According to Myra McGovern, senior director of public information for the National Association of Independent Schools, more independent schools are becoming invested in how diverse environments should feel, rather than only concentrating on what they should look like.But these well-resourced institutions can fall short at nurturing minority students emotionally and intellectually.Judith Ohikuare December 17, 2013 Idris Brewster and his mother, Michle Stephenson, in a scene from American Promise (Jon Stuyvesant) Dalton is a prestigious, decades-old, K-12 prep school on New York Citys Upper East Side that filters its students into the best universities in the country.
In 2010, Forbes reported that 31 percent of its students matriculated into MIT, Stanford, or an Ivy League institution. Former students include Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, and Ralph Laurens daughter Dylan. Even imaginary people make sure their families are present for parent-teacher conferences. For years, however, Dalton was largely inaccessible to minority and lower-income students. Maintaining its reputation as a top-tier place of learning did not require administrators to extend invitations to those groups. Idris and Seuns parents believed that getting into Dalton was the first step to a life filled with accomplishments. Students that came out of independent schools were well-prepared on the level of networking, internships, job and school opportunitiesyou name itand we were offered great financial-aid incentives, Michle Stephenson, Idriss mother, told me. We thought this intensive, intellectually stimulating institution would open doors for Idris and take him anywhere he wanted to go. Recommended Reading Black Boys Have an Easier Time Fitting In at Suburban Schools Than Black Girls After-School Activities Make Educational Inequality Even Worse Homeroom: My Daughter Is an Overachiever, and Its Hurting Her Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer Recommended Reading Black Boys Have an Easier Time Fitting In at Suburban Schools Than Black Girls After-School Activities Make Educational Inequality Even Worse Homeroom: My Daughter Is an Overachiever, and Its Hurting Her Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer Fourteen years later, Idriss parents have released American Promise, a documentary that records the boys personal and academic experiences from kindergarten through senior year of high school. The film reveals a hard truth about being a student of color at an elite school: Simply being admitted doesnt guarantee a smooth or successful educational journey. As the film progresses, though, they become less certain of Daltons ability to improve their sons lives. They realize that, as Michle phrases it, Daltons ticket to upward mobility often came at a cost to their kids success and self-esteem. We understood that this was a school that the 1 percent sent their children to, Michle says, but not having grown up in that environment, neither of us understood the extent to which the social and emotional sides of our childs development would be at stake. Daltons school building (Wikimedia Commons) When I entered sixth grade at the single-sex Chapin School in 2000, I was the second black girl out of nearly 60 students and one of few working-class students in my year. Id prepared for Chapin by going through a program called Prep for Prep, a nonprofit organization that filters low-income minority students into New York City independent schools. Idris parents consulted with another program, Early Steps, which does similar work for kindergarten-aged students.) My peers from similar circumstances were a half-black, half-Puerto Rican girl from Queens who had started in first grade, and a Bronx-born girl of Guyanese descent that started at Chapin the year before. Everyone was incredibly friendly (almost alarmingly so for my public-school disposition), but I was clearly a novelty. I found it hard to understand how such well-traveled people knew so little about their own city. I had never in my life been touched and asked with such stark curiosity how I got my hair to just stay that way or, even years later in high school, what a borough was. I usually laughed, but was often as horrified as they were when Id say that I was going home alone on the train. To them, it seemed callous that my parents would allow me to do so; I thought it was bizarre that many of them needed a babysitter just to travel a few bus stops. Idris and I started our respective journeys at a pivotal point on the timeline of minority enrollment in independent schools, as schools started to try for more than simple numeric representation.
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