School's Out in Williamsburg
Williamsburg and Greenpoint may be filling up with affluent families lured by the recent condo boom, but the well-heeled new residents are hardly beating a path to local schools. According to an article in this week’s Crain’s (sub. req’d), enrollment is plummeting in the neighborhoods’ public schools–it’s down 12 percent in elementary schools over the…
Williamsburg and Greenpoint may be filling up with affluent families lured by the recent condo boom, but the well-heeled new residents are hardly beating a path to local schools. According to an article in this week’s Crain’s (sub. req’d), enrollment is plummeting in the neighborhoods’ public schools–it’s down 12 percent in elementary schools over the past two years, with middle schools operating at 56 percent capacity, on average. The classrooms are emptying as older residents priced out of the neighborhoods are forced to leave and newer residents put off by what they consider to be conservative education practices decide to send their kids to schools farther afield. The trend is exposing chinks in the armor of the Bloomberg administration’s rezoning of northern Brooklyn, which was supposed to create a community where rich and poor (and their offspring) rubbed shoulders. On top of that, it could spell trouble ahead for developers who are marketing Williamsburg and Greenpoint buildings to young professionals with families. And developers are keenly aware of the areas’ lack of pull on the education front. “We have thought about it,” said Ron Moelis, a principal with L&M Equities, which is developing Schaefer Landing. “I don’t have an answer for you. There’s talk of a charter school, a new magnet school or maybe even a new private school. It would be great if that occurs.”
Photo by specmotors.
8:37pm said:
“Talking INCOME Taxes. Many of you wouldn’t know about that would you……….”
Income taxes don’t fund the local schools in a community. Property taxes do. You’re the one who is uninformed, not me, or the other people here.
Another issue that needs to be raised is that while there are many great teachers currently working in district 14, more needs to be done to attract the best and brightest to want to work in our schools now and in the future. That currently isn’t happening. That is not the fault of parents, kids or administration at our schools. You can blame the DOE for not helping to make our schools an attractive workplace. Look at the conditions the teachers have to put up with at MS577. Its appalling.
Williamsburg is a mess.
And gross.
What is so funny is the idea that parents involvement “AT the school” has virtually anything to do with achievement.
Sorry kids but it is the teachers who do the teaching at schools…
Parent involvement WITH THEIR KIDS and and emphasis on education is what makes successful schools (and students).
Obviously if a parent is involved AT school they are likely involved at home – but if everyone just stayed home but helped their kids get prepared for school and supported their schools efforts plus supplemented with a good learning environment at home – it would have the exact same effect. Your bake sales and annoying interfering are doing nothing to help the kids learn.
However, the issue in Williamsburg is not about getting the kids a “GOOD” education it is about trying to get a “PROGRESSIVE” education. It makes perfect sense that such an AGENDA would be resisted.
The other amusing part of this debate is that it only swirls around Elementary and Middle School – which makes sense – I have to wonder how many of you so called ‘school activists’ will be sending your kids to public high schools if they dont get into some specialized school (not many I venture a guess)
Thanks Kate for posting that article.
Crain’s article:
Textbook Lesson in Gentrification

Brooklyn housing boom causes clash as new arrivals reject city schools
By Erik Engquist, Crain’s New York Business
Published: October 7, 2007
The city’s ballyhooed rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn is supposed to create a vibrant, integrated community with whites and minorities, rich and poor living together. A proverbial melting pot.
But in local public schools, it is fanning a cauldron. Incoming parents–largely white and well-educated–are rejecting neighborhood public schools en masse. Parents seeking progressive reforms are meeting fierce resistance from an entrenched school bureaucracy. Classrooms are emptying out as newcomers decline to fill the seats vacated by minorities priced out of the area.
“When parents come in and say a school’s not good enough for their children, it’s a very sensitive issue,” says Kate Yourke, an activist parent who moved to Williamsburg from the Upper West Side in 1985. “Parents were quite naive about the implications.”
The May 2005 rezoning of northern Brooklyn by the Bloomberg administration and the City Council has triggered a boom of luxury apartment projects. In the next few years, tens of thousands of affluent residents will plunk themselves down in what has long been a poor, heavily ethnic area.
The schoolyard fights of the last two years point to uglier times ahead for the administration’s most ambitious experiment with accelerated gentrification.
Consider what happened to Brooke Parker, who led an effort to increase arts education at P.S. 84 in Williamsburg. “I was running for the school leadership team, and I got heckled by faculty at a meeting,” she says. “The faculty was trying to push out parents they didn’t want.”
It worked: Ms. Parker and the others pulled their kids from the school.
It’s a common scenario in District 14, where many schools feature tightly controlled classrooms in which test preparation, handwriting drills and homework are emphasized. Some schools have no recess, and children are rarely allowed to speak to each other, even at lunch. Students might have just one gym class a week but spend two hours a day on penmanship. Exams begin in kindergarten.
The rigid approach, which produces admirable test scores in some District 14 schools, is typical of conservative, immigrant-dominated communities.
“From when you drop your children off to when you pick them up, they’re not allowed to have fun,” says one white mother who expects to transfer her child to a private elementary school next year.
With few exceptions, the neighborhood’s new arrivals are sending their kids anywhere but their zoned schools. Many use false addresses to enroll them in schools in lower Manhattan. Others opt for a charter school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, or private or magnet schools as far as an hour away. As a result, enrollment fell 12% over two years in the district’s 20 elementary schools; 13 were left at less than 80% of capacity and seven at less than 60%. The five conventional middle schools are now just 56% full on average.
Developers are worried
The problem is not lost on the developers marketing new apartments to white professionals from Manhattan who demand schools with parental involvement, field trips, hands-on projects and the like.
“We have thought about it,” says Ron Moelis, who is building hundreds of luxury units in Williamsburg. “I don’t have an answer for you. There’s talk of a charter school, a new magnet school or maybe even a new private school. It would be great if that occurs.”
No new schools, says city
With so many vacant desks, the Department of Education says it won’t build new schools. Instead, District 14 Superintendent James Quail says he will try to accommodate parents who seek “more opportunities for children to think and develop their own learning styles in classrooms, and more opportunities for parents to engage.”
But the department has given principals great autonomy, and many resist change.
“[Former Deputy Chancellor] Carmen Farina said that all you need is 10 families to move in and help turn a school around,” says Pamela Wheaton, the director of InsideSchools.org, which gives District 14 schools mixed reviews. “But if you have a principal who’s diametrically opposed. …”
Some parents are plotting to start self-contained boutique schools within existing district buildings. Ms. Yourke, whose 7-year-old son attends public school in East Williamsburg, opposes that move. She is leading a small group of parents who are trying to move District 14 out of the 1950s. They aired their grievances at a powwow in June, but little has happened since.
“Our last chance to integrate these communities is by raising our children together, and I don’t think the Department of Education has a mind-set or a plan for how that can happen,” Ms. Yourke says. “They have been completely negligent in dealing with this.”
Sidebar:
NO HELP FOR THE GIFTED
Programs for the gifted, used by many districts to attract middle-class parents, don’t exist in District 14.
Officials tried to launch a program last year, but they promoted it poorly and located it at P.S. 297–a 99% black and Latino school in an area so dangerous that students are forbidden from using the playground.
Only three students accepted spots in the gifted program, so it was canceled.
Infographic:
SCHOOL DISTRICT 14
Includes Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and part of Bedford-Stuyvesant

Enrollment, October 2006 19,652

Two-year change in K-5 enrollment -12%

ETHNIC BREAKDOWN
Hispanic 62%
Black 25%
White 9%
Asian/other 4%

Students with Limited English proficiency 15%

Sources: NYC and NYS departments of education


Comments? EEngquist@crain.com
I like Williamsburg as a parent too, but this thread is making me like it a bit less. Why do I suddenly feel like I am not cool enough to know about PS 84? Why do I feel like there’s no issue, except in the minds of a few parents who read something about the latest trends in progressive education and feel as compelled to follow that trend as they do everything else?
11:31 sorry, not a broker. i am just being sincere. have owned in several brooklyn neighborhoods and am blown away by how many friends i have made in williamsburg in less than a year. i actually work in photography/advertising. i’m in my early 40’s and haven’t made this many new friends any where else i have lived. just take my kid to mccarren and run into people i have met this year. everyone IS nice and cool.
i emailed with several neighbors just today. we are constantly popping in and out of each others apartment. our kids hang out together on the sidewalk in front of our building all the time. it really is great.
public school is for retards.