What School Choice Really Means

South of Ninety-sixth Street lie some of New York City's most fashionable addresses. The continuing collapse of the city's economy has touched even these streets, of course, and now there are empty stores, unsellable condominiums. But nannies still push strollers along Fifth Avenue and in Central Park, and adolescents still stream forth from private schools. Lawyers and investment bankers still look as if they had stepped straight out of the display windows at Talbot's or Brooks Brothers. Almost the only nonwhite faces to be seen belong to the help. To the north of Ninety-sixth Street lies East Harlem. On its two hundred square blocks many of the brownstones are empty, boarded up, covered with barbed wire and jagged bits of glass to keep out the vagrants and drug addicts. Half of East Harlem's population of 120,000 is Hispanic, and almost all the rest is African-American. New arrivals come mostly from dirt-poor Caribbean and Central American countries. By all the standard social measures, East Harlem is among the worst-off neighborhoods in the city.

Yet every school-day morning brings a remarkable sight, as a thousand or so children from elsewhere in the city, many of them from families that could easily afford private academies, negotiate the buses and subways with practiced cool to join the 14,000 Hispanic and black children who attend East Harlem's elementary and junior high schools. These students come to East Harlem not because some official issued an integration order or redrew a school-district boundary but because their families have chosen to send them here. Remarkably, in some of the battered school buildings of this neighborhood, where these children attend classes with the children of the barrio, an exemplary education can be had. East Harlem's schools have, in fact, become famous, at least among educators, for their quality--relative to that of other inner-city schools, anyway--and the story of the transformation of these schools has by now acquired the status of an oft-told legend.

In 1970, when each of New York City's elementary and junior high schools was assigned to one of thirty-two community school districts, with powerful elected school boards that had the right to pick the local superintendent, East Harlem's schools, which make up District Four, were widely regarded as the city's worst. In 1974 the children scored thirty-second--dead last--on standardized reading tests. Absenteeism was chronic among teachers as well as students. Gangs had turned junior high corridors into battlegrounds, school bathrooms into drug bazaars. And yet scarcely a decade later this prototypical blackboard jungle had come to be hailed as something of a model for urban education. The most widely cited measure of its accomplishment is the reported improvement in reading achievement: by the mid-1980s East Harlem's scores had risen from the very worst citywide to a level approximating the citywide average.

Behind this change, East Harlem's boosters say, lies the simple but revolutionary fact that parents in East Harlem are now allowed to choose their children's schools--thereby introducing the salutary effects of competition into institutions dispirited by inertia, red tape, and the chaos of the surrounding community. These changes are not unique to East Harlem. Across the country, public school choice has been one of the most widely adopted reforms of the past decade, and enthusiasts for one or another version of school choice span the political spectrum. But what does make East Harlem special, and so worth paying attention to, is that it came first--and that New York has just decided to make a school-choice program citywide. In District Four choice has been sustained as a guiding philosophy for nearly two decades--a geological epoch in the faddish world of education policy. Moreover, the system of choice has been implemented in a city where the difficulties of making ANYTHING happen are well known, and in a neighborhood characterized by deep social pathology. And it is undeniable that much of the education in East Harlem is better than what was available twenty years ago. But did choice make the difference? And how much difference has actually been made?

These are important questions, the answers to which have implications for schools around the country--because even as legions of defenders hold up East Harlem as a national model, critics assail some of what has happened there as a triumph of public relations. Yes, they say, many East Harlem mini-schools may get a silk-stocking trade, and may offer instruction that is as good as in the better private schools, but just a few corridors away are classrooms with no middle-class students and all the familiar woes of inner-city education. And, they say, the way the system labeled "choice" works in practice makes such disparities inevitable.

THE REVOLUTION BEGINS

During the mid-1950s novelist Dan Wakefield, then a young reporter, lived in Spanish Harlem for six months and delivered a savage indictment of official neglect, especially in the public schools. "[The schools] have been of little help to the children of Spanish Harlem in escaping the realities of its streets, or...changing those realities to something like the promise of the posters that smile from the classrooms," Wakefield wrote in Island in the City. "The schools, in fact, have blocked out the possibilities of the world beyond even more profoundly than the tenement buildings around them." The situation only deteriorated in 1968, when black and radical white parents and teachers throughout the city fought the teachers' union and the education bureaucracy for greater local control over schools. They got it in 1970, after several bitter teachers' strikes, but the aftermath brought infighting of every kind among the board members of the thirty-two newly created school districts.

Things began to improve in District Four in 1973, when an insurgent slate was elected to the school board. Robert Rodriguez, an East Harlem native who headed the slate and directed the East Harlem Neighborhood Manpower Service Center, was only twenty-one at the time. The new board chairman was committed to running a clean enterprise, in which educational priorities didn't get confused with personal agendas and board members didn't push pet programs or hand out patronage jobs to friends. Keeping fellow board members and local leaders from meddling in the details of personnel and programs didn't prove easy, however, and tensions ran so high that police officers were sometimes present at board meetings to assure order.

When Rodriguez came to power, the district superintendent was seen by many in the community as symbolizing the old, unresponsive regime. The superintendent was quickly forced out, and the board chose as his successor Anthony Alvarado, a charismatic thirty-year-old Puerto Rican from East Harlem. His fast-track career had taken him from Fordham University to half a dozen jobs in education, including running an experimental preschool and heading up a bilingual elementary school.

As the District Four superintendent, Alvarado brought in new black and Hispanic principals--a good idea in itself, and certainly also a way of fending off potential local critics. He also pushed an agenda that included alternative schools, bilingual schools (which now enroll 2,000 of the district's students), a district-wide reading program, and major infusions of federal and state dollars.

The alternative schools have gotten the most attention, yet they began almost accidentally. In 1974 Alvarado approached Deborah Meier, a longtime teacher on Manhattan's Upper West Side and a pedagogical reformer committed to bringing open classrooms to city schools, and asked if she would be interested in running her own elementary school. Meier jumped at the chance. In the school she had in mind, classrooms would have places to build things, quiet spaces for reading, and corners for painting. Teachers would move around, offering individual help. Classes would be small by city standards, and teachers would come to know their students well, because they would spend two years with the same children. The new school would depend for its survival on parents' willingness to accept the risks of an unfamiliar kind of education for their children, and also on teachers' willingness to surrender their lunch hours to students and their after-school hours to meetings that ran as long as in socialist heaven. The school had to start small, Meier argued, one grade at a time, with no set curriculum--"If the teacher cared a lot [about a topic] and the kids cared a lot, that was a good topic"--and no guaranteed results.

Although classes like this have been routine for half a century in the best progressive private academies, the school Meier and Alvarado proposed to create was a deviant institution in New York City public schools, where teachers typically stood at the front of the classroom talking at rows of nodding heads and covering a prescribed curriculum. Central Park East, as Meier's elementary school was called, started out in the fall of 1974 on two floors of P.S. 171, a run-down elementary school with which it would be competing for students and resources. Many of the Puerto Rican parents living in the neighborhood, whose memories of their own education led them to equate quality with order, were suspicious of a white Jewish woman and her permissive ideas. Some community activists wanted a school rooted more in the language and struggles of the barrio than in the theories of John Dewey and Jean Piaget. But the school attracted students, and after a troubled first few years its reputation as a good place to learn began to spread. Soon there were more applicants than spaces, with many of the applications coming from outside East Harlem.

The same year that Central Park East opened its doors, two other alternative schools opened, to serve grades five through nine: the East Harlem Performing Arts School and the BETA ("better education through alternatives") School, which took rejects from other schools, where they had made teachers' lives hell (the BETA School would close in 1990).

