My name is Ivanna Berríos and I'm currently an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. I experienced both sides of the educational inequality and segregation in New Rochelle and strongly felt throughout my academic career that New Rochelle High School perpetuated a horrible culture of elitism, racism, and classism on the part of both students and faculty that was structurally reinforced by tracking, lack of resources for marginalized students, and other unacceptable practices of neglect and preferential treatment.

 

My family originally lived in an apartment complex in the downtown of New Rochelle, a lower income and majority immigrant area as compared to the more suburban, upper middle class, White north end of New Rochelle. I attended Trinity Elementary School, as did my older sister who also attended Isaac E. Young Middle School. I remember feeling bored and restless at school, and rather than receive support or resources, I received comments about minor behavioral problems in my progress reports. I religiously visited the public library to supplement my reading, and ended up scoring high enough on the New York ELA/Math assessment to enter a lottery for an advanced program called Kaleidoscope. Were it not for several factors as well as pure luck through the lottery, I would have had a much harder time leaving the track I was on for the Kaleidoscope 'advanced' track. Both of my parents had begun or completed a college education before they immigrated and were steadily obtaining socioeconomic upward mobility. They had both learned English, and I had quickly learned English as well after starting school. My grandmother and other family members had the time and capacity to bring me to the library when school frustrated me.

 

It was not my own intelligence or hard work per se that qualified me for Kaleidoscope so much as the circumstances that better positioned me to be an exception to the trend of Hispanic kids living downtown attending the public school that I did. At the same time that I transferred from Trinity to Davis Elementary for the full-day Kaleidoscope program, my parents had finally saved enough money to buy a house and we moved out of the downtown area. In the Kaleidoscope program I experienced a whole new kind of learning that was more comprehensive, less based on rote memorization, and operated from the premise that children were intelligent and creative individuals. It was very different from Trinity. At the same time, my parents had finally saved enough money to buy a house, and so we were able to move out of downtown to an area that would qualify me and my sister to attend Albert Leonard Middle School.

 

The way the suburbanites at ALMS talked about the kids from Isaac was incredibly patronizing, and although I can't speak for my sister, I know her experience transferring from Isaac to ALMS was initially upsetting. This patronization continued in NRHS, when children from Isaac and ALMS were finally joined. Of course many people befriended each other and didn't care who was from where, but NRHS for the most part clearly continued to follow the tracking logic and did not provide resources to address the unequal tracks that began in elementary school and were based on class and racial geographies. The majority of the people in my Advanced Placement classes were White people I knew from ALMS. In my senior year, I was either the only Hispanic person in the AP class or was one of two or three. When it came time for SATs, my family could not afford private tutoring or classes. However, my guidance counselor at the time said he had a friend who taught a class in Mamaroneck who would accept one student free of cost if my counselor recommended them. He chose me as the student, and I was able to take the class. I was the only non-White person there. I was one of the few who attended a public school, and it was like a different world. And of course, I was chosen as the student because although I was not predisposed to be able to access it, I had made my way onto the 'advanced' track since late elementary school. I had proven my worth as a student to invest in. NRHS treated students like investments, dropping them if they did not return adequate scores and managing risk by not 'wasting' resources on students with less than ideal backgrounds.

 

I had no trouble getting accepted into AP classes because of my track record, whereas some of my friends had to test in or were actively discouraged by their counselors to not bother. NRHS prides itself on being a high performing public high school, but it was glaringly obvious that this performance was exactly that- a performance of attentiveness to students and excellence while in practice, a large swath of students were neglected.

 

I once received a couple of days of in-school suspension for an incident that otherwise should have resulted in a longer-term, full suspension, and was told to my face that because I was so promising, my punishment was being minimized. I always felt anger at the very obvious preference that a pampered group of racially/economically privileged students and lucky minorities received and how that was seen as normal and pragmatic at NRHS. One time, a teacher of mine that taught both my AP English class and a remedial English class indicated that the other class wasn't really intelligent or interested in learning, whereas we would go on to "rule the world."

 

It made my skin crawl.

 

I did go on to attend an Ivy League school, excel academically, and meet all the marks and expectations of my track. However, it is not so much the predictive capacity of the tracking system as much as it is the prejudice and differentiated treatment that the tracking system encourages that explains this. NRHS must take drastic measures to address these power imbalances and it must take them immediately.