Even if 199’s overcrowding made the zone change inevitable, it still blindsided parents who’d paid a fortune to live near the school. Many saw it as a betrayal of a tacit agreement between the city and higher-income families: If you keep your kids in the public system, we’ll let you secure spots in the top-ranked schools if you purchase homes in their zones. That might sound counter to the ideals of public education, but the parents had reason to think city leaders were in on the deal. When Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked at an unrelated press conference that November whether he was willing to rearrange zone lines to promote school integration, he replied: “You have to also respect families who have made a decision to live in a certain area oftentimes because of a specific school.” Such families have “made massive life decisions and investments because of which school their kid would go to.” The flipside of this bargain is that redrawing school boundaries could affect children’s schooling—and their parents’ real-estate investments. As one dad put it at that October hearing: “We want the best for our children. We want the best for our property values.”

At the same time, the prospect of P.S. 191 panicked some rezoned parents. (The change only applied to incoming students; no current 199 students would be moved.) The “persistently dangerous” label was alarming, as were the very low test scores. The scores should not have been a surprise: Social-science research over the past 50 years has shown that concentrating low-income students of color in the same schools lowers their achievement levels. In 2006, the economist Douglas Harris found that only 1.1 percent of high-poverty schools consistently performed at a high level (which he defined as having students in two grades achieve high scores on math and English exams for two years). By contrast, 24.2 percent of low-poverty schools met that mark. If P.S. 191 got an influx of affluent students, its scores would inevitably rise. But many parents want to see high scores up front. “One-ninety-one will continue to be shunned until the test scores are improved,” a dad in a gray sweater and glasses said at a hearing.

Racial anxieties coursed through the debate, often just below the surface. White and Asian parents who opposed the rezoning often began their public comments by praising diversity and stating that race played no part in their resistance to 191. (In surveys, it’s common for whites to downplay the importance of race in choosing schools, even as studies find it’s a top consideration in their actual decision-making.) Yet outside the hearings, racially tinged rumors about 191 circulated among some parents. A woman whose child attends a predominantly white school in the area and asked not to be named said she’d been told that some 191 students serve as drug mules for local dealers; another woman who asked not to be named told me she’d heard that an older 191 student had pulled a knife on a pre-kindergartener. (The school’s head pre-k teacher at the time strenuously denied that any such incident occurred.) Among parents of color, it seemed undeniable that bias accounted for at least some of the opposition. “They say it’s about rezoning,” a black woman who lives the Amsterdam Houses and whose child attends 199 said at one of the October hearings, “but what they’re worried about is having to integrate with public-housing minority kids.”