In 1976 Alvarado hired Seymour Fliegel, who had been a teacher and administrator in Harlem for two decades, to oversee the existing alternative schools and help create many new ones. By 1982 two new primary schools, Central Park East II and River East, were launched to meet a rising demand for open classrooms. Though they began as spinoffs of Central Park East, and took students from a common pool of applicants, the new academies gradually developed their own identities. From the outset, places in these schools were much sought-after, and soon educators with other dreams appeared at Fliegel's doorstep. Alan Sofferman, who had taught fifth and sixth grades at P.S. 96, and who eventually became its assistant principal, imagined a School of Science and Humanities, as tradition-oriented as any parochial school. Students would wear uniforms, and silence would be observed as orderly ranks of pupils passed by one another in the corridors. Leonard Bernstein, a science teacher, designed the Isaac Newton School with the intention of exposing the brightest youngsters from the ghetto to state-of-the-art instruction in science and math. Beryl Epton, who had taught at the BETA School, wanted a chance to work with younger children who had troubled histories. She started the Children's Workshop, the smallest of East Harlem's alternative schools, a one-room second-through-fourth-grade class for children who had been or were likely to be held back because of behavioral problems. New schools opened almost every year, each one trying to find its special niche. Their names reveal the range of aspirations: the Academy of Environmental Science, the Maritime School, the East Harlem Career Academy, the Talented and Gifted School.

While every other district in the city was pleading poverty, East Harlem usually found the money to do what it wanted. For one thing, its administrators came to realize that because the notion of choice pushed the right buttons at Ronald Reagan's Department of Education, Washington after 1980 would be forthcoming with cash. At one point during the 1980s District Four received more federal money per student than any other school district in the country. The Republicans from Washington and the liberal Democrats from Spanish Harlem have made strange bedfellows, and there are those who say that the district was manipulated. Yet in the cutthroat world of New York City school politics, Washington's support bought East Harlem a measure of protection.

District Four was also prepared to fend for itself. For years it engaged heavily in the risky business of deficit financing, and it outmaneuvered the dozing downtown bureaucrats. The alternative schools, with their tiny staffs, could not live with the seniority system that reigned in every other city district. So the principals (called directors) of the alternative schools recruited teachers mainly by word of mouth, and turned to Fliegel to slip the new teachers onto the payroll regardless of seniority.

The teachers' unions initially protested about all the rules East Harlem was breaking. But they backed off when they saw members volunteering to swap protections won through collective bargaining for the rewards of professionalism. (Today the New York City teachers' contract specifies that with a three-quarters-majority vote the teachers at any school can waive rules about class size and teachers' schedules.)

"I could say, 'We had a long-range plan: we envisioned a choice program ten years down the line,'" Fliegel says. "But things don't work that way. It developed organically." Slowly, if haphazardly, with a sizable dose of what Fliegel calls "creative noncompliance" with the rules, an alternative system parallel to the regular schools emerged, with a handful of alternative elementary schools and a somewhat larger number of junior highs--twenty-two alternative schools in all by 1982, offering a wide range of options. By then there were enough options to enable every sixth-grade student in East Harlem to have at least SOME choice, although competition for places at the most popular schools was sufficiently intense that the schools, not the parents and students, ended up doing most of the picking. Still, by 1982 half of East Harlem's junior high students were attending one of the alternative schools, and by that year East Harlem had moved from thirty-second to fifteenth in the city in reading scores. District Four began getting national attention.

THE NUMBERS GAME

East Harlem officials focus on District Four's dramatically improved test scores when trumpeting their success. In 1974, they note, only 15.3 percent of the district's students could read at or above grade level; by 1988 the proportion had quadrupled, to 62.5 percent.

This fact is always seized on by those who would commend the East Harlem experience to other school systems. Yet those statistics, while technically correct, are somewhat misleading, and a close look at them begins to reveal some other realities of the East Harlem experience. The biggest improvements in reading scores occurred in 1975 (13 percentage points), when the choice program was just getting started, and in 1986 (9.5 percentage points), when New York City switched to a different test. In those two years reading levels improved substantially all across the city.

