Independent Sources; Separate And Not Equal

On this edition of independent sources, separate and not equal, growing concerns that New York City's gifted and talented programs may lead to segregation in public schools. Getting the word out, with only a small portion of the City's advertising dollars spent on ethnic media, certain communities may be missing out on important messages. And the doctor is in a pioneering immigrant artist gives life to New York City's video artsy. Welcome to independent sources, I'm Abi Ashola. And I'm Jano Ravinkan. New York City's gifted and talented programs in public schools are coming under fire from some critics who say that they are reinforcing racial segregation in the City's classrooms.

They contend that affluent Asian and white pupils have more access to these programs than less fortunate black and Hispanic students. The Department of Education officials have denied that and defended the programs. They say that the DOE's overall objective is to improve the quality of education in public schools and reduce the achievement gaps among students. I sat down with Dr. James Borland, a professor of education at Columbia University's Teachers College, and Michael Petriley of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington based organization that advocates for improved childhood education, we spoke about the debate over the gifted and talented. Michael, you are a strong supporter of the gifted and talented program. What was the rationale behind its creation? Well, we have a challenge in our country, which is that when students come into our classrooms, especially in the early ages, they tend to come in with vastly different preparation levels.

So some kids are coming in ready to read at a second or third or fourth grade level. Other kids are way, way behind. A lot of this has to do with social class. Kids growing up in poverty tend to come in way behind with much smaller vocabularies. Kids who come from more affluent families tend to in general come in way, way, way far ahead. You bring all their students into the same classroom and you've got a challenge. You've got to figure out how do you make sure that you challenge all the students and how kids get to where they need to be. gifted and talented programs have traditionally been one answer to that question, which is to say, can we have some special programming for the students who are ready to accelerate ahead? That's certainