Amy P sent me a link to a post on Joanne Jacobs that brings together two of my favorite topics — gentrification and parental involvement in schools.
P.S. 84 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn was a Latino dominated school for many years, until the hipsters arrived and started having babies. They started sending their kids to the local school and now, their kids comprise nearly half of the pre-K and Kindergarten classes.
The white gentrifiers have offended the long time parents by criticizing the school and teachers (the test scores are extremely low) and by questioning long term practices like selling ice-cream to the Pre-K kids and by wanting to get rid of the Three Kings Day parade.
In some ways, this story is a unique Brooklyn tale. The white parents believe the Three Kings Day parade is a religious event that will make their non-Christian children feel out of place and is a violation of the separation of church and state. The Latinos believe that the Three Kings Day parade is a cultural event that celebrates their heritage. In this case, the white parents should have lightened up a bit.
Other aspects of this story are class-based, and I've seen it before in entirely white towns. The long time parents have bonded with the teachers at the school. They are less concerned about test scores, because they have a different priority in schools than the newer parents; they want a school where their kids are safe and accepted. They think that the middle-class parents are pushy, entitled, and rude.
Then there are all the resentments that gentrification stirs up. The Latinos are certainly concerned that the rich folks are coming into town and telling the long term residents what to do and will ultimately take their apartments and expose the bricks and push them out.
Homophily is the tendency for people to bond with people like themselves. I think it is an unfortunate human characteristic, because ultimately I think we learn more from being around people who are different from us. I hope these folks can work it out and find a middle ground.
Apt. 11d 
“I hope these folks can work it out and find a middle ground.”
The article was hopeful, pointing to an increase in enrollment and suggesting that the new principal is in a better position to arbitrate between the two sides.
The enrollment level is a crucial part of the story, because if it falls too low, the school will have to cede part of its space to a charter, which the article represents as a fate worse than death.
Another issue that comes up in the P.S. 84 story is that the gentrifier parents want progressive education. Although I’m sure P.S. 84 has lots of room for improvement, the sort of education that the gentrifiers like is most accessible to children who come in with a lot of cultural capital and it could easily prove disastrous for other children. Children from the two groups may genuinely need a very different sort of education in elementary school, because they have different needs.
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Gosh this is sad. It seems like both sides were short-sighted. A little bending and finesse on the hipster side might have helped the existing parents adapt to the changes that need to be made. And obviously the changes do need to be made.
My kids’s school constantly says “We don’t teach to the test” as well, but the second half of that sentence is “but we still outscore district, state and national testing.” You don’t have to do rote memorization to get good test scores. The scores shouldn’t be the only measurement of student achievement, but they have to be one component of it.
And I would’ve kept the Three Kings parade and used it as part of some social studies unit. Also would’ve suggested selling ice cream on special occasions. I hate bake sales, parents spend as much money on the ingredients as the kids make. My guess is ice cream is close to the same.
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I can’t imagine any kind of school or neighborhood or community that wouldn’t be improved by a robust Three Kings Day celebration. Stupid white middle-class agnostics.
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If they wanted, they could celebrate the Defense of Veracruz and piss off the even more Americans.
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At least in Chicago, Three Kings Day is also associated with gang activity, in the form of the Latin Kings’ King Day. I would like to know more before I assume to understand the motivations of the people who disliked the parade. If I saw a Three Kings parade where half the participants were in black and gold, I would also have a problem with it.
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“If they wanted, they could celebrate the Defense of Veracruz and piss off the even more Americans.”
Maybe across the nation, but I bet the hipster Brooklyn crowd would have been perfectly happy with a celebration of the defense of Veracruz (or the Alamo from the other point of view).
I’m guessing it’s the religious connotations of the 3 kings that offended the crowd (does this have something to do with Jesus? and the new testament?). The conflation of religious and cultural traditions are rampant (and difficult to separate) but, it’s culturally deaf to ignore the issues atheists (or, I wouldn’t be surprised in this case, Jews) would have with the religious connotations.
A religious pre-school teacher tried to convince the Jews in our pre-school that the nativity she’d brought in was OK, because the baby jesus was just a baby. It really didn’t fly with our crowd. I personally, love nativities. I think they’re a great cultural tradition. But, like crucifixes I do consider them religious symbols of a religion I do not believe in.
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BJ, I’m trying to teach the Latino people about market segmentation. You need a different strategy to irk each different demographic.
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And yes, Three Kings Day is the end of the Christmas season, mostly. I get confused about what other churches and Catholics in other countries do. In the U.S., it is know as the Feast of the Epiphany and is a minor religious holiday.
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“The conflation of religious and cultural traditions are rampant (and difficult to separate) but, it’s culturally deaf to ignore the issues atheists (or, I wouldn’t be surprised in this case, Jews) would have with the religious connotations.”
Religion is culture and culture is religion. While I wouldn’t be thrilled to have my child dragooned into participating in an alien religious practice, kids do need to learn more about culture, religion geography and history, there being significant overlap between those four categories. It’s unfortunate that that is probably politically impossible in the public schools as currently constituted, insofar as there always will be a gap between a religious group’s self-perception versus other groups’ perception of them.