Moreover, in 1988 the city was using a test whose norms--the criteria for what should be expected by way of performance--had been set a decade earlier. But in the interim there had been a marked increase in basic-skills levels, and so the norms were out-of-date. It's as if a high-jump bar had remained at a certain height even as the jumpers had grown taller. After new national norms were established, in 1989, the proportion of youngsters performing at grade level dropped to 42 percent in East Harlem (as against 48 percent citywide). This doesn't mean that things weren't getting better in East Harlem, but it does mean that the statistical gain is not as fantastically large as is commonly claimed. Nor have matters changed much since then. Last year 43 percent of students in East Harlem (as compared with 49 percent of students citywide) were doing grade-level work.

Comparisons with other districts do show that from 1978, when norms were previously established, to 1989 District Four's reading scores rose by 14.2 percent, as compared with 2.3 percent for the city as a whole. That was the second-biggest improvement recorded in all of the city's districts. (The biggest improvement, 14.5 percent, occurred in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn district that is 98 percent black and Hispanic, whose school system combines choice at the junior high level with a strong emphasis on scholastic drills and testing.) Performance on the mathematics test has been far weaker. Since 1986, when the current citywide test for mathematics was adopted, District Four has fallen from twentieth to twenty-seventh place.

It is hard to know how much of the improvement in reading scores to attribute to choice. For one thing, much of the gain has been recorded in neighborhood elementary schools, where choice has not been as widely available as in the junior highs. For another, the district-wide data conceal variations as great as can be found among public schools anywhere in America. In 1991 at least 75 percent of the students at the most elite East Harlem schools, including the Talented and Gifted School (TAG) for elementary students and Manhattan East and Isaac Newton for junior high students, scored at or above grade level. At Central Park East Secondary School, with a more diverse student body, more than half of the junior high school students read at grade level. Until recently these schools received special funding from the federal magnet-schools program, and they have attracted most of the students who come from outside East Harlem. TAG, for example, is 40 percent white.

The question of who is attending which East Harlem schools goes to the heart of the system of choice. In its publicity brochures District Four describes its schools as "Schools That Dare to Compete," but the fact is that in many cases it is not the schools but the students that are competing--competing for the schools. A mother visiting New York Prep while I was there was eager to persuade its director at the time, Brian Spears, that her daughter, who was shyly tagging along, should be admitted.

"Why do you want to send your daughter here?" Spears asked.

"You've got computers and a good reading program," the mother said. "It's a safe school. I've got a younger daughter downstairs in the elementary school, and the principal there says it's good."

"There are two hundred and fifty applicants for seventy places," Spears replied, and then added, "The fact that you've come down, shown an interest, that's very important."

Sometimes parents treat the selection process as casually as if they were selecting a brand of cereal. Other parents--ones considering elementary schools in particular--base their decisions on factors like proximity and the safety of the neighborhood, which are important but only indirectly related to the quality of the education their children will receive. And for the many youngsters who are characterized by district officials as "at risk"--including children with young mothers strung out on crack, children who have worn thin the patience of their grandmothers, children living in group homes or on the streets--there is no responsible adult to make a choice.

Choice is a tool wielded less decisively by parents than by the school directors, the most adept of whom, like Spears, seek out students they think will succeed in their schools. Five alternative junior highs recruit many of their best students from elementary schools located in the same building that they themselves occupy. Until the past few years others ran their own early-admissions programs, effectively picking students before most parents had a chance to apply. It is largely because of this hidden selection process--which screens both for levels of skill and for traits of character--that some very good schools have been created in East Harlem.

A hierarchy has emerged, reflecting the extent to which schools can be selective. At the top are the so-called elite schools, which the ablest East Harlem children and most of the youngsters from outside neighborhoods attend. The highly selective sixth-through-eighth-grade school Manhattan East, which offers what it calls "a rigorous classical academic program," attracts as many as eighty of its 215 students from the world outside District Four; this integration would be less likely to occur if the school had less say over who gets in from the world inside District Four. The junior high school New York Prep, in the middle of the academic pecking order but with four applicants for every place, can also fill up with good children and reject all likely troublemakers. At the bottom of the heap are schools that virtually none of each year's 1,400 prospective seventh-graders in District Four would choose. These get the hundreds of children who are left over after the more successful schools have made their picks.

