Education
As Enrollment Shrinks, a Clash Between the Have- and Have-Not Schools
For 17 years, the schools on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have coexisted in harmony. But when the families of their students gathered on a recent night in their shared auditorium, there was nothing neighborly about it.
On one side was Public School 9, a coveted but overcrowded elementary school where parents raise $2 million annually to pay for extra teachers in every classroom. On the other was Center School, a beloved middle school with ingrained traditions like allowing its students to eat lunch off campus. The topic that night was their proposed breakup.
P.S. 9 wanted to take over the entire building, kicking out Center School, so that it could expand, reduce class sizes and, perhaps, attract more families from the neighborhood. Center School would move to a building about 20 blocks south that it would occupy alongside a chronically low-performing school, Riverside School for Makers and Artists, whose middle school is losing students and would be eliminated. Center School families agreed that it should move — but not to Riverside, which they say lacks everything it needs.
Across the country in recent years, a similar landscape of schools — some hollowing out, others teeming with students — has emerged as public school systems confront a yearslong, sustained decline in enrollment. The exodus accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, as parents considered other options for their children, and has started to strain budgets and force tough decisions.
Since the pandemic, more than 123,000 students have departed New York City public schools, while nearly 1.3 million have left public schools nationwide. From California to Texas to Maine, school leaders facing half-empty schools and stark forecasts of continued enrollment declines have few options, including closing or merging schools.
But those are deeply unpopular, politically radioactive and tear apart neighborhoods. That was clear that night on the Upper West Side.
“If you don’t want families to go to charter schools, if you don’t want families to go to private schools, then stop closing schools,” said one of the first speakers, Dawn Goddard, a mother of a sixth grader at Center School.
A fifth grader at Center School said she was being punished to help a “larger, wealthier school.” If P.S. 9 really needed space, a sixth-grade boy said, it should start by eliminating its science lab. And a Center School mother wondered why P.S. 9 parents hadn’t expressed concern for the Riverside students, many of whom are recent asylum seekers, including one who, the mother noted, had witnessed the decapitation of his parents.
Seated in the first rows, parents and teachers from P.S. 9 shook their heads in disgust. A mother of a girl with special needs took the microphone and spoke about the shame her daughter feels because her therapy sessions have to be held in a room with other students because of space constraints.
Gale Brewer, a City Council member who represents the area, had tried to broker a deal to appease all sides. “They’re very, very nasty to each other,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
This has been the atmosphere during the past four months after New York City’s Education Department announced a plan to break up those schools and close or downsize others before the next school year. Opponents said that the proposals had been rushed.
Versions of this feud on the Upper West Side have been playing out across the country. Parents have protested proposed closures, shouted at public meetings and, on rare occasion, been escorted away by the police, including recently in Houston just before its school board approved the shuttering of 12 schools.
Facing overwhelming opposition, school leaders in some places, such as Philadelphia, have scaled back their closure plans, revealing the difficulty in trying to address declining enrollment.
“Closing a school is an incredibly sharp pain point for parents and communities,” said Thomas S. Dee, a professor of education at Stanford University, who has been tracking school closures nationwide since the pandemic. “Local schools are often a focal point for neighborhood identity.”
On the Upper West Side, where families carefully study school attendance zones before buying or renting and sometimes pay more to live near higher-achieving schools, Education Department leaders insisted in town hall-style meetings that they would not back down from the proposal. It could not be negotiated, there was no Plan B.
But two days before a panel of education advisers was expected to approve it, New York’s new schools chancellor called it off, an inauspicious start to what could be a wave of closures and mergers in the coming years as enrollment declines.
The chancellor, Kamar Samuels, said the proposal was too much change too quickly into a new administration, even though Mr. Samuels had crafted it himself in his previous job overseeing Upper West Side schools.
But the deal was not dead. He said it would be revised by local school leaders in consultation with parents.
While the clash pitted families against one another and strained friendships, it also cast a harsh light on the differences and inequities among schools, even those just blocks apart, and also brought up fraught questions about race and class. A battle a decade ago on the Upper West Side over school attendance boundaries centered on the same issues.
Across the country, school closures have disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic students, and it would have been no different for the schools marked for shuttering or downsizing on the Upper West Side.
At one of them, Community Action School, nearly every student is Black or Hispanic. During one of the first meetings about the closures, an eighth-grade girl from the school pleaded for it to be saved, describing how it had been a refuge after a tumultuous experience earlier in middle school.
While she spoke, a mother, who was watching remotely and speaking on a hot mic, said, “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school.” (Afterward, the woman said that her comment had been taken out of context.) Mr. Samuels later announced that Community Action School would stay open.
