Postcard from New York: Columbus Circle to Elder Avenue
Roy Blatchford

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For readers not familiar with the New York subway system, both Columbus Circle and Elder Avenue are stations on the same line.

Columbus Circle lies at the fashionable end of Eighth Avenue. The spectacular, half-submerged glass cube that is the Apple Computer shop does roaring business close by. A restaurant tab for four at the local Mandarin Oriental will set you back $500. A penthouse flat overlooking Central Park close by the station changed hands this week for $50 million. The people here are seriously rich, look and feel it, shaded by Japanese maples and parasols. Even Scott Fitgerald would turn his head at the wealth of the current era.

Take the 6 Train a dozen subway stops north and you arrive at Elder Avenue, in the heart of the Bronx.

Stepping out of the station, the dirt and shimmering heat of the streets are immediate. Diners run by Puerto Ricans sell breakfast for a dollar. The housing projects are where people live: in the land of acronyms and brash capitalisation, NYPD Operation Clean Halls is the sign that welcomes. All global life is here, teeming onto the streets by way of escape from the cramped apartments and humming air-conditioning. A cruising Buick, boot open to reveal four-foot high speakers, thumps out its dramatic and deafening bass. Different generations, poverty a shared experience, barbecue food on the doorsteps.

This is America's most successful big city, a city divided.

Arriving at one of New York's many new schools in the Bronx, I show my ID to the resident police officers. I soon realise that this is not one school, but three occupying the same building. Part of Mayor Bloomberg's drive to raise standards (only 50% of the city's high school students graduate in four years) has been to create small schools with an extraordinary array of aspirational names. Choice is the talisman. Many high schools now number around 300 students in an attempt to create units where children feel safe and free from the gang culture that still grips their lives on the streets.

I ask innocently of a group of fifteen year-olds why, if life can be so grim in the housing projects and school is a place of welcome and safety, attendance is so low. 'Some just don't make it here', comes the wistful reply. One student talks of his friend having 'taken a dollar and fifty bucks', a reference to a slashed face of 150 stitches.

Visiting a number of elementary, middle and high schools on the wrong side of the tracks, certain themes emerge. A number of the principals I encounter have lived the lives of the children they serve. One grew up in the failing local high school, escaped to an Ivy League college and has returned to her neighbourhood to raise expectations and ambitions. Another attended the same building her new school now occupies. Many teachers went to local schools and have a passionate commitment to serving and inspiring local children. Presidential candidate Barack Obama's biography 'The Audacity of Hope' is on the best-sellers lists here, the title a neat summary of what many of these educators breathe.

One small school has had three principals in the three years since its creation - and two different buildings. Children travel from miles around: lateness is chronic and absence endemic. The current inspirational principal is about restoring order to fractured lives, striving against all odds to drive forward developments in classroom practice. One lean and fit boy in the school observed he was 'puttin' on a fat belly' because at lunchtime everyone stays inside the canteen, a necessity with no playground.

Another theme is the learning environment. Architects shape golden lives at Columbus Circle and environs, while school buildings in many parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens are in need of significant refurbishment. Décor is drab, classroom furniture is tired, and hallways and stairwells are bleak. By sharp contrast, in the new purpose-built schools, one an imaginatively converted factory, rooms are light, air-conditioned and fit for purpose.

Which leads me to the curriculum. Black-boards are being installed in new schools, while smartboards are conspicuous by their absence. Information technology as we know it in UK schools is in its infancy here in the domain of Disney and Google. English language arts, math, social studies and a smattering of textbook science provide the diet of most children and students. Music, gym and global history depend on facilities and teacher recruitment. Design & Technology, geography and MFL are nowhere to be seen. Any talk of a uniform national curriculum and national tests is politically unacceptable, with the Federal government contributing just 9 cents out of each dollar spent on schools.

Yet in the wake of the indelibly branded No Child Left Behind law, US schools are gripped by their students making AYP: adequate yearly progress in reading and math tests. Teaching is not mentioned, rather it is all about instructional programs. Chalk and talk is a common mode of delivery. Differentiation and data are the new buzz words, but I reassure my hosts that pendulums swing, from Plowden to Woodhead and back again.

Just where the children of families who occupy the Columbus Circle apartments attend school I've not yet visited. That's for another postcard. There was a time in US politics when poverty was a critical component of presidential campaigns. With 2008 election-specials beginning to dominate the myriad TV channels, the poor and their educational aspirations appear to be kept out of sight in this city of plenty.

Roy Blatchford, Director of NET, is currently visiting New York schools.

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