In theory, unsuccessful schools in a competitive system would be shut down and replaced with more-popular alternatives. That can be hard to arrange, though, when one reason that a school is unsuccessful is that it has been saddled with the least-promising and most-disruptive students--a change of name, director, and educational philosophy can accomplish only so much. It's also hard to arrange in the real world, where a teachers'-union contract guarantees job security and where many among the poor are possessive even of terrible schools, because these happen to be their schools. In nearly two decades only three alternative schools have been shut down in East Harlem. For all these reasons, a substantial proportion of elementary and junior high students wind up in schools that remain largely unaffected by the improvements in District Four.

AN EAST HARLEM SAMPLER

Diversity is just an abstraction until you walk into the East 109th Street building that a decade ago was a conventional junior high for 1,300 students. At that time it was a school with a reputation for student violence and dead-end teaching. Now the building houses four alternative elementary and junior high schools: the Harbor Performing Arts School, the Talented and Gifted School, the East Harlem Career Academy, and the Key School. Pedagogically these places are worlds apart, though they are separated physically by no more than a staircase or a fire door.

A visitor must sign in at a guard's desk before entering--a reminder that trouble is always possible from the crack dealers or the bullying high schoolers who hang around. When I visited the building, the guard was a young woman from the neighborhood, a recent high school graduate who returned to a book of word puzzles when no visitors were in sight. She carried no weapon and would have scared no one, but she offered at least the illusion of protection.

The Talented and Gifted School's name is no mere euphemism. Introspective TAG students take a battery of intelligence and psychological tests, and submit to interviews. The school rejects six children for every one it accepts. In one classroom I saw, pre-kindergartners age four were already beginning to write. A first-grade classroom was filled with stuffed dolls, likenesses of themselves that the children had crafted. "I'm Leslie," the writing on one doll proclaimed. "My puppy sleeps in my bed." "I'm Jenna," said the words on another. "I went to Florida." There was an "Artists' Touch" corner and an "Our Pets" corner. On the wall were cartoon figures demonstrating "angry," "afraid," and "frustrated." I asked the teacher's aide whether "frustrated" wasn't too sophisticated a concept for these six-year-olds, but she assured me that they get it. One of the kids volunteered, "It's the feeling I have when I can't do what I want."

Two floors away, at the Harbor Performing Arts School, with 210 seventh- through ninth-graders, a dance teacher led a dozen girls through a routine. The girls stood poised at the bar. "First position and stop and step back and step forward--don't use your arm, use your entire body...first position three, down on four...Please stop fidgeting. Don't give me third, Ebony--we're in fifth." A sign hanging in the room read, IF YOU'RE NOT WORKING ON YOURSELF, YOU'RE NOT WORKING, and intensity was sketched on the girls' straining faces. From down the hall came the sounds of a choir practicing a medley of songs. In a month the Harbor School's singers and dancers would begin rehearsing their major school production, a Broadway musical. The director at the time, Leslie Moore, told me that these classes build self-esteem. "If teenagers who are having trouble in math or English can succeed in singing or dancing," she said, "with all the discipline that that demands, they don't walk away defeated; they'll stay in school, maybe catch on to academic work. There's also some direct carry-over, since students in music or drama have to make sense of words."

Four hundred students apply for the seventy openings in the seventh grade at Harbor. Some will go on to La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts--in 1990 ten of the twelve who applied there were admitted--and more will attend prep schools or the city's selective high schools. A handful of alumni are celebrated, among them Amani A. W.-Murray, who has released a saxophone album to bravo reviews, and Carlos Guity, a boy from the slums of the southeast Bronx who became an acrobat with the Big Apple Circus.

A typical junior high teacher with 150 students to teach over five periods can't be expected to remember all the students' names, let alone know very much about them. The intimate scale of some of the East Harlem junior high schools invites teachers to invest themselves, much like coaches, in their students' futures. On my initial visit to New York Prep, which occupies the fifth floor of an old elementary school, a boy whom I will call Jaime Morelia, home on vacation after his first term at a Connecticut prep school, came in to check up on his fonder teachers and see his friends. Jaime's natural ease made him seem more like a college freshman than a fifteen-year-old. He appeared to have made the transition from Harlem to an elite private academy without difficulty. His grades were decent and his confidence was intact. "It's different there," he said. "The work isn't so easy. And it's quiet. I'm used to noise. But we had good preparation for it, and the school is small enough so you can become close to everybody."

