamaica, Queens, to his school in East Harlem. He and his family rode the F train for the first month of school because their legally mandated school bus didn’t show up.

The shelter is dingy and far away from anyone Darnell knows. But it is safer and more spacious than the cramped room he used to share with his siblings and mother at his grandmother’s house. Darnell, who is in fourth grade, has already shuffled through four schools.

Like her son, Sherine has never had a home to call her own for long. She was raised by her grandmother until she was 12, then lived in foster care. She entered a shelter when she was 18 and has been in and out of the shelter system ever since.

Sherine, 35, has eight children. The five eldest were removed from her care years ago when she was living with their father, who she says was abusive.

Sherine, who recently found work as a home health aide, is desperate to get her own place. “No kid should have to grow up in a shelter,” she says.

AFTERNOON: ‘Bam!’

English class is a haven for Sandy. She adores her teacher, her notebooks are meticulous, and she keeps a log of the books she has devoured. But even though Sandy seems to breeze through her days, the principal, Suany Ramos, still worries about her.

Ramos says she is frustrated that at a school where about half of the students are homeless, there is only one social worker. The school’s staff, she says, is overwhelmed by children in acute crisis.

“No one is going to look at Sandivel and say, ‘She needs help,’ ” Ramos says, adding that Sandy will eventually have to confront her trauma.

After prodding from activists, Mayor Bill de Blasio added 31 new social workers who specifically focus on homeless students to city schools this year. That brought the total of social workers to about 100 — all of whom were hired under de Blasio — at a cost of roughly $14 million a year. The Education Department’s annual budget is about $24 billion.

There have been flashes of bullying in Sandy’s homeroom, but she mostly floats above it.

She gives a high-five to a boy in her class even after it is established among her friends that boys have cooties.

On the playground, Sandy grows upset as she watches a friend of hers mock another girl.

“She’s my friend, but I don’t know if she should be or not,” Sandy says of the bully.

At the start of recess at Public School 76, Darnell grabs a football with one end split open amid yelps of “Hike!” from the boys he usually plays with.

Within minutes, there is a dispute over the rules of the game, and the boys end up in a circle, shoving one another. The principal, Charles DeBerry, tries to talk Darnell down.

DeBerry says he is grateful that students, including Darnell, feel comfortable coming to him with problems. But he wishes there were an additional guidance counselor to specifically help the roughly 30% of his students who are homeless.

During lunch, Darnell peels the cheese off a slice of pizza and eats it. Then his day begins to unravel.

He snaps at a classmate in the hall, telling him to hurry up. The boy spins around and pushes Darnell, who falls on the cold linoleum floor. After the fight, Darnell’s teacher notices that he is crying in class, and she summons the guidance counselor.

“I kept my hands to myself,” Darnell says. Eventually, both boys apologize in a near-whisper. Darnell tells the guidance counselor he is bored and doesn’t want to go back to class.

School can be dull for Darnell, a fourth grader, because he often finds it bewildering. He has a learning disability and struggles to read.

Over 70% of the city’s homeless students failed state English exams last year, and less than 60% of homeless children graduated from the city’s public high schools.

Darnell comes to life in computer class, where he shows off his agility at math, matching patterns and filling in multiplication tables. He whispers “Bam!” whenever he gets an answer right.

Darnell spends the rest of the afternoon teetering on the edge of another scuffle and fidgeting in his chair.

After classes are finished, Darnell spends another three hours in an after-school program. His eyes are glazed over, but football practice is still to come.

EVENING: ‘I want him to have his own spot and have his friends come over.’

After school, Sandy’s 15-year-old brother, Jesus, begins a daily ritual: walking through P.S. 188’s cavernous gym, picking up his younger siblings and making sure they use the bathroom before the long commute home.

For them, the crosstown bus is a mobile library. The children pull out homework, and Sandy flips through her younger brother Giovanni’s assignments. “Pretty easy,” she concludes.

The children race to embrace their mother when they meet her in Union Square during the evening rush. On the crowded subway, Sandy helps Jonni unbutton his sweater so he can slide off his backpack. Maria passes around a king-size Kit Kat bar and a bottle of Gatorade for all of them to share.