It could also be a lot worse. My relative who lives in Germany says that when the three kings visit in her part of Bavaria, one of them is in black face.
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“In the U.S., it is know as the Feast of the Epiphany and is a minor religious holiday.”
If you’re hard core about Catholic Christmas tradition (like my household is), the tree gets decorated Christmas Eve and it stays up until after Epiphany/Three Kings.
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“Religion is culture and culture is religion.”
Yes, I realize this, too. But, it’s not true that you can’t teach about religion as culture in the public school (or other non-sectarian classroom). You just have to do it in the right way, with the right context. Religious practitioners don’t always like that approach (for example, the bible as literature) and sometimes the easy solution is to just exclude it.
It’s undeniably true, though, that knowing text from the bible is important for understanding literature, and the same is true for understanding the cultural backgrounds that include religion.
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As a nice jewish lady who didn’t let my daughter watch Dora’s Three Kings special a few years ago (she watched the hour long mermaid kingdom special on DVD instead), I totally understand the pickle this all presents. This is all really interesting. When you are a member of a minority, having endless displays of Christianity is super annoying. but its hard when the display of christianity comes from another minority. sigh.
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“…sometimes the easy solution is to just exclude it.”
That seems to be the usual method. Works for evolution, too, not to mention sex.
The impossibility of reaching academically respectable compromises with regard to content is a big argument against public schools as an idea. We all want something very different from our schools (different academic focus, different religious or political flavor, different languages, different length of school day, different holiday schedule, different discipline style, different attitude toward sports, different extracurriculars, different expectations of parents), so why should we all crowd into the same one-size-fits-all institution? Most of the point of public schools in the old days was to beat the foreignness out of immigrants.
“When you are a member of a minority, having endless displays of Christianity is super annoying. but its hard when the display of christianity comes from another minority. sigh.”
And yet, I don’t know that it’s true that non-Christian minorities in the US are very knowledgeable about US Christian cultures. At best, there’s a sort of surface familiarity without deep understanding. And that’s generally true of elite US opinion, I think.
(Get Religion at http://www.getreligion.org is really good, by the way. Their specialty is pointing to holes in news stories where there should have been a better explanation of religious issues.)
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Hmmm. These discussions of religion in school are foreign to me, mainly because I went to a public school where the biggest mandatory school celebration was Kwanzaa. If you were the type of white person who didn’t want your kid to celebrate Kwanzaa, then you probably wouldn’t have had your kid bussed to a majority-black school in a bad neighborhood for desegregation purposes anyways. Each teacher had full control over what they celebrate, but at maximum we also celebrated Christmas, Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, Purim, Rosh Hashanah, and all the secular US holidays (MLK day being the biggest). At minimum we only celebrated Lunar New Year, plus the school holiday assembly, MLK day and Kwanzaa. If your family or culture celebrated a special holiday, you could in the lower grades have show and tell on that day to explain about the customs.
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Oh, and I forgot. You can have mixed-ability classrooms and have all students end up with an excellent education, however it requires skill and commitment on the part of the teachers, principle, parents etc. My experience, having gone to both an elementary and middle school that were anti-tracking, involved having a combination of independent, self-paced work, collaborative projects where the goal is collaboration, not the end product, and occasionally dividing the class up into smaller groups of like ability level, in addition to normal activities. Even though there was a very wide ability difference, somehow, all the students managed to learn and be challenged, and in addition to “book learning,” we also, all of us, learned an incredible amount by being surrounding by people with completely different backgrounds.
Creating that type of environment requires a commitment to certain political goals and a certain type of society that goes far beyond wanting your kid to get into Harvard, or putting a “me and my child first, above all else” sort of attitude when it comes to education. (Even though, if you measure success based on fancy school attendance, every middle class kid from my elementary and middle school did just fine.)
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Creating that type of environment requires a commitment to certain political goals and a certain type of society that goes…
Or a really small town with no nearby school districts.
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I guess it depends how you define “knowledgeable about Christian cultures” but Pew found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons knew more about a range of religions than Catholics or Protestants.
http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx
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I remember that survey–note how the high scorers were all very small groups. The questions were a micron thick. True cultural and historical knowledge is much, much rarer, across the board. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anybody Jewish (and I had a lengthy philosemitic phase) who really got Christianity, in any version, although it’s possible that such people exists. In elite US culture, religious understanding tends to be clouded by a vision of the zombie hordes from Jesusland, shambling toward the voting booth. How deeply does one need to understand zombies, after all? In addition, there are some very entertaining theological speed bumps for the unwary. Take, for instance “the immaculate conception.” The archives of Get Religion contain a huge library of similar media oopsies.
As in so many other academic areas but here with special urgency (since the US seems fated to have at least two wars going in the Islamic world at any time), we all need to know a lot more about world religions and how they intertwine with history and culture and geography. But unfortunately, there’s probably no politic way to go about instilling a deep understanding of the theology and history and culture of world religions in the public school system, as currently constituted. And no, celebrating Three Kings or doing a Ramadan simulation does not constitute deep knowledge, although it’s something like a start.
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or doing a Ramadan simulation
They’d lay-off the cafeteria people and call it close enough.
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