Lincoln Towers development on the Upper West Side. | Team Boerum New Upper West Side school integration plans reignite an old fight

The high-profile fight over the integration of two racially and economically segregated schools on the Upper West Side has been going on, by some measures, for a half century.

Attempts to desegregate the neighboring schools — PS 199, which has been mostly white and exceedingly popular for decades, and PS 191, which has long had a largely black and Latino population and is currently under-enrolled — made headlines this year , as parents and their elected representatives revolted against the de Blasio administration’s efforts to reorganize the district.


But a review of news stories and documents from the city’s first effort to diversify the two schools in 1964 helps show both why today’s rezoning debate has proved so contentious and why school integration efforts have foundered for decades on the Upper West Side — a neighborhood with the unique distinction of having schools that are more segregated than its housing.

The city’s first stab at integrating the schools came in 1964, when the old Board of Education proposed a “pairing” of PS 199 and PS 191, then each less than a decade old. The schools were then, as they are now, deeply segregated but separated by only about nine blocks.

At the time of the pairing in 1964, PS 199 was 62 percent white and PS 191 was 93 percent black or Latino. Today, PS 199 is still 63 percent white and PS 191 is 80 percent black or Latino. PS 191’s poverty rate last year was 72 percent; PS 199’s was 7 percent.

Mayor Robert Wagner’s administration sought to, according to a 1964 New York Times report, “achieve a measure of racial integration in city schools” by rezoning the Upper West Side and four other segregated neighborhoods.

The Upper West Side was given a new “community zone,” in which all students would go to PS 191 for second grade and PS 199 for fourth grade. Ninety-six students were to be moved from PS 199 and 86 children from PS 191. The city provided buses between the two schools for 116 students. Each school was given $400,000 to hire new teachers and shrink class sizes.

The pairing, Times declared in 1965, was “the boldest and most controversial step taken in the city school system’s history to improve racial balance.”

But the proposal instantly set off protest among the Upper West Side’s white families, many of whom threatened to resuscitate a public school boycott that had brought the nation’s largest school system to a standstill earlier in 1964. The scores of black and Latino parents whose children were impacted by the pairing are largely absent from the historical record about the plan.

MANY OF THE SAME DYNAMICS apply to the debate that has roiled the Upper West Side over the last several months, with mostly white parents organizing opposition to the city’s plans to partially integrate PS 199 and several other neighboring schools.

The Department of Education’s current proposals would have a less dramatic impact on PS 199 than the plans advanced by the city over 50 years ago.

A potential rezoning would move several blocks that are currently zoned for PS 199 into the PS 191 zone. PS 191, which currently sits adjacent to the Amsterdam Houses, will move into a brand new school building in the West 60s.

The effect the new plan would have on PS 191, which has lower standardized test scores than PS 199 and was until recently on the state’s list of the city’s most dangerous schools, would be more substantial, as it receives an influx of high-performing students.

A plan from the District 3 Community Education Council would go even further — it has offered its own plan that would push integration efforts further than the city has gone.

Council leaders have said that they are motivated by a desire to solve the overcrowding and segregation problems once and for all, rather than fending off a series of iterative city proposals.

The Council's plan, which has not yet been voted on, would grow the PS 191 zone significantly and apply to more families originally zoned to PS 199 than the city originally proposed. The Council plan would also move PS 452, another popular and mostly white elementary school, from its current location into the old PS 191 school building sixteen blocks south.

A group of parents has objected to the plan, too, claiming that the Council broke open meetings laws by constructing a proposal in private.

Joe Fiordaliso, the president of the Council and a PS 199 parent, encouraged Upper West Siders to change their perceptions of PS 199 in an interview.

“The PS 191 that people have thought about up until now will no longer exist on the first day of school in 2017,” he said.

But many parents whose children are currently zoned for PS 199 have thus far shown considerable resistance to the idea of sending their children to PS 191, however different the school may be by next year.

The loudest opposition has come from parents in Lincoln Towers, a middle class and mostly white development that has been zoned for PS 199 since the 1960s. Some families have bought property in the towers specifically to send their children to PS 199. Parents in the development who would be affected by the school zoning change have responded fiercely.

Recent meetings on the proposed rezoning have turned hostile: Lincoln Towers residents have wept and pleaded with the city not to go ahead with the rezoning, arguing that it would divide their community. Parents have shouted down Department of Education officials at meetings, accusing them of lying and intentionally concealing details about the plans. One person referred to PS 191 as a “cesspool.”

The principal of PS 191, Lauren Keville, has attended some of the public meetings, urging PS 199 parents — to apparently little effect — to visit her school before forming their judgment. PS 191 parents have been largely absent from the debate.

After the Council proposed its own plan and made explicit pleas for a more integrated district at a recent meeting, scores of parents spoke out against the plan. When one member of the council claimed he'd been "blindsided" by the plan, dozens of parents gave him a standing ovation. The PS 199 parents who support the integration plan — a constant but muted minority presence at public meetings — have been largely drowned out.

One mother who spoke in favor of the rezoning at a meeting last month told POLITICO New York she was followed home by another mother. That parent, who lives in Lincoln Towers, threatened to ostracize the first parent if their children ever attended the same school.

“Lincoln Towers should not be allowed to bully their way into staying at PS 199,” the mother, who asked not to be named out of a desire not to escalate the situation further, wrote in an email. “Despite what they may think, it is not their school. They do not own it.”

A group of Lincoln Towers parents recently created a petition to opposing the city’s rezoning proposals. The petition, signed by over 800 people, argues that PS 199’s success is largely due to Lincoln Towers.

“Our community has provided exceptionally strong volunteer and supplementary financial support to PS 199 over its history,” the petition states. “The ongoing support of the entire community has been a major if not decisive factor in PS 199’s high level of success.”

PS 199 parents, particularly from Lincoln Towers, which was then a brand-new development, mounted an similarly vigorous protest to proposed integration plans in the 1960s.

A group of the school’s white parents organized themselves under the umbrella group Parents and Taxpayers, which was comprised largely of families that had led a citywide public school boycott to fight back integration efforts earlier in 1964.

Four of those families — including two families from Lincoln Towers — sued the city in July 1964 to try to block the pairing, arguing that the arrangement amounted to a quota system. They also claimed the move was a form of racial discrimination, since it excluded students “from their neighborhood public schools on the sole basis of race, creed, color or national origin.” Their lawsuit was eventually rejected by a judge and the pairings began in September 1964.

PS 199’s parent association president at the time, Frances Westerman, argued in a Times letter to the editor in June of that year that the proposed pairing would make the school majority non-white. Westerman wrote that PS 199 families already considered their school integrated, and that the proposal would “deliberately create two segregated schools.”

Some parents made good on their threats to pull their children out of public school; about 150 children were marked absent daily from each school while they attended private schools created by the Parents and Taxpayers group.

“How can the Board of Education say the pairings are working when so many white parents have taken their children out of public school or moved to other areas?” one protesting parent asked a Times reporter in May 1965, about nine months after the pairings began. “They soon won’t have any white children left in this city to push around.”

AT A RECENT PUBLIC MEETING on the Upper West Side, Daniel Katz, a member of the community education council, told parents that they have an "obligation to stop segregation" in the neighborhood.

Segregation was "allowed to happen here in District 3, it was deliberate, and it was unjust," he said. "Yet we are practicing that today in the southern part of our district."

Fiordaliso rejected the notion that today’s protest over rezoning proposals is motivated now — as it was fifty years ago — by a fear of integration.

“The root of the pushback is not the same, and not rooted in the resistance to desegregate,” he said.

“This is opposition to an incompetent agency that wasn’t providing an essential city service,” he added, criticizing the Department of Education for acting too late to address what he called PS 199’s overcrowding “crisis.”

The Department of Education has emerged as a common enemy in the current Upper West Side debate, as it did during last year’s equally contentious rezoning battle in downtown Brooklyn.

Toya Holness, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, defended the city’s efforts in a statement. “We’re dedicated to providing an equitable and excellent education to all students, and remain focused on increasing diversity at schools citywide through both systemic and localized approaches,” she said.

But PS 199’s struggles with integration have also been a fact of life on the Upper West Side for decades, even beyond the initial attempt at pairing in the 1960s.

That plan appeared doomed from the start.

A Times story published a year after the pairings began found that they were typically praised by teachers but criticized by parents. In 1972, eight years after the pairing was approved by the city, then-city schools chancellor Harvey Scribner rejected a report that found the pairings had largely failed.

But by the 1980s, the pairings had disintegrated, as the city government again cycled towards an embrace of local “neighborhood schools.”

Since then, PS 199 and PS 191 have avoided the threat of being demolished and re-sited to make room for luxury towers on at least two occasions. In 2008, the neighborhood resumed its simmering integration fight when the city proposed moving a popular middle school, the Center School, out of PS 199’s building in order to create more room for the overcrowded elementary school. Many of the Center School’s parents protested the move, noting that their middle school was more diverse than the overwhelmingly white PS 199.

The actress Cynthia Nixon, then a Center School parent who has since become a devoted supporter of Mayor Bill de Blasio, accused PS 199’s parents of racism in a NY1 interview at the time.

“In one day, they can segregate 270 West 70th Street with the stroke of a pen,” she said, referring to the school building’s address.

A PS 199 parent also interviewed insisted the proposal had nothing to do with diversity, only with overcrowding. The Center School has since moved several blocks north.

Just last year, PS 199 parents led the charge to block a rezoning proposal that would have sent some of their children to PS 191. The city dropped the plan last fall after failing to find “consensus” among the community.

WHILE PS 199 HAS REMAINED FIRMLY at the center of failed school integration efforts for decades, the city has become less explicit about desegregation as a primary policy goal since the 1960s.

The attempted pairing of PS 199 and PS 191 in 1964 was accompanied by a Board of Education-commissioned report which directly linked integrated schools to improved academic outcomes. That conclusion, supported by several well-regarded studies, has rarely if ever been elucidated by members of the de Blasio administration.

“A better ethnic distribution of pupils in the public schools of New York City must be planned and promoted to the fullest in every school where it is feasible, not only to counteract the injustices of segregation in housing, employment and other segments of our society, but also to further goals of quality education in a democracy,” the 1966 report, titled “Improving Ethnic Distribution of New York City Pupils,” read.

The explicitly stated purpose of the Upper West Side’s school pairings in the 1960s was to racially integrate the schools; the current debate looks primarily to overcrowding, with ensuing integration seen largely a side effect.

Even after a recent report found that New York City’s schools are the most segregated in the nation, de Blasio has repeatedly referred to the city’s segregation problem as a unfortunate facet of “American history.”

“It’s about the reality of this country and this city going back not just decades but hundreds of years, and that has to do with discrimination and segregation in housing, let alone education and employment,” de Blasio said recently.

City schools chancellor Carmen Fariña has been mocked for her suggestion that a pen pal program between students could help ease the city’s segregation crisis.

Much of the current administration’s reluctance to address segregation can be explained by the potentially enormous political cost of attempting to desegregate city schools.

After Upper West Side parents threatened to vote their elected officials out of office for not standing up to the city, a flock of local electeds have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to the rezoning plans, attending rallies and railing against the Department of Education in meetings.

Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, for example, declined to comment on the rezoning until recently, when she repeatedly declined to say integration should be a primary goal of the plan in an interview with POLITICO New York.

At a recent meeting, she decried that “everyone” was paying only “lip service” to the need for greater diversity.

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal recently told an auditorium packed with almost exclusively white parents that they were “one of the most educated and active parent bodies” in the city and that the city could not “pull the wool” over their eyes.

When a Times reporter wrote of the Upper West Side’s school pairings in 1964 that “no move undertaken by the school system within memory aroused so much community opposition or left so much bitterness,” he might well have been observing the same neighborhood today.