At 6 p.m., Darnell bounds into the school’s main office to get ready for football practice with his brother, Thomas. Practice helps Darnell stay focused. He worships his coach and listens intently for instructions before starting drills.

Sherine is a “football mom,” a crucial part of the team. She helps stretch the boys’ jerseys over their hulking shoulder pads and walks the players to a field a few blocks north.

Darnell zips down the field with his arms by his sides, his fists clenched, daring his teammates to tackle him.

After years of being bullied, Darnell has made his first group of friends through football. “It makes me feel good that he feels safe now,” Sherine says. But, she adds, “I want him to have his own spot and have his friends come over.”

Sherine’s voice breaks. “I feel like a failed parent,” she says, adding, “I should have been able to provide everything that they need.” She has just spent her entire day helping out at the school.

Sherine’s heartbreak reflects that of parents who cared for the 34,000 students sleeping in New York’s homeless shelters last year — enough children to fill a small city.

Sandy stands on her tiptoes and squints across the East River as the N train pulls onto the Manhattan Bridge. She watches the skyline until the train dips underground.

She hopes the family will gather in the bedroom to watch an episode of “Cake Boss” or “Tom and Jerry” on the small television that sits on top of two dressers.

By the end of football practice, Darnell and his siblings are exhausted and hungry. Sherine is making a mental inventory of what is left of the food at the shelter; she hopes they will eat some defrosted chicken by 10.

They will be up before the sun rises to do it all over again.

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — The number of school-age children in New York City who live in shelters or “doubled up” in apartments with family or friends has swelled by 70% over the past decade — a crisis without precedent in the city’s history.

A Long Day Begins Before Sunrise

Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.

On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.

Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.

Tens of thousands of eligible families were not there at all.

Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place.

Beacon’s admissions rate is roughly akin to Yale’s: there were over 5,800 applicants for 360 ninth-grade seats last year.

The lines that surround Beacon and other elite high schools are a living symbol of the anxiety, competition and inequality that define New York’s segregated public school system. High school admissions are seen as perhaps the most egregious example of how city policies end up dividing privileged parents from vulnerable families.

That dynamic was on display outside of Beacon’s two fall open houses.

“I am my son’s administrative assistant, that’s the best way to put it,” said Laura Kosik, who lined up early with her son, thanks to a tip from the newsletter, created by the consultant Elissa Stein.

Kosik, who is white and lives in Manhattan near Union Square, had also met with a different schools consultant who charges $240 an hour to dispense advice about the process. “I feel like this is a job,” she said.

Lakisha Moore and her son stood several hundred people behind Kosik.

“I didn’t know that I should have come early,” said Moore, who had arrived about a half an hour before the scheduled start, hoping to make it inside quickly. “I wish they had put that on the website,” added Moore, who is black and lives in Queens.

Though New York’s school system is mostly black and Hispanic, its highest-performing schools are largely white and Asian. Beacon’s student population was half white last year, and about a quarter of its students were low-income, compared to about three-quarters of the district as a whole.

A debate over how to make the city’s top schools more representative of the city itself has reached a fever pitch over the last year.

In March, a tiny number of black students got into the ultra-selective Stuyvesant High School, which has more low-income students than Beacon but a much smaller percentage of black and Hispanic students. In August, a panel commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio to study desegregation recommended that the city eliminate its mostly white and Asian elementary school gifted-and-talented classes.

Interviews with three dozen parents, students and educators revealed how high the stakes of the high school admissions process in particular feel to many families — and how easy it is for some children to get left behind.

“You only get one chance to figure out four years of your kid’s education,” said Alisa Kriegel, who joined Beacon’s line early after reading Stein’s newsletter. She waited with three other white mothers who met at their children’s TriBeCa middle school.

The four women had created an informal admissions support group, complete with a shared Google calendar, a robust group text and the promise of company on long waits to tour schools. “We’ve been going through hell,” Kriegel said.

“The Department of Education should be doing what Elissa Stein is doing, for free,” said Jill Taddeo, who was part of Kriegel’s crew.