Of all the changes Mr. Samuels had pursued, one school would have come out ahead of the rest: P.S. 9, one of the most-sought after in the city.
Most of its students are white, and it has resources — a science lab, a computer room, a library and two art rooms — that are a rarity among New York elementary schools. Among the city’s nearly 1,600 schools, only five raised more money than P.S. 9’s parent organization last year.
The Education Department believes that P.S. 9 could lure families back into the public schools, which remain popular in neighborhoods that are home to many middle-class and upper-middle-class families.
This school year, more than 800 students applied for the school’s kindergarten class, which had just 100 seats. With an expansion, P.S. 9 could accept more of those students, school leaders said, and also lower its class sizes to comply with a new state cap.
More than 40 years ago, education leaders in New York saw the same potential in Center School during another period when schools were losing students. A group of educators aimed to create a school unlike any other in the city — and it remains that way today.
It has four grades, unlike the three in most middle schools. The roughly 250 students are grouped in classes that span every grade. Collaboration and fun are prioritized. Students play together during recess, eat lunch together — often off-campus at pizza shops and empanada spots — and direct, perform and produce the school’s highly anticipated variety shows.
“Families who might otherwise opt for charter, private, suburban middle schools see Center as a rare gem,” said Michael Fram, a high school principal whose child attends the school and who attended a meeting in January.
Relocating Center School to Riverside would kill Center, parents and students said. Riverside does not have a dedicated auditorium, its play area is on a rooftop and the neighborhood has fewer restaurants.
That night in the auditorium, a mother, Tiffany Rodriguez-Noel, who has children at Riverside, said it had been overlooked in the clash among the other schools. It needed more resources, which were promised years ago, she said.
In the school boundary fight a decade ago, much of it centered on the creation of Riverside. Back then, it was known as Public School 191, and almost every student who attended it lived in the Amsterdam Houses, a public housing complex near Lincoln Center.
It was renamed and relocated, placed on the ground floor of a luxury high-rise in a wealthier neighborhood, as part of an effort by the Education Department to give it a new start. It would have a diverse student population, school leaders said, and just 20 percent of its students would come from low-income families. Today, that number is 86 percent.
“It feels a lot like our land is being stolen to cover up being neglected, ignored and robbed of an adequate education,” Ms. Rodriguez-Noel said.
Kitty Bennett and Georgia Gee contributed research.
Luna Lab is far from the only program for young composers in the United States. Besides conservatory classes, there is the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program, open to all high-school students from sophomore to senior year, and Wildflower Composers, which provides mentorship to female, transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer early career composers.
What’s different about Luna Lab, Mazzoli said, is its commitment to its alumni. Reid and Mazzoli remain available to former fellows for advice and networking. Yuri Lee, 21, who was in the program from 2018-19, consulted with them about where to go to college, for example. She had studied composition in Juilliard’s Preparatory Division and it was her “dream school” for college. Reid and Mazzoli — and her teachers at Juilliard — encouraged her to attend Princeton University instead, for a well-rounded undergraduate education.
Luna Lab alumni can apply for stipends, from the Toulmin Luna Composition Lab Alumni Fund, that can be applied to creating recordings, producing concerts, purchasing software, creating a website and more. Alumni can apply more than once and can receive a total of $5,000 over time.
The nonprofit also furthers alumni careers through commissions from partner organizations and special projects like 25 for 25: A New Time for Choral Music. For that, the Cincinnati May Festival, celebrating its 150th anniversary, collaborated with Luna Lab to commission 25 works by alumni for 25 different choral ensembles.
About three-quarters of Luna Lab alumni who attend college have studied composition, and virtually all continue to be involved with music. Many have gone on to graduate school in composition. And Mazzoli and Reid say they can foresee a time when alumni will be ready to return as mentors.
For many of the alumni, the Luna Lab fellowship was life-changing. Maya Miro Johnson, 25, a 2017-18 fellow, said that its impact on her life was “incalculable, because I would not be a musician or a composer.” Growing up in a low-income family in Utah, she did have dance and violin lessons as a child but, she said, she was not good at the violin.
Chris Kobara stood in front of an electronic white board in his New York City high school, practicing with a swoop of his pen the connection between the “a” and “r” in his name.
He stepped back and looked at the board with Suzanne Finman, his English teacher, who had been coaching him.
“If it’s readable, it’s something,” he said, displeased with his effort.
Mr. Kobara, 18, was one of six students who gathered after school in Ms. Finman’s classroom at the Urban Assembly Early College High School of Emergency Medicine on a recent afternoon to practice signing their names in cursive.
The students, all of them high school seniors, filled sheets with their names, at times comparing the flourishes they added to their letters.
The club is one of several that have been established in recent years at schools and libraries across the country where children are learning cursive in extracurricular clubs.
