NYC's intentional "misfortune" may be Greenwich real estate's boon
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wait — you mean I can move to the suburbs instead?
Fr. Anthony sends ahoy this article: How New York Stopped Fearing the Urban Doom Loop and Learned to Love It and although I’d already read the first part of it, where the author discusses how cities are spiraling down in general, Anthony brought my attention to the discussion further down that focuses on what the “equity movement” — is doing to public schools and the resulting exodus from cities by parents.
Here’s the paragraph of immediate relevance:
One District 2 mom, who taught in city public schools for six years, says she and her husband have already bought a house in Riverside, Conn., where schools provide accelerated education. They plan to move there if they can't afford a private school in the city.
"It's 100% certain that our children won't go to an unscreened school," says the mother, who asked not to be named because she has two kids in public elementary school. "It's heartbreaking because I grew up in the city and went to public schools. But the standards are falling now."
It’s interesting to note that these parents have bought a house in Riverside but aren’t planning to actually move here unless they can’t find a suitable school in the city. It must be nice to have the money to buy a safety home in Greenwich, just in case.
Anyway, here are some excerpts from the body of the article
… New York City has decided to accelerate the de-peopling of the cities, by all but ending the selective school system, which was the one thing keeping the prosperous middle class located in New York, and paying to keep the city's lights on.
Magnet schools are competitive schools where only higher-performing students are permitted in.
These are extremely important, because they're the only thing keeping high-income but not super-rich families in New York. The cost of private schools in New York ranges from expensive to so expensive that only actual multimillionaires can afford it.
So it's vital to have a functioning public school system in New York City. New York's main public school system is dysfunctional and terrible, but as long as the city kept its magnet schools open so that the prosperous middle class had a free schooling option for their academically-gifted kids, it made living in New York with a family possible.
The left wanted to destroy the magnet school system, claiming it was "racist" because blacks and Hispanics were underrepresented in these competitive-entry schools.
I didn't think New York would really destroy the system. I thought they'd realize "We're about to tell the fat middle of our tax base, the prosperous upper-middle class, that they cannot raise families in New York, and should flee the city."
But they have.
And the prosperous middle class is now in fact fleeing.
Alex Shilkrut has deep roots in Manhattan, where he has lived for 16 years, works as a physician, and sends his daughter to a public elementary school for gifted students in coveted District 2.
It's a good life. But Shilkrut regretfully says he may leave the city, as well as a job he likes in a Manhattan hospital, because of sweeping changes in October that ended selective admissions in most New York City middle schools.
These merit-based schools, which screened for students who met their high standards, will permanently switch to a lottery for admissions that will almost certainly enroll more blacks and Latinos in the pursuit of racial integration.
Shilkrut is one of many parents who are dismayed by the city's dismantling of competitive education. He says he values diversity [bold facing added by your FWIW editor to highlight the hypocrisy at work here] but is concerned that the expectation that academic rigor will be scaled back to accommodate a broad range of students in a lottery is what's driving him and other parents to seek alternatives.
"We will very likely leave the public schools," says Shilkrut, adding that he knows 10 Manhattan families who also plan to depart. "And if these policies continue, there won't be many middle- and upper middle-class families left in the public schools."…. The retreat from selective middle schools in New York City gained momentum during the pandemic. Prior to COVID, almost 200 of the city's middle schools, or nearly half the total, used enrollment screens, typically grades and test scores, to select high achievers.
Whites and Asians won a disproportionate number of seats in these competitive schools, creating a form of segregation based on academic performance. For instance, at Salk School of Science, a junior high in District 2, these groups accounted for three-fourths of the enrollment, with blacks and Latinos taking less than a quarter of the seats even though they make up two-thirds of all students in NYC's system.
...
New York has already faced crippling losses in school population -- 10% of all students who left during covid never came back.
The drop-off accelerated in this and other cities nationwide during the pandemic. Many parents left after seeing the harm done to their children by remote learning when teachers, backed by their union, refused to return to the classroom. Families of all races, particularly blacks, and all income levels exited public schools for charters, homeschools, and mostly for an education outside New York City in New Jersey and in southern states like Florida.
By 2022, the city's schools were down to about 900,000 students, a remarkable 10% drop from two years earlier.
Nothing is more dangerous to the city's schools than the loss of students. State funding is based on head count, and the decline already forced Mayor Eric Adams to cut more than $200 million from the education budget this summer.
And now the City is telling another 10-20% of parents: Take your children somewhere safe.
"I have no doubt that some parents in areas like the Upper East Side will leave the city because of the elimination of screens," says Ray Domanico, a longtime researcher of the city's school enrollment both within the system and now at the conservative Manhattan Institute. "With significantly fewer kids enrolled today, the city shouldn't be pushing policies that could drive more families away."
Selective middle schools were created decades ago to keep middle-class families in the city as crime was pushing them to the suburbs in large numbers. By the 1990s, as the soaring murder rate began to recede and more people moved into less inhabited areas of District 2, parents began to demand better schools, Domanico says.
"The school system chose to respond to those families by setting up screened schools," he says. "The city wanted to appeal to better-educated parents of all racial groups who had good jobs."
In District 2, officials rolled out screened middle and high schools that quickly gained a reputation for excellence, including the Salk School of Science on East 20th Street in 1995.
The schools helped lure white and Asian families to the district. In the following two decades, the number of white students in the district rose to 26% in 2020, up from 19% in 2003, according to state enrollment data. More Asian students enrolled in the district too, bringing their total to 22%, while the number of black students fell to 14% from 22%. Latinos, the largest group, declined as well.The author concludes:
And now New York City has decided to accelerate the de-peopling of the cities, by all but ending the selective school system, which was the one thing keeping the prosperous middle class located in New York, and paying to keep the city's lights on.
Covid -- and I'm sure the Summer of St. Floyd -- accelerated this trend towards Harrison Bergeronism.
The retreat from selective middle schools in New York City gained momentum during the pandemic. Prior to COVID, almost 200 of the city's middle schools, or nearly half the total, used enrollment screens, typically grades and test scores, to select high achievers.
Whites and Asians won a disproportionate number of seats in these competitive schools, creating a form of segregation based on academic performance. For instance, at Salk School of Science, a junior high in District 2, these groups accounted for three-fourths of the enrollment, with blacks and Latinos taking less than a quarter of the seats even though they make up two-thirds of all students in NYC's system.
The lesson to be learned here is that for all their lip service paid to “diversity” and “equity” and acknowledgement of “white guilt”, parents aren’t willing to sacrifice their children on that alter of wokeness.