Stein said about 500 families have signed up for her newsletter this fall, but noted that about 80,000 students are currently applying to high school. Stein said she offers reduced rates to low-income families and has signed some people up for free. “It shouldn’t be this hard to go to high school,” she said.

Under a school choice system created by Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor, the city allows students to apply to up to 12 high schools anywhere in New York, and an algorithm matches children with one school. Some parents said the ranking process was so daunting that they turned to YouTube for strategies.

Though there is no penalty for students who do not attend a tour, Beacon’s two open houses provide the only opportunity most families have to see inside the school. The Department of Education said that school also organizes small student tours that are not advertised.

Beacon, unlike Stuyvesant, does not have an admissions test. But to win a spot, students must have high standardized test scores and grades, along with a strong portfolio of middle school work and admissions essays. Students are much less likely to be accepted if they do not list Beacon as their top choice.

A teacher at the school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some at the school believe that enrollment, “reflects income, and where kids grew up, and not necessarily academic ability.”

The teacher also said that the school’s administrators brag about the huge open house lines, and consider the turnout “a source of pride.”

Beacon is not the only selective school that makes it difficult to take a tour.

Stuyvesant usually has two fall open houses that parents queue up for, and Bronx Science, another specialized school, has only one.

Other selective schools have tried to avoid lines by allowing parents to register for tours online. But the tours are booked within a few minutes; Stein’s newsletter sends reminders to register the moment slots are available.

“We have a private school admissions system set up with public school resources,” said Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of Inside Schools, a website that reviews local public schools.

Still, she said, “the schools that care about equity and access have found a way around this.”

Bard High School Early College, which typically has about 7,000 applicants for 300 freshman seats at its two diverse campuses, offers weekly school tours and holds events for families to learn about the school in all five boroughs.

Another highly selective school, Manhattan Hunter Science High School, halted its open houses after the lines became too unwieldy. The school now posts virtual tours on its website.

Bedford Academy, a high-performing, mostly black school in Brooklyn, holds its open houses on Saturdays.

The free-for-all lines at Beacon and at LaGuardia High School, a competitive performing arts school, felt intimidating for some parents.

Joan Bann and her son shuffled past a taxi inspection depot near the West Side Highway to join a line of at least 1,000 people outside Beacon last month.

“I’m saying, ‘What is it about this school that you have this long line?’” said Bann, who is black and lives in Harlem. “What are my chances, how many seats can they possibly fill?”

She added, “I should be able to get a good school in my own community.”

Many families echoed the sentiment that there were not enough good options. Hemphill said the city could take action by expanding the number of seats at high-performing high schools that do not have strict academic requirements for admission. “It’s a no-brainer,” she said.

De Blasio has taken steps to try to make admissions more equitable. Earlier this year, the city said it would replace the second round of high school applications with wait lists in an attempt to streamline the process. The city has also scrapped a policy that allowed some schools to give preference to students who attended a school fair or open house.

“We’re taking a hard look at our admissions processes,” said schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza, who has said desegregation is a top priority.

Halley Potter, who studies school integration at the Century Foundation, said the current system was deeply flawed: “There’s a good reason why that’s not the way that most other cities and districts approach high school.”

In the meantime, families are left scrambling for any edge they can find.

Maxwell Damoah and Paulina Arhin, both immigrants from Ghana, stood on one of last month’s Beacon lines as drizzle turned into a steady rain. They said they were grateful that their daughters were enrolled in Breakthrough, a local program for low-income students that offers mentoring through the high school admissions process and reminders about open houses, among other services.

Damoah, who works an overnight shift at a nearby Hilton hotel, said he wanted to give his daughter the best opportunities. “I want her to not be like me, working in the night,” he said. “It has been very stressful, but I’m hoping at the end of the day, better things will come to our side.”

Arhin said her daughter was excelling at a Bronx charter school and hoped to attend a high-performing school like Beacon.

“We wish for Beacon,” said Arhin. But without Breakthrough, she added, “maybe I wouldn’t know about this school.”

Why White Parents Were at the Front of the Line for the School Tour

NEW YORK — There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall.

TAG Young Scholars is one of the highest-performing schools in the city. It is also the only ultra-selective gifted and talented school in New York that is more than a third black and Hispanic, thanks in part to an admissions policy that explicitly encourages diversity.