Christina Giammalva, who until recently divided her time between teaching history at New York Prep and placing her students at prep schools, believed that Jaime would make it at prep school. Although there were students with stronger academic records and better test scores, Jaime was clear-headed, a survivor. When his father disappeared from the family picture, Jaime, then thirteen, became the man of the house. All during his time at New York Prep he had to juggle the heavy and sometimes conflicting demands of home and school.

In terms of overall reading scores, New York Prep isn't impressive: in 1991 only 35 percent of the students there were reading at or above grade level. But typically eight or nine of the seventy ninth-graders at New York Prep, many of whom have lived lives at least as hard as Jaime's, will go on to private schools. Student programs involving Scarsdale High and Princeton University, and field trips to places like Boston and Washington, D.C., show New York Prep's students something of the world beyond the ghetto. One or two afternoons after school every week, 120 of the 210 students spend nearly an hour getting to Columbia University, where they are tutored by law-school and business-school students. Those accepted by private schools take an intensive summer course to hone their academic skills and prepare them psychologically for what's ahead. Almost all will go on to college. Don't pay too much attention to the test scores, the teachers at New York Prep write in their recommendation letters, because we know this student. We won't hide the weaknesses, but we will tell you why they're manageable. In ordinary junior highs in inner cities this degree of involvement in the lives of students is largely unheard of.

The teachers' predictions cannot be infallible, of course, because few among us live perfectly mapped-out and predictable lives. Certainly not most fifteen-year-olds--they believe in their own immortality, and their eyes are on many prizes all at once.

We know how treacherous the passage from ghetto to private school can be from stories like that of Edmund Perry, whose journey from Harlem to Phillips Exeter Academy ended in robbery and death. Jaime's story is not so tragic, only shadowed and human. During his first year at prep school he was caught cheating--in Spanish, of all subjects--and placed on probation. This past spring, at the end of his junior year, he used a teacher's telephone calling card to phone his mother and his friends in East Harlem. He was found out--how could it have been otherwise?--and expelled. Now he is enrolled in a New York City public high school.

What Jaime Morelia did was plainly wrong, and his moral compass was calibrated finely enough for him to know that. The deeper puzzle is why he behaved as he did. Christina Giammalva speculates that for Jaime the psychological distance may have been too great, the demands to conform to prep-school mores too imposing. Perhaps, Giammalva says, he made those phone calls to invite rejection, rather than be forced to do the rejecting.

Jaime's failure cannot be chalked up entirely to adolescent acting-out, because the school's insensitivity is pertinent too. When Jaime first got into trouble, his prep-school mentors never called his mother to enlist her support, and the first she heard of her son's expulsion was after the fact. Nor is the school's attitude unusual--and this makes the success stories even more special. Another graduate of New York Prep, a boy I'll call Jamail Robinson, was almost kept from returning to a private school where he had spent two years because his mother, a security guard raising two children, owed the school $1,000. School officials were ready to bounce Jamail without even talking to his mother; it took several anxious phone calls from Giammalva to get him reinstated. This past June, when Jamail graduated from a private school (one of half a dozen or so New York Prep alumni to do so) he was picked by both the faculty and the students as the senior who best embodied their school's ideals.

The key school which occupies the basement of the same building that houses the Talented and Gifted School and the Harbor School for the Performing Arts, is a school that reflects the underside of reform in East Harlem. None of the Key School's 120 seventh- through ninth-graders chose to be there. The places in this school are filled by youngsters who can't make it elsewhere, and enrollment at Key keeps climbing. Desperate administrators of other alternative schools plead with its director, Iris Novak, to take one more hard-to-handle adolescent, one more kid that nobody else wants. The last arrival had stolen $600 collected for a school dinner from a teacher's handbag at his old school. Since the BETA School closed, there are almost no other schools in the district for problem students. Those who can't make it here may be sent to special-education classes for the emotionally disabled, where about one East Harlem child in fifteen winds up.

