A SYSTEM DIVIDED
‘Why Don’t We Have Any White Kids?’
By N.R. KLEINFIELD
Published: May 11, 2012
IN seventh-grade English class, sun leaked in through the windows. Horns bleated outside. The assignment was for the arrayed students to identify a turning point in their lives. Was it positive or negative? They hunched over and wrote fervidly.
A System Divided
Separate but Uneasy
This is the second article in a series examining the changing racial distribution of students in New York City's public schools and its impact on their opportunities and achievements. The previous article chronicled the experience of Rudi-Ann Miller, one of 40 black students at Stuyvesant High School, which has 3,295 students.
Multimedia
Read more articles in this week's Metropolitan section.
Related
A System Divided: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High (February 26, 2012)
News, data and conversation about education in New York.
Emily Berl for The New York Times
Students outside the Explore Charter School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on March 28.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Floriande Augustin, a first-year teacher at the school, invited students to share their choices. Hands waved for attention. One girl said it was when she got a cat, though she was unsure why. Another selected a car crash. A third brought up the time when her cousin got shot and “it was positive because he felt his life was crazy and he went to college so he couldn’t get shot anymore.”
The lesson detoured into Martin Luther King Jr. and his