“It doesn’t make sense that gifted and talented is so overwhelmingly white and Asian when we know there are black and brown kids who can do this, too,” said Eric Crump, father of a black fourth-grade student, Carter, at TAG.

“I want other kids to have the opportunities that Carter had.”

The future of gifted programs in the largest public school system in the country is one of the most urgent and provocative education issues in New York. A high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio said in August that creating separate classrooms for gifted children is inherently unfair, and it recommended eliminating the current system.

But a group of parents with children at TAG said their school was proof that gifted classes can be racially diverse and that TAG should become a model rather than an exception.

New York’s school system is predominantly black and Hispanic. Last year, however, the city’s gifted offerings — five highly selective gifted schools, and roughly 75 other gifted programs — were nearly 75% white and Asian.

TAG is unique: Its classes were about 36% black and Hispanic last year, and it has the highest rate of students living in poverty of any of the five so-called citywide gifted schools.

Of the 1.1 million students in the city’s public schools, about 16,000 were enrolled in gifted programs last year.

Opening more intentionally integrated gifted schools could be an appealing option for de Blasio. The mayor is facing pressure to diversify the programs, but he has not shown a willingness to take sweeping action to desegregate schools and has already distanced himself from the proposal to scrap gifted programs altogether.

De Blasio has said he will not make final decisions about the panel’s recommendations this school year.

Will Mantell, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, said the review of gifted and talented programs “will include a deep dive into both admissions and instruction at existing programs in New York City and across the nation, which will include looking at schools like TAG Young Scholars.”

After TAG’s black and Hispanic population shrunk from about 80% in 2010 to 36% last year, its leaders searched for a way for the school to maintain its diversity — despite its growing popularity with white and Asian parents.

So last year, the school prioritized about 40% of the spots in its incoming kindergarten class for low-income students. The school has also become a magnet for families across the city looking for a diverse gifted school, and the parent-teacher association encourages local East Harlem parents to apply.

Still, the admissions policy is not a panacea: The Brooklyn School of Inquiry, another citywide gifted school, adopted the same kindergarten priority last year. The school was still nearly 90% white and Asian last year, though more diverse kindergarten classes in future years could eventually change its demographics.

The gifted system shed most of its black and Hispanic students over the last decade, after former Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to diversify the programs by creating a universal threshold for admission based on a single standardized exam.

But gifted schools in mostly black and Hispanic parts of the city closed as fewer students in those neighborhoods met the tougher requirements.

De Blasio’s school diversity panel recommended that the mayor overhaul Bloomberg’s system and replace elementary school gifted programs with nonselective magnet schools and enrichment programs available to all children.

Jaime Chauca, a Hispanic parent of a first grade student at TAG, said that could be damaging for students like his son, Ryan, who Chauca said learned to read so quickly because he was around other advanced students at TAG.

“Why don’t you look at a program that is doing something right, and say, ‘How can we expand it?’” Chauca asked.

Kasha Cacy, who is white and has two children, said her son Teddy, a sixth grader at TAG, needed a different type of educational environment than her other child, who is not in a gifted program. “I do worry that my son would have been bored in a general-education classroom,” she said.

Cacy also said she was concerned that the diversity panel did not clearly outline a plan to provide alternatives for gifted programs for children like Teddy.

“I worry that it will become like the Republicans’ approach to repealing Obamacare,” she said of the recommendations. “It gives me a pit in my stomach that we have this successful school that is doing what we want it to do, and it could cease to exist.”

But some experts and activists said that even diverse gifted schools reinforced the idea that accelerated children need to be separated from other students.

“What it comes down to is: separation versus integration,” said Allison Roda, a professor of education at Molloy College on Long Island who has studied gifted education in New York. “I haven’t heard any strong argument for why they need to have separate classrooms, why they need separate instruction,” she said, referring to gifted students. Proponents of gifted education, including some academics, disagree.

Matt Gonzales, director of an integration initiative at New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and a member of the mayor’s diversity panel, said the group decided that expanding gifted education in its current form would be a “Band-Aid” solution.