Cursive was eliminated from the Common Core standards in 2010, and now many children can’t sign their names, write checks or read historical documents written in cursive, such as the Declaration of Independence.
In a 2016 interview with Education Week, Sue Pimentel, who helped shape the Common Core state standards for English and language arts, said a higher priority had been placed on students learning how to use technology than learning cursive.
While some states have restored cursive writing to their curriculums, some students in states where it remains excluded have sought ways to learn the skill outside school.
“Knowing how to write your name in script is really important,” Mr. Kobara said. “Everybody should know how to write in script.”
He’s been practicing his signature for several weeks after school, perfecting a loop in the “C” of his first name, and plans to write thank you notes to teachers in cursive.
It started with the students’ curiosity.
“When students see me take my own notes in cursive, they immediately ask me to write their name in cursive and then they ask me to teach it to them,” Ms. Finman said. “This has happened a lot over the years, so I asked, ‘Could I teach you this in a cursive club?’”
While some students are learning in extracurricular clubs at school, others are finding their penmanship lessons at libraries.
Mandi Whipple, a librarian who specializes in young adult books at the public library in Blackstone, Mass., was inspired to start a cursive club last year after one of her colleagues observed that her grandchildren couldn’t read cursive writing.
Now, a group of students meets at the library for an hour every Thursday to practice the looping script of their letters.
“The ones that have stuck with it are now writing full sentences,’ Miss Whipple said. “They’re really into it.”
A cursive program at Abington Community Library in Clarks Summit, Pa., has a defined curriculum that children follow for eight weeks, focusing on a few letters each week.
“We show them how to do it and they can copy us on paper,” Leigh-Ann Puchalski, the children’s librarian said. “Then we do practice where they practice on worksheets. Then, to make it fun, we add different types of sensory elements.”
The children can trace letters in salt with their fingers, use magnetized drawing boards called Magna Doodles, and write in gel pens to make it fun, Mrs. Puchalski said.
The program has been so popular that it has had a wait-list, she said.
With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this year, Mrs. Puchalski is emphasizing the historical side of cursive and having children trace the Constitution.
“For one of the sessions we’ll use parchment paper,” Mrs. Puchalski said. “I did actually order the refillable fountain pens.”
In Pennsylvania, cursive won’t be a relic of the past much longer. Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a bill in February to reintroduce it in schools, joining at least 23 other states that have started to require that it be taught in schools. New Jersey is reintroducing cursive for the 2026-27 school year. Idaho brought it back last year.
Cursive is not just for signing checks. It also has a scientific advantage.
“When you form those intricate letters, those motor patterns on paper, it actually requires much more of the brain, and the brain is much more active and it’s more stimulating for the brain than to type letters on the keyboard,” said Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher and professor of psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Dr. van der Meer conducted a study of 140 students who were quizzed after a lecture by their professor. Those who took notes by hand scored better on the quiz than those who typed their notes, she said.
For Jasmyn Rios, 17, learning cursive is a point of pride.
“My I.D. signature looks crazy, it’s a mess,” she said, while writing her name repeatedly on a piece of paper. “I wanted to come so when I do have to sign those professional documents, I’m not embarrassed.”
Ms. Rios said that she’s had to sign her name several times as she prepares to go to college, and that she was concerned about how her handwriting would look once she is in the professional world, she said.
Cursive “should be taught fundamentally in elementary schools,” she said. “I think it covers a lot more than just having professional writing — just being confident in what you’re writing when you’re writing it.”
You don’t get to know for sure what college will cost until you apply and get in. Colleges provide tools that help you guess what kind of financial aid they might offer, if any, but the numbers are often off by many thousands of dollars.
The fact that this real price is a mystery for most people at most schools is disgraceful. It also presents an opportunity.
A few weeks ago, Brandeis University quietly introduced a new tool for college shoppers called Faye. It asks questions like a person would, digests high school transcripts and tax returns, then tells you “what your Brandeis cost will be” if you get in, including both need-based and merit aid.
“Will” suggests certainty. And certainty is decidedly not what colleges offer with the net price calculators that federal law requires them to provide applicants. Those calculators are the tools that lead to sticker shock when an admission offer arrives with an actual price that is far higher than the calculators’ estimates.
I don’t know of any schools that do what Brandeis is trying. It may not work, and it may backfire in a couple of different ways. But the fact that the school is even trying it is a kind of victory for anyone who has ever wailed in agony over the complexity of college pricing and the futility of trying to figure it out.
The person who signed off on Faye (as in F.A., or financial aid) is Arthur Levine, the Brandeis president. The son of a South Bronx mailman, he was able to attend Brandeis himself in the late 1960s only because a well-off relative helped.
