4.12/The Lived Worlds/Class and the City

Education: The Class System Made Visible

The Test

At the opposite end of the city’s sorting mechanisms sat a test that cost nothing and answered to no family’s name. In September 1992 the most selective public high school in New York City abandoned the crumbling building it had occupied since 1907 and moved into a purpose-built tower in Battery Park City that had cost around a hundred and fifty million dollars and was reached from TriBeCa by its own pedestrian bridge over West Street.² Admission to Stuyvesant did not turn on the building, the neighborhood, or the family. It turned on a single test. Under a 1972 state law, the Hecht-Calandra Act, the three original specialized high schools — Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical — admitted students by one criterion and one only: the score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, a multiple-choice examination in mathematics and verbal reasoning given on a single morning in the fall of a student’s final year of middle school.³ No grades, no interview, no essay, no record of who the parents were. The cutoff was a rank order and a number of seats, and the number of seats stopped where the class was full.

The examination was the purest meritocratic instrument the city operated, and its results across the period told a particular story. At the start of the period white and Asian-American students had made up the great majority of Stuyvesant’s enrollment in roughly comparable share; by the end of it Asian-American students were the largest group by a wide margin, and Black and Hispanic students together had fallen below a tenth of the school and were still declining. The Bronx High School of Science, founded in 1938 by the educator Morris Meister and sitting in a modernist block off Jerome Avenue in Kingsbridge Heights, ran the same admissions and produced the same drift; it counted more Nobel laureates among its graduates than any other secondary school in the world, most of them in physics.⁴ The schools were free. The test was free. The gate stood somewhere else.

Life inside the exam schools ran on a workload that was itself a kind of sorting: hours of homework taken as ordinary, the advanced track as the default, a place on the math team or an entry in the national science-talent search carried as social currency. The students commuted to it from every borough, an hour or more each way on the train from Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. Stuyvesant ran a student newspaper, The Spectator, that fed directly into New York journalism; the move from the old building to Battery Park City stripped away a generation’s accumulated lore of broken lockers and rumored swimming pools and was mourned in public as a small death. All of it — the workload, the paper, the commute, the lore — presupposed the one thing the neighborhoods furthest from it lacked, which was arrival.

The barrier stood in the months before the test. A commercial preparation course from Kaplan or the Princeton Review ran to several hundred dollars; Khan’s Tutorial in Queens ran a program marketed to South Asian immigrant families; a private tutor charged by the hour. Church and community programs offered preparation free or nearly free, but only where they existed and only to the families who found them. From 1995 the Board of Education ran a free preparation program of its own, aimed at Black and Hispanic students; their share of the specialized schools continued to fall regardless.³ For a child in a Bronx neighborhood where no relative had taken the test and no course was advertised, the operative barrier was not the fee. It was the prior knowledge that the test existed at all, that it was taken in the seventh grade for entry in the ninth, and that a year of preparation was the norm among the children one would be ranked against. A guidance counselor flagged a strong student in time, or no one did, and the difference between those two outcomes never appeared on the score sheet. The test measured what a child could do on a November morning. It did not measure who had told the child to be ready for it.

The List

At the other end of the city’s education economy, the competition began at birth and was conducted entirely in private. Parents seeking a place for a child at one of Manhattan’s elite independent schools started what was known as the list — the sequence of Mommy-and-Me programs and playgroups that fed the kindergarten applications — before the child could walk.¹ The ERB score came back in the family’s file, and applications went out in the fall to six or ten schools at once; parents wrote essays; the child made a “play visit” while the parents were interviewed. Decisions arrived by mail on a single notification day in late winter, acceptance and wait-list and rejection citywide in the same post, and the families who landed on a wait-list entered the period known for the telephone kept by the bed.

