NYCETC 2018 Conference: A Conversation with David Jones

Well, CSS in the last 10 years has made a major shift. The organization started 175 years ago. It was basically the premier social work agency for many years and dealt with a wide range of poverty issues. Over the last decade, we've recognized that the chief way for people out of poverty, which has become almost a hard goal, is work. But it can't be just any work; it has to be well-paid work with benefits and other supports. I think the New York Times just came out with an article saying people are getting a lot of jobs, but it's not bringing them out of poverty. That's why we're suddenly seeing the merger of these issues. I don't think it's only us; across the not-for-profit sector, there's a recognition that work is the way to do it. We also have started to emphasize and work with unions that are trying to organize low-wage workers. We did a piece for 32BJ, who were trying to organize workers manning offices and security guards. We did a lot of one-on-one discussions with security guards and found that their wages were terrible. If they protested hours, they were terminated. They were told there are hundreds of people waiting for that job. So an individual can't stand against these kinds of problems.

I think there are things they can be proud of. Anyone in this room can say they helped with the fight for 15, they were very supportive of our efforts and others on paid sick leave. I think they are moving in a progressive way. But when you get to my age, you always complain about something. We're worried that the 100,000 jobs is still a dream. There's also the question of whether the jobs being created are actually lifting people out of poverty and going to the people struggling to get a foothold into work. In the Bloomberg administration, I was highly critical because I was excited by the new Cornell engineering and science center, but there was never a connection to middle school students in those communities who could have really exploded in terms of understanding what it was about.

It's clearly created a political firestorm. People come up to me saying, 'How could you say such things? I went to Stuyvesant and you don't want to change anything.' What finally got my goat was when I was growing up in Crown Heights, the ideal if you were really smart and a person of color was to go to Brooklyn Tech. To hear that 12 years ago Brooklyn Tech had 31% black and Latino and now has less than 10%, at a time when the city's population is increasingly of color, was shocking. Lazare, who is my youth policy person, started digging into it after articles showed Stuyvesant had dropped to ridiculous levels of participation. I became concerned that all the African Americans interviewed were young women; I didn't see any guys. So there's a real question of gender issues. But it's also a concern that equal access to resources isn't the same. My cousin was former principal of Prospect Heights High School. I've known boys and girls there for many speeches. Then I go on the website for Stuyvesant and look at their spanking new laboratory that outstrips most colleges in the country. We did an informal survey and found we didn't have operating labs in substantial numbers of schools that were 90% minority. The distribution doesn't stop. If we had separate but equal, that would be terrible, but we're not even getting that. We're getting a system that denies entry to the very best parts and systematically removes resources.

We just were part of the victory at Fair Fares, which the mayor was not happy with me about. He said to me a couple of days ago, 'You're the nicest son of a bitch I know.' I think you're going to have to press. That's what we've done. I sued the administration just today; we filed suit on unfair fare evasion arrests, trying to get data, nothing more than data. We've seen signs that it's racially biased. Taking a very strong stand is difficult for the not-for-profit sector because many of us receive resources from government. Biting the hand that feeds you has always been a tension. But I think we're going to have to find space through coalition to take strong stands that call into question critical issues of what the city is doing. The segregated school system is a shining example. I started looking at the test prep industry that's grown up around admissions to specialized high schools: $3,000 to get ready for the test. Then I realized there's another test prep industry developed in the Asian community: $1,500 for the two summers before you take the exam. This is such a huge system that there's no way in without extraordinary expenditures. It's not only a question of blacks and Latinos; there are wastelands of white ethnic communities throughout the city with the same issue of being shut out, even though they've excelled. It was also worrisome because there were interviews with students at Stuyvesant who said, 'These kids are not as bright as I am.' This is not good preparation for making it in the United States. In a city this diverse, it's not going to serve you well to assume you're so much brighter than everyone else when you haven't been in face-to-face competition.

We had a similar discussion. You may not know that Baruch has fewer blacks and Latinos than Harvard, Princeton, or my own Wesleyan. A lot of this is economically driven. I don't like to demonize what's going on. As the cost of private education became astronomical, parents had to realistically look at Baruch for a fraction of the cost, which provides just as good an education. Suddenly CUNY was inundated with applications. Instead of doing what other elite schools do—calling based on not only SAT scores but grade point average, first in your family to attend college, all the other things—they went to SAT only. In doing that, they saved a lot of money and didn't have to think about it, but they started to get a much less diverse student body. That's a problem. When I brought that up to the past head of CUNY, I met a stone wall. They didn't want to change it because of the US News reports. Because they became rarified on the SAT, they went up in the rankings. But they tried to convert what we were talking about as a return to open admission. The best case in the country is the University of Texas, which had a similar problem, but it wasn't because of black and Latino students; it was because no rural student could get into the University of Texas. They came up with a rule that the top tier of every high school in Texas would have admission granted if they met certain minimal requirements of grade point average and SAT scores. That transformed it. It helped black and Latino students, but it was a reaction that there were too many students across the state who had done very well and couldn't get into their own university.

Clearly, more advantaged communities have a network of attachment to work and different things. When a neighborhood becomes over-concentrated with people who don't have those networks, that's why we've been a staunch supporter of universal summer youth employment. It opens up opportunities. I remember kids growing up on Dean Street in Crown Heights who literally talked about going into the city as a great adventure because they never left the four or five square blocks. That's happening again: you become so isolated from where you might find work and meet different people with different attitudes. Work is one of the great ways to get about this. Having a universal summer youth employment program, not just make-work, but starting when kids are relatively young, maybe even junior high school, and as their interest develops, having them graduate. I used to be on the board of Jobs for the Future many years ago. They had a program called Project Protect, which I was blown away by. Hospital labs got together and started identifying young people in junior high school interested in science. If they had a certain grade point average, they got a summer job and an after-school job in a lab, first as a shadow, then a lab assistant. On graduation, they were given an opportunity to come back and stay on as they went to college or other careers. The results were extraordinary. Once a youngster got excited, keeping the grade average became, 'Of course I'm going to do that; that's my whole summer job and part of my future.' That kind of idea, if we could grab the administration as it struggles with these tough political problems of desegregating a system and providing special resources to schools where people are most isolated, and getting them into not only summer youth employment and after-school programs but also career planning where people sit down and say, 'What do you want to be? Here's the track to get there,' really investing in that as we wait for a more inclusive system to appear.

I think so. We're part of the mayor's diversity panel; Lazare does this. I think those kinds of approaches have some efficacy. Coming to some kind of negotiated requirement on doing away with a pure one-test system. I'm also agitated—my grandchild is six—but the notion we have a test for four-year-olds for the enriched kindergarten program? What four-year-old isn't brilliant? It drives me crazy. The fact that a little test prep industry has developed around this becomes a way of using public dollars to support a segregated system that, if left unchecked, will get much worse as economic pressures continue.