Dr. Levine did not come up with Faye. He has long been pals with John Katzman, whose name will be familiar to Gen X-ers who took his Princeton Review SAT classes. Mr. Katzman’s punk-rock approach to test preparation over the years, which included trying to trade his archrival’s internet address for a case of beer, made him a folk hero to students and an irritant to people in power.
I first met Mr. Katzman in the 1990s when Random House republished, under its Princeton Review imprint, an out-of-print book about gap years that I had co-written. But we hadn’t spoken in about 25 years until he emailed about Brandeis. He’s no longer affiliated with Princeton Review and started a higher-education company called Noodle in 2013.
He shopped the upfront pricing idea around for a while before trying it on Dr. Levine. But it was slow to gain traction because real pricing, pre-application, is just not how things are done in the residential undergraduate education industry.
To get any kind of a binding price under the current system, you generally must apply and get in. Then, perhaps you appeal for a better offer, if the school can digest your appeal in time. This year, Northeastern could not for some students.
And then, more! Maybe a different college surprises you with an even better offer — even after the May 1 decision deadline.
To call it a goat rodeo is to engage in a kind of goatism.
Brandeis’s enrollment team was well aware of this mess. But its members weren’t sure there was any overarching fix, given regulatory and other constraints, and they greeted Mr. Katzman with arched eyebrows.
“We thought he was nuts,” said Sherri Avery, assistant vice president of student financial services at Brandeis.
“If it could be done, someone would have been doing it, right?” said her boss, Jennifer Walker, vice president for enrollment management.
“And we wanted to do it,” Ms. Avery added.
Mr. Katzman’s premise was simple. Most need-based and merit aid calculations are formulaic and algorithmic, even if they differ at least a bit from one another. Ever-evolving technology ought to be able to handle it.
Faye is simple to use, and the price quotes it produced in my tests were easy to understand. What gave me pause was that the word “guarantee” did not appear anywhere near the dollar figure. One recent test triggered an email that was supposed to confirm Faye’s “will pay” price, but it referred to the number as a “projection.”
In my first meeting with the Noodle team, the G word came up repeatedly. Since then, however, the Brandeis and Noodle wordsmiths struggled mightily before they settled on the “will pay” language.
Why no guarantee? Blame the lawyers, who demanded asterisks that the team thought would be off-putting.
Indeed, there will be situations — estranged parents who won’t submit tax returns, small-business owners in various circumstances — that will require human intervention. A “will pay” offer could still come, but from humans, later, and not from Faye right away.
Then, there’s Faye’s garbage-in, garbage-out rule: If you make an error, it’s on you. If you lie, Brandeis won’t honor the quote. And if the software messes up, Brandeis reserves the right to re-price your deal.
There’s more. If your child is a high school sophomore or younger, the “will” does not apply, since your finances may change and Brandeis’s list price will for sure.
Brandeis may also change its merit aid formula if the school becomes more popular. It received 40 percent more applications this year, which may give the school enough marketplace power to offer fewer merit aid discounts. (Merit aid for current students doesn’t change from year to year as long as they keep their grades up and finish within eight semesters.)
And finally, if your household income or assets change drastically during your time at the school, your net price might, too, if you receive need-based financial aid.
So much throat clearing. So many maybes. All these asterisks make the whole endeavor seem asterisky, and it is.
If you’re a school, any big change in how you sell can alter who will matriculate and what they can and will pay. If net tuition revenue per student then plummets, you have an enormous problem. Competitors will scrutinize Brandeis’s tool, and some of them may undercut its prices.
And if enough people use the tool but can’t get sensible offers, the university loses them before they even apply. Application numbers could fall as quickly as they rose.
“That’s hard,” Mr. Katzman said. “But it’s the same hard as every airline and hotel and everyone in the real world has to deal with. I have to set a price, and I have to tell people what it costs.”
That’s the other reason there is no “guarantee.” College-pricing nerds like me think the word is a solution to what ails higher education. But in Faye’s testing, the word generated more questions than excitement among parents and students, and there was a risk that it might sound gimmicky.
So if you are a college shopper, test Faye mercilessly. If your finances seem broken, try to break Brandeis with your complex situation.
And save that “will pay” price quote. If you apply to Brandeis and get in, send me a note and let me know if the price changed.
But before then, ask this when you talk to other colleges: Why won’t you tell me what you will charge, pre-application? Heck, do it in the group information session in front of 100 other people. Maybe the school will surprise you.
Some institutions will make this work eventually, even if it isn’t Brandeis. And hats off to Cornell College, Whitman College and the College of Wooster, which have their own transparency initiatives.
Ms. Avery and Ms. Walker no longer think Mr. Katzman is crazy. And over lunch in March, they talked about the risk that their price quotes could scare people away.
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