The schools were not interchangeable, and the class knew the gradations exactly. Dalton on the Upper East Side coded as progressive, arts-forward, hospitable to the children of the famous; Spence and Chapin and Brearley, the girls’ schools of the East Side, coded as older and more traditional, the daughters of established families; Trinity and Collegiate on the West Side, Episcopal-affiliated and academically relentless, coded as the co-ed and boys’ Ivy feeders; Horace Mann and Fieldston and Riverdale, up in the Bronx, carried the long commute and the pressure that came with it. Tuition at the top schools ran to roughly eleven thousand dollars a year at the start of the period and climbed into the low twenties of thousands by 2001 — a single child’s schooling costing more per year than an editorial assistant earned.¹ The parents’ bible was a paperback, Victoria Goldman’s The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools, first published in 1994, and a copy on a kitchen counter said as much about a household as the address on the door.⁵

Within this class the phrase public school did not mean the public school. It meant, in practice, a narrow set of zoned Manhattan elementaries — PS 6 on the East Side, PS 87 or PS 199 on the West — whose catchment areas had been priced accordingly; anything outside that set required explanation. The exception that the whole class discussed was Hunter College Elementary, a free public school admitting a few dozen children a year by examination at the age of four, and its affiliated high school admitting by test in the seventh grade: a public meritocracy of the kind the specialized high schools represented, folded into a world that otherwise ran on money and manner. For a family with every private school within reach, the Hunter test was the one admission money could not buy. The application to the private schools was itself information, because the list of schools a family had applied to recorded its own reading of where the child belonged. The question in that world was never whether a child had gotten in somewhere. It was which one, and the answer placed the family on a map its members had been reading since they were children themselves.

The Free Academy

Between the exam schools and the private ones ran the institution that had once made the whole argument moot. The City College of New York had opened in 1847 as the Free Academy, on the principle its founder, Townsend Harris, had stated at the outset — to let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and be distinguished by nothing but industry, good conduct, and intellect.⁶ For a hundred and twenty-nine years the municipal colleges of New York charged no tuition. City College took its permanent home in a Gothic quadrangle on Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights, its stone quarried from the excavation of the IRT subway, and it educated the children of immigrants at a scale and to a standard that earned it, in its own mouth, the name of the poor man’s Harvard: it claimed more Nobel laureates among its graduates than any other public college in the country, and its alumni ran from Jonas Salk to Colin Powell.⁷

The free century ended in 1976. In the depths of the city’s fiscal crisis, under pressure from the state that was assuming the cost of the senior colleges, the City University imposed tuition for the first time in its history.⁸ What followed across the next two decades was a series of increases that fell hardest on exactly the students the institution existed to reach. Tuition at the senior colleges climbed from thirteen hundred and fifty dollars in 1991 to eighteen hundred and fifty the next year, to twenty-four hundred and fifty the year after that, and to thirty-two hundred by 1996.⁹ On March 23, 1995, after Governor George Pataki proposed a further increase and the elimination of the state’s remedial and opportunity programs, tens of thousands of students filled City Hall Park in what organizers called the largest student demonstration since the Vietnam era; sixty people were arrested as the crowd tried to march downtown.¹⁰ In 1999 a commission chaired by Benno Schmidt reported on the university and pronounced it “an institution adrift.”¹¹ The year before, the trustees had voted to phase remedial education out of the eleven senior colleges entirely, a change rolled out college by college between 1999 and 2001 that fell most heavily on the campuses serving the poorest students.¹²

The arithmetic of the thing was its own argument. A full year at a CUNY senior college in the mid-1990s cost about a fifth of a single year at Dalton, and the two institutions sat a subway ride apart in the same city. The private-school parent measured tuition against the trajectory it purchased and paid without protest; the City College student, for whom thirty-two hundred dollars was the difference between enrolling and not, measured it against a rent and a wage. A student who had come up through the specialized high schools and then through City College had spent thirteen years inside the city’s free meritocratic institutions and arrived, at twenty-two, holding a set of credentials that were excellent and, in certain rooms, illegible.

The System Most Children Attended

Beneath the exam schools, the private schools, and the university sat the system that actually held most of the city’s children, and in the early 1990s it was the site of the era’s loudest fight over what a public education was for. In February 1993, by a vote of four to three, the Board of Education declined to renew the contract of the schools chancellor, Joseph Fernandez.¹³ Fernandez, a reformer brought up from Miami, had backed two initiatives that joined the era’s culture war to its public-health emergency. The first was a first-grade multicultural curriculum, “Children of the Rainbow,” which urged respect for the diversity of families and drew its fiercest opposition to a handful of titles on its supplementary reading list — among them the picture books Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate, which portrayed children with gay parents.¹⁴ Mary Cummins, who chaired the local school board of District 24 in Queens, refused to distribute the guide and became the national face of the revolt. The second initiative made New York the first school system in the country to make condoms available to high-school students on request, at the height of the AIDS deaths, over the open opposition of Cardinal John O’Connor. Fernandez lost his job over the two together.

