The Last Page
Phillips, Maxine
ACOUPLE OF years ago I picked up my fifth-grade daughter from an afterschool rehearsal for her East Harlem school's chorus. The mother of two other children was late, and I agreed to wait...
...The Edison Corporation, the country's largest for-profit school management company, plans to move its corporate headquarters from midtown to East Harlem...
...Edison, the Amazon.com of the for-profit educational world, has not yet made any money from its ventures to save failing public schools...
...Edison will undoubtedly pour a lot into this school to show what it can do...
...But we will all be diminished as the tall towers rise...
...At neither end would thought be given to the common good, to an ideal that brings races and classes together to forge an educational community...
...In a neighborhood that boasts three private elementary schools and at least two good public ones, why did Columbia need its own school...
...For this article, the Times did not seem to have interviewed anyone connected with the network of alternative public schools in the area...
...The university claimed that it was not abandoning the public schools, but it obviously had put the needs of its own community above those of the surrounding one...
...Instead, the article noted the potential of four hundred jobs, presumably in the offices, and four hundred and eighty construction jobs...
...I thought of our elementary school, where one year the budget for supplies was so low that we had to send pencils from home, where the library was only open intermittently as parent volunteers were available...
...Meanwhile, across town, at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, near my daughters' former elementary school, another story was unfolding...
...And its track record is mixed...
...I was a little put out until she showed up an hour later, with an infant and another child in tow, and I learned that they had traveled almost an hour and a half from their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant...
...The area at 110th Street and Broadway is quite congested and none of the surrounding buildings rises twelve stories...
...It wants a showcase school...
...I thought of that family's desire for a decent education when I read two separate reports in the New York Times that illustrate the abandonment of the ideal of accessible public education...
...A block away from me, in the middle-class neighborhood close to Columbia University, the university plans to build a twelve-story elementary school cum apartments for its faculty and staff...
...It wants to build a big office building cum showcase school...
...The school is a good one...
...At the other end, children would be prepped to do well on standardized tests...
...There will be some individual gains, perhaps some profits, certainly some prestige...
...At one end, children would be encouraged to explore, to challenge, to think critically, to take their place among the elites...
...The mother of two other children was late, and I agreed to wait with them until she arrived...
...Well, it seems that you can't get good help these days, and many potential faculty are reluctant to come to New York because of "high housing prices and the negative perception of the New York City schools," as the Times put it...
...They were tales from one city but two worlds...
...I didn't have to ask why they would endure such a grueling commute...
...Founded by Deborah Meier in the early seventies, it is the prototype nationally for small, progressive public schools that aim to provide a well-rounded education and resist the hysteria around testing and tracking...
...But its investors are convinced that millions can be made on the lives of poor children underserved by beleaguered public school systems...
...Money would go to both new schools on 110th street...
...Why, public school advocates asked, hadn't Columbia gone into partnership with a struggling local public school or started its own charter school...
...MAXINE PHILLIPS...
...With its resources, Columbia could have a 128 • DISSENT / Fall 2000 significant impact on the public schools around it...
...None of the elite private schools a few blocks south and light years away feared competition...
...We, too, chose to send our children out of our school district in order to be part of it...
...The university refused to comment, but it was clear that it wanted control over hiring and firing, curriculum, and, perhaps most important, who could get in...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