“There needs to be an interrogation of what we are doing when we label a student gifted and talented and separate them away,” he said. “Is it about providing enrichment, or giving a title or status that will carry them through their life?”

Some parents and educators at gifted schools said the system was unfair and needed to change, although they did not agree that it needed to be blown up entirely.

Anand Raghunath, an Indian American parent of two TAG students, said parents of gifted students “need to confront the fact that there is privilege” in the system.

“I have to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘I had the money to put him in the course,’” he said, noting that he paid for his son to be tutored for the gifted admissions exam. “I don’t consider myself better. I’m lucky. I’m grateful. Let’s not be jerks about it.”

The city’s five citywide gifted schools typically require students to score in the 99th percentile on the admissions exam, which has given rise to a test preparation industry that caters to 4-year-olds. The dozens of other gifted programs scattered throughout the city generally require students to score in the 90th percentile.

Talie Tebbi, an English teacher at the citywide gifted school NEST+m on the Lower East Side, lamented that school’s lack of diversity. “We are missing something,” she said. The school is mostly white and Asian. The Anderson School, a citywide gifted school a few miles south of TAG on the Upper West Side, was only 3% black last year.

Those numbers have frustrated many elected officials and families in neighborhoods that have lost gifted programs. Rather than calling for an overhaul to the gifted program, however, some prominent politicians in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods have called on the city to create new gifted classes in their districts.

“What they are basically saying is, ‘Oh, not enough black and Latino students are in these programs so let’s just eliminate it,’” said Rubén Díaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, of the diversity panel’s recommendations. “Are they suggesting we can’t make the cut? That I find highly offensive and disrespectful.”

Díaz, who is likely to run for mayor in 2021, attended a gifted program in the South Bronx as a child.

The loss of gifted programs in black and Hispanic neighborhoods has prompted some families to enroll their children in high-performing schools outside of their neighborhoods — decisions that in some places have exacerbated socio-economic segregation.

“We have high achievers that get stagnated and bored and are not challenged, so they leave the district,” said City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, who represents largely black and middle-class southeast Queens.

Creating more gifted programs has been suggested as a potential remedy to the drastic decline in black and Hispanic enrollment in the city’s elite specialized high schools. In recent months, a coalition of black and Hispanic alumni of the schools — along with billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder — have called on the city to reinstate gifted classes in neighborhoods that lack them in order to rebuild a pipeline to the specialized schools.

Still, that faction has not yet called for more schools like TAG, with admissions policies aimed at creating diversity. Critics argue that simply adding additional gifted programs — especially without admissions guardrails — will not automatically integrate the gifted system.

NeQuan McLean, a parent leader in the mostly black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said he learned that lesson firsthand.

A few years ago, after McLean and other parents fought to reinstate a gifted program in the district, which has struggled with performance and enrollment, unexpected problems arose. Principals worried that students entering the gifted program would drain talent from local schools, making it even harder to improve those schools.

Some families asked others, “Why is your kid special?” McLean said. The gifted program used the same curriculum as other schools but simply went through it faster, prompting McLean to wonder whether more students would have been able to keep up with the faster pace.

Bedford-Stuyvesant’s parent council recently asked the mayor to phase out all gifted programs — including a program that recently opened in their neighborhood.

“Solving one equity issue has created another,” McLean said. “We need to figure out a solution where there’s not a loser.”

Integration, Diversity and the Future of Schools for the Gifted

NEW YORK — Every morning, students from each of New York City’s five boroughs pull on red plaid uniforms and head to an unusual school in East Harlem.

This Top Gifted and Talented School Is Integrated. Is It the Future?

But despite these looming problems, student achievement is rising steadily in New York City. Students in elementary and middle public schools made gains on the state’s standardized English and math exams, according to data released Thursday.

About 46% of the city’s third through eighth graders passed the state math exam, a 3-percentage point increase from last year, and just more than 47% of students passed the English exam, up about 1 point compared with last year.

New York City is now inching closer to the modest milestone of half its students demonstrating proficiency in math and English.