The Key School is a dark place, out of sight, with none of the amenities of the more elite schools. Its ceilings vibrate whenever students from the Harbor School are playing basketball or practicing their ballet movements in the gym upstairs. Its name could be a metaphor for opening up new opportunities or, perhaps more fittingly, for locking a jail cell.

As I talked with Novak, students came and went, pleading for the key to the bathroom, a privilege granted at the absolute discretion of the director. It's an emergency, each of them insisted. A burly ninth-grader stormed in, demanding the return of his hat, which Novak had confiscated earlier in the day. "Gimme back my fuckin' hat," he screamed at Novak. "You think I'm a nice kid but I'm not. I'm mean." Novak wrote it all down, and then silenced the kid with a look and a rumbling voice that comes from having trained for the stage. "I'm not your mother or sister or girlfriend or grandmother. I'm the director of this school. I demand to be treated with respect. There will be no 'fuck, fuck' here. You are suspended " The day before, after one student had held up another at gunpoint on the sidewalk, security guards were called in; they put the suspect up against the wall and frisked him.

Only nine percent of the students at the Key School are reading at grade level. This isn't surprising, given the composition of the school. Even among East Harlem schools that are not designated as repositories for problem children, more than a few have only one youngster in five--if that--making the grade, and have experienced a decline in performance levels during the past decade. The worst of these schools was Music 13, which until June of 1990 (when it was shut down) coped with seventh- through ninth-graders.

"If you're interested in music, a strong academic background, and high standards," the brochure given to parents bravely announced, "Music 13 is the place to be." The name of Music 13 was intended to reveal its special focus, and there was an able music teacher, Luis Rosa, on the premises. But nobody really chose to attend Music 13, and by the end few at the school cared much about music anymore. The "13" in its name turned out to be more significant than the "Music."

The building that housed it was formerly Junior High School 13, and when two of Deborah Meier's schools were moved there in 1985, some neighborhood parents rebelled. We want to keep our own school, they insisted--even though the junior high had been such a misery that most parents had stopped sending their children there years before. A number of teachers also wanted to stay on, and a grandfather clause in the union contract entitled them to do so. Some of the half dozen who remained--"the grandfathers"--epitomized much of what has gone wrong with many big-city schools. During my visit to the school one teacher read The New York Times while students chattered, another shouted desperately for order, and a third delivered a by-the-book lesson to a class of uninterested ninth-graders. Often the teachers didn't bother to show up, or else let the director know a day ahead of time that they felt "a sickness coming on." Music 13 had become a school in name but not intention, a place of last resort.

Students like an eighth-grader I'll call Kevin Jones were stuck. "Kevin is intelligent and articulate, with a real talent for science and basketball," Ira Lyons, the third director Music 13 had had in five years, told me. "He has more brains than I do." Kevin first attended Isaac Newton, but was kicked out after being accused of smashing the headlights of the director's car. He has had fights with other students at Music 13. Family conferences came to nothing when the boy's elderly and deeply religious grandmother insisted that he was no trouble at home. "High-ability kickouts don't mesh with low-ability kids," Lyons said. "He belongs in a school that would challenge him." But no other school was interested.

Every urban school district has its Kevin Joneses, and they're probably no worse off at a place like Music 13 than at some run-down junior high in the Bronx. That reality points to the expedient bargain that has in effect been struck in East Harlem among those who have worked for reform. The deal is essentially this: Through the mechanism called choice--a mechanism that gives some options to parents and students but at the same time is rigged to give even more options to school directors--we can greatly improve the situation for about a third of our students, offering them a far better education than they could otherwise have had in one of the most battered neighborhoods in America. Perhaps we can even offer something useful to another third of our students. But the bottom third will be virtually abandoned--as they would have been anyway.

