THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 67
“And I think that in the last couple of
years people are saying, ‘Now, more
than ever, Prep for Prep’s work is vital.’”
The board’s search for a new chief ex-
ecutive, led by the firm Spencer Stu-
art, is under way.
In January, I called Joseph at his
office in Brooklyn, to ask what he
thought of Prep’s future. He’d said in
his speech that “Prep’s mission has never
been about just getting us into private
school,” and I asked him to elaborate.
“We got really good at this one thing,
and that became who we are,” he said.
“Companies that get really good at one
thing tend to fall off the face of the
earth when they don’t change with the
times.” Maybe the organization could
begin to branch out—by, say, selling
Prep’s curriculum to failing school dis-
tricts and helping them to implement
it. Prep, he seemed to be saying, was
too small: the organization needed to
help more kids, even if it did so in differ-
ent ways. Perhaps it could reach be-
yond New York, and perhaps it could
reach those who aren’t scooped up in
its talent search. It’s not enough to pro-
mote a “talented tenth,” Joseph said,
referring to W. E. B. DuBois’s notion
that “the Negro race, like all races, is
going to be saved by its exceptional
men.” He added, “Our success alone
does not open any doors.”
F
orty years after the 1968 strike,
the middle school where it began,
J.H.S. 271, was closed by Bloomberg,
for poor performance. The building is
now home to three separate schools, in-
cluding the Ocean Hill Collegiate Char-
ter School. During Bloomberg’s tenure,
New York’s graduation rates improved,
but segregation deepened—the city’s
public schools are as segregated now as
they were under John Lindsay. In the
interim, millions of black children have
passed through the system, some served
well enough, others hardly at all, none
of them ever able to simply assume that
the education offered to them by their
government would prepare them for the
wider world. (A school-desegregation
plan that includes a proposal to abolish
“gifted” education is being considered
under New York’s current mayor, the
liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio.)
We are all embedded within sys-
tems, but each life—each child—is an
unrepeatable anecdote. According to
the adults I knew when I was a kid,
the worst thing in the world was to be
a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of
low expectations and bad outcomes de-
termined by color and class and sus-
tained by a bureaucracy that was, at
best, inept and, at worst, intractably
racist. Education, then, was triage; es-
cape was a higher-order concern than
reform. Parents murmured about how
So-and-So had got her daughter into
Such-and-Such school, and had spir-
ited the kid away from a school sys-
tem whose failures symbolized—and,
in many ways, flowed out of—a larger
set of brutal social facts.
Before her announcement, I asked
Hefferren whether Prep, by its nature,
helps to keep broader inequalities in-
tact. “We’re going to help create prin-
cipals, superintendents, education com-
missioners—people who are going to
really change that system,” she said.
Among Prep graduates, education is
the second-most-popular field of work.
Is it their—is it our—responsibility to
change the system now? Are we suc-
ceeding? When I spoke with Nikole
Hannah-Jones, she criticized Prep’s
philosophical orientation, but also told
me that she does not begrudge the
choice some black parents make to
send their kids to such programs. “The
onus of fixing the system”
should not fall on them,
she said.
I thought of conversa-
tions I’d had over the years
with all the Prep alums
I know, about what the
program had and hadn’t
done. One friend, a fellow
Horace Mann graduate
and a son of Nigerian im-
migrants, who now lives
in Amsterdam and is perpetually as-
tonished at the thick web of public ser-
vices there, told me, over dinner near
his home, “If Gary Simons had devoted
his life to single-handedly turning
around the whole system, he’d have
died (a) sooner and (b) without hav-
ing changed that much.” And here we
were, two kids from nothing much,
gently arguing over dinner at a bistro
across the ocean from where we grew
up. Another alum pointed out to me,
at a birthday party, that her son was
only a generation removed from the
material want she had known, and two
generations from the Haiti her parents
had left. Yes, it would be good for
well-off people to send their kids to
public schools, she thought. But, no,
she couldn’t afford for the “experiment”
to start with her son.
To be educated is to be subject to a
series of experiments. When Simons
was planning the lessons for Aspects
of Leadership, he considered adding a
section focussed specifically on poli-
tics, which would have been reserved
for the students who had taken most
ardently to the curriculum. These su-
perbly trained young people could go
on, he thought, to fix the society-wide
problems that had made Prep neces-
sary. The course was never implemented
at Prep, but Simons later incorporated
it into leda. Simons remains a close
observer of national politics: on an
e-mail list and a blog that he updates
more than once a day, he regularly shares
thoughts in support of his preferred
2020 Presidential candidate, the un-
usually bookish thirty-eight-year-old
Pete Buttigieg, a graduate of Harvard
and Oxford.
In January, I attended an open forum
of Prep alumni, held by the search com-
mittee that will choose the program’s
new chief executive later this year. There
was a nervous mood in the
room, less about the future
leader than about the ex-
istential issues that the
change represented. What,
exactly, made Prep differ-
ent from other similar pro-
grams? And now that pri-
vate schools, on their own,
without nonprofit inter-
vention, seek out nonwhite
students, starting in kinder-
garten—often from affluent families—
what exactly was the program’s role?
Prep has more than three thousand
alums now, many of whom are in their
forties and early fifties, with their own
children to agonize over. One of them,
a father of two, spoke up. “All of us
have to make that decision,” he said.
“Am I going to send my kids to the
same place I went to?” It was one in a
series of rhetorical questions. The rep-
resentative from the search committee
wrote it down. ^