The city performed slightly better than the rest of the state on English and is now nearly even with the rest of the state on math. Some of New York’s other cities have extremely low achievement rates: Only about 13% of students in Rochester passed the exams, though the city improved on both exams compared with last year.

Though the mayor has railed against what he considers an overreliance on standardized exams to assess the health of the nation’s largest school system, he is keen to celebrate when scores tick up.

This is the first year that the inaugural class of students in de Blasio’s universal pre-K program took exams, and they performed slightly better than their peers last year: English pass rates rose about 3 points to 53%, and the math pass rate inched up 1 point to 53%.

But the results also showed wide gaps between how black and Hispanic students have performed compared with their white and Asian American peers: 28% of New York City’s black students passed this year’s math exam, compared with 74% of the city’s Asian American students and 67% of white students.

Those disparities have remained fixed during de Blasio’s tenure, and this year’s numbers are likely to raise fresh questions about his reluctance to implement citywide integration measures.

Students with disabilities also continued to struggle on the exams: The pass rate for students with special needs on English was flat at 16% and up about 2 points to 17.5% in math.

The latest batch of scores, while largely encouraging, do not say much about how students have improved over time. A decade of changes to the state’s testing system have rendered years of results all but meaningless, and the new results can only be compared to last year’s, not to results from previous years.

States across the country have reevaluated their relationships to standardized exams in recent years, as a backlash to these tests has swelled in both liberal and conservative cities and towns. But New York has endured an especially turbulent process.

The state was one of the first to adopt the tougher Common Core standards, aimed at developing a challenging nationwide set of expectations for what children should learn, which were introduced by the Obama administration. But after students performed poorly on the new, Common Core-aligned exams in 2013, opposition began to brew in progressive city neighborhoods and wealthy suburbs.

In 2015, a fifth of students across the state refused to take the exams in an act of mass protest, known as “opt out,” which threatened the viability of the entire testing apparatus. The growth of the “opt out” movement has slowed in recent years, as elected officials have moved away from using exams to make determinations about schools, students and teachers.

The movement is shrinking: About 16% of students across the state refused to take exams this year, down from 18% last year.

De Blasio rode the wave of anti-test sentiment during his 2013 campaign for mayor and set about reducing the role of exams in high-stakes decisions once he was elected. Earlier this summer, the mayor agreed to start evaluating schools based not only on their test scores or graduation rates but also on their racial and socio-economic diversity.

The rebellion against testing has recently spread from City Hall to the state Capitol.

Earlier this year, a new crop of progressive legislators backed a bill tamping down the role of test scores in teacher evaluations. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who just four years ago proposed a plan to tie half of a teacher’s rating to students’ test results, signed the bill into law without protest.

The city’s charter schools, which include some of the highest-performing schools in New York, again outperformed district schools this year, with a 63% pass rate in math and a 57% pass rate in English.

But charters’ proficiency rate on English was flat compared with last year. Even Success Academy, one of the country’s most prominent and highest-performing charter networks, saw a rare — albeit small — drop in its English pass rate this year, to 90% from 91% last year. Several Success schools still have some of the highest test scores of any school in the state.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/nyregion/new-york-city-school-test-scores.html" id="1744b539-db52-3c3b-aadf-e2f59eac2389">The New York Times</a>.

City School Test Scores Inch Up, but Less Than Half of Students Pass

NEW YORK — Entrenched segregation, rising student homelessness and breakdowns in special education services: Mayor Bill de Blasio will face significant hurdles when it comes to improving the school system this fall.

Now, they are teaming up to try to influence one of the city’s most intractable and divisive debates: how to address the lack of black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and the other elite public high schools that use a test to determine admission.

Lauder announced this week that he was financing a multimillion-dollar lobbying, public relations and advertising effort called the Education Equity Campaign, whose immediate goal is to ensure that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to eliminate the entrance exam does not pass the state Legislature, people involved in the effort said.

More broadly, the two men are trying to make their mark on the future of the system, the nation’s largest, with 1.1 million students.

Their effort amounts to a new challenge to de Blasio’s education agenda from people whose ideas are more reminiscent of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vision. They are seeking to forge connections to leaders in Albany who are skeptical of the mayor’s philosophy.

They are championing a range of educational ideas that include more programs for the gifted and talented, more test preparation, better middle schools and more elite high schools. De Blasio’s administration, on the other hand, is skeptical of high-stakes testing and academic tracking in the school system.

De Blasio is seeking to replace the test for the eight so-called specialized schools with an approach where top performers from each middle school would be offered spots.

Lauder and Parsons — who is making a sizable donation to the effort — have hired several lobbyists and political strategists to sway opinion in Albany and, ultimately, to achieve a broader aim of overhauling a long-struggling school system. They include a protégé of the Rev. Al Sharpton and a firm with ties to Bloomberg.

In a fight that is reaching a boiling point, “the fact that it’s very rich people who are at the helm of it makes it distinctive,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Lauder is not merely a deep-pocketed outsider wading into a fraught local issue. Heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, he graduated in 1961 from Bronx Science. He is a relative rarity: Not many wealthy students have historically attended the elite schools, which have long been seen as an engine that propels low-income children to the middle class.

Lauder and Parsons declined to be interviewed but released statements explaining their support for the Education Equity Campaign.

“The education I received at Bronx Sci shaped the person I am today,” Lauder said. “I want more New Yorkers, from every borough, to have access to a world-class public education.”

Parsons, who is considered one of the nation’s foremost black business leaders, attended a public high school in Queens but not a specialized school.

“Greater diversity in our schools is an imperative, but the battle cannot be won simply by lowering standards,” Parsons said. “I’m backing this effort because I believe we must do the hard work of improving our public education system so that all children have the opportunity to realize their full academic potential.”

De Blasio lashed out at the spending by Lauder and Parsons, portraying it as a misguided attempt by wealthy donors to meddle in public schools.

“The billionaire class is going all out to keep the status quo and deprive black and Hispanic kids of their shot at the city’s specialized high schools,” he said. “It’s a disgusting misuse of money and power, and we’re going to fight it.”

The diversity issue flared last month when the city disclosed that only seven black students received offers to Stuyvesant out of 895 spots.

Although black and Hispanic students make up nearly 70% of New York’s public school students, they represent only 10% of the elite schools’ population. Asian American students, who make up 15% of the system as a whole, hold about two-thirds of those schools’ seats. Many come from low-income and immigrant families.

The admissions test, which tens of thousands of eighth graders take every year, has become a focus of the debate, with opponents calling it discriminatory.

As a result, proponents of the current system are facing pressure to find ways of diversifying the schools while keeping the test. Projections show that under de Blasio’s plan, the schools would enroll many more black and Hispanic students, but Asian Americans would lose about half their seats.

The equity campaign’s ideas in some ways recall education policies embraced by Bloomberg, whose sweeping education agenda has been largely eliminated by de Blasio.

Tusk Strategies, a political strategy firm with close ties to Bloomberg, said it was orchestrating the effort for a fee of between $50,000 and $150,000 a month.

Also on the payroll are Albany lobbying firms, including Patrick B. Jenkins &amp; Associates and Bolton St.-Johns, known for their connections to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration and the state Legislature.

The group’s board of advisers, who are also being compensated, includes education experts who have supported Bloomberg’s accountability-driven brand of education reform.

The public face of the campaign, the Rev. Kirsten John Foy, whose civil rights organization is receiving a contribution for its involvement, is a prominent minister and a Sharpton ally. The campaign plans to spend at least $1 million on advertisements alone. Neither the website nor the ads mention Lauder or Parsons.

Foy said the low black and Hispanic enrollment in the specialized schools should be a wake-up call about problems in the city’s 1,800 schools. He dismissed de Blasio’s plan, saying, “Do not miss this opportunity by taking the path of least resistance.”

The group is hoping that Albany lawmakers adopt its platform, elements of which Bloomberg embraced as ways to make an impact on the specialized schools and to advance a grander theory of change.

NEW YORK — Ronald Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir, and Richard Parsons, the former chairman of Citigroup, have for decades had their hands in New York City affairs. Lauder ran a failed bid for mayor and successfully led a campaign for term limits for local elected officials. Parsons has been a prominent adviser to two mayors.

Eliza Shapiro

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