SCHOOL BY SCHOOL BY SCHOOL

Confronted with crumbling buildings and daily episodes of violence, with splintered families and refractory bureaucrats--problems that elsewhere might in themselves suck up all the energy of school leaders--East Harlem has transformed a number of its schools. Elsewhere, initiatives are frequently abandoned when their champions leave, but the alternative schools in East Harlem have survived the departure of Alvarado and Fliegel, the entrepreneurs who launched the plan. They have survived a procession of chancellors at 110 Livingston Street, most of whom have been cool to what the district is doing. They weathered a 1988 financial scandal that brought down Alvarado's successor, cast suspicion on Fliegel's successor as director of alternative schools (who was later exonerated), and for a while left East Harlem's schools in the hands of an acting superintendent who made no secret of her dislike for the alternative-schools program. Whether any further progress is possible in District Four--and whether other New York City districts will be able to proceed with plans for similar restructuring--depends on the impact of the continuing fiscal crisis in the New York City schools.

East Harlem, with all its problems, has built a far better school system than I have seen in any comparable neighborhood. For all the hype about reading-test scores, what's more impressive is the students' generally clearer writing and focused thinking, their greater self-confidence and understanding, and their willingness and ability to enter the world beyond the ghetto in high school and afterward. Graduates from junior highs in East Harlem ARE making it out of the barrio. In the intensely competitive environment of New York City's elite high schools, sorting is nearly as rigid as it was under the old British eleven-plus exam system. The four examination schools--Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High, La Guardia High School, and Brooklyn Technical High School--are among the very best high schools in the nation. Another handful, including Aviation High and East Harlem's Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, enroll the next tier of students. The nonselective schools get the leftovers. In the mid-1970s fewer than ten of East Harlem's junior high graduates were accepted by the examination high schools. By 1987 things had radically changed. East Harlem sent 139 youngsters, or ten percent of the district's graduating class that year, to those elite high schools--double the citywide average. An additional 13 percent enrolled at four other high schools that also screen their students--a rate four times as high as the city average. That same year at least thirty-six students from East Harlem received scholarships to private schools, including some of the best ones in the country.

Some of the students who travel to East Harlem from other parts of the city volunteered to me that for the first time in their lives they are being treated with respect by teachers. Teachers reported that the smallness and autonomy of the alternative schools enable them to identify a distinctive voice in each of their children and to respond in kind. In the corridors and directors' offices where teachers congregate, the talk is mainly about what works in the classroom and what doesn't, not about Macy's sales and last night's Knicks game. Not all the schools are as innovative as those that Deborah Meier founded, for there are, after all, only a handful of such educators. But as the history of good urban parochial schools suggests, educational innovation isn't essential to success. What is essential is that the school take the time to shape an identity that seems right to those who inhabit the premises, and that this effort be sustained by teachers and administrators who have a measure of independence, a feeling of being driven, and a capacity to know each of their charges. If the idea of intimate enclaves in factory-like city schools is going to take hold, it must happen not by treating East Harlem as a model to be mechanically applied, and certainly not by taking literally the misleading metaphor of the schools as a marketplace. Instead, it must happen as an approach adapted to the particularities of place.

Schools like those in East Harlem are being asked to accomplish the impossible--to challenge the highly achieving and rescue those who otherwise would drop out, to ease racial separation and reduce inequity in schooling, and all the while to function as the cutting edge of educational innovation. In truth, there are no easy paths even to modest progress. What's needed can be as time-consuming and undramatic as meticulous planning, into-the-wee-hours sessions with anxious school-board members, months of meetings with teachers and school directors to give content to the dreams, and then endless reassurances to parents troubled by what is new and untried. And even then, as District Four shows, there may well remain a large portion of the student population for whom reform might just as well never have occurred.

It is essential to risk the mistakes that so often accompany newness and to resist overpromising. Each school will have to find its own way, because everywhere the talents and the possibilities are different, but out of the process something of real value can emerge. This much, at least, East Harlem has to teach the rest of America, as the nation quietly but unmistakably embarks on the great experiment of remaking its schools, one by one.