Dear Editor:
In a recent issue of the Hoboken Reporter, Carlo Davis wrote about some of my findings in the book, Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City: Youth Experiences of Uneven Opportunity. While I was thrilled to have these findings shared with the community (and it is my hope that they will contribute to necessary civic dialogue), I would also like to encourage residents who are interested in the intricacies of the methods and findings to read the book in its entirety or come to one of the book talks I will be doing in the community. This story is complex and rife with nuance.
About half of the book examines education while the other half examines housing policy and the environment. The research is based on 3.5 years of ethnographic observation, participatory youth research, and focus groups, case studies and interviews with 66 individuals. The findings show that while youth in public housing do in fact benefit from living in a gentrified community in some very important ways, schooling and socio-economically integrated social networks are not among them. The research also points to the myriad benefits of maintaining and improving public housing in the community. While this book takes a critical look at education, schools, and housing policy, it is important to note that this book is a critique of systems of inequality not of individual actors. There are not good guys or bad guys in this story.
In Hoboken we have enormous potential to create socio-economically integrated diverse schools and with them integrated social networks for young people that would benefit all of the children in the community. There are also many positive aspects of the Hoboken story that should be celebrated: universal preschool, public housing that has not been dismantled, charter schools that are successful and using innovative pedagogical strategies, and parents who are having positive experiences in the district schools and advocating for improvement.
It is my hope that rather than parsing the degrees and definitions of segregation in the schools, we can all come together to say that we can do better in all of our schools and have difficult but necessary conversations about solutions.
Molly Vollman Makris