The system he had run was starved in a way the fight rarely mentioned. New York City spent, per pupil, well below what the affluent suburbs to the north spent per pupil; its elementary classes commonly ran to thirty children or more where the affluent suburbs ran to little more than twenty; a large share of its buildings predated the Second World War. In a West Bronx neighborhood like Morris Heights, the local schools met the surrounding decade directly — the crack epidemic at its peak, the highest AIDS rates among women in the city, boilers that failed and windows patched with plywood, bathrooms kept locked against drug use so that a child needed a pass to reach one. The bureaucracy that presided over all of it had a street address that had become a synonym for its own failure: 110 Livingston Street, the Board of Education’s headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, was shorthand for institutional paralysis for a generation before the fight over Fernandez.¹⁵ Toward the end of the period a new instrument arrived. The state’s Charter Schools Act, signed by Pataki in December 1998, permitted publicly funded schools run outside the district system, and in September 1999 the first of them opened in Harlem: the Sisulu Children’s Academy, the first charter school in New York State, founded by the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, once a chief of staff to Martin Luther King, and the financier Steven Klinsky, who had left a private-equity firm to build it.¹⁶

The Room Where It Showed

The magazine world was one of the rooms where the whole apparatus became visible, because it drew its staff from the top of it with unusual consistency. The editorial ranks of the major New York magazines had been assembled, overwhelmingly, from a small number of colleges — most of them private, many of them in New England, and, at the top of the mastheads, almost none of them public. The pipelines were specific and well worn. The daily paper at Harvard fed the newsweeklies and the political journals; the papers and literary magazines at Yale and Princeton fed the Times and the weeklies; the small liberal-arts colleges of the Northeast supplied the literary end. An editor who could place a name at a dinner party could often place it to a school and a class year and a mutual acquaintance two doors down a freshman hallway. There had always been other ways in — a piece in The Village Voice, a clip file at an alternative weekly, a book that broke through, an editor who took a chance on a graduate of a state or city university — but those routes narrowed across the decade as the alternative weeklies declined, and the number of people who reached a masthead without the shared credential fell with them. A degree from the same handful of institutions functioned less as a qualification than as a common background, and the fluency it carried was assumed before it was tested.

What the language encoded was the thing Pierre Bourdieu had called habitus: the manner absorbed in childhood, in seminars of twelve and summers abroad and the assumption that one’s opinions mattered, that money made later could purchase but not convincingly counterfeit.¹⁷ A graduate of a private day school at twenty-two had spoken in small classes since the age of five, had every essay read closely, and knew, through a teacher or a roommate’s parent, someone who knew an editor personally. A graduate of a public high school and a city college at twenty-two had fought for attention in classes of thirty, had essays marked for grammar more than for argument, and knew no one in the field and did not know the field in the same way. These were not the same starting line, and the newsroom was among the places where the gap stopped being abstract. Nicholas Lemann’s history of the aptitude test and the meritocracy it built, The Big Test, appeared in 1999 and was read across the magazine world as an account of a machine its readers had passed through without examining.¹⁸ The fluency had a vocabulary, and it was audible in a dozen small usages. It was the boarding school named in passing — Exeter, St. Paul’s, Andover — and the masthead read by first name, and the novel one had done sophomore year, and the summer one had spent in Florence at seventeen; it was the fellowship dropped without a gloss because everyone at the table was assumed to know what it was. The tell of the difference was a single question, asked in the first minutes of small talk and answered in a word. The private-college graduate named the school and watched the question open onto the next one — a name, a year, a connection. The City College graduate said “City,” and the one word was enough in the pause that followed, while the other person calculated which City and filed the answer, and the conversation found another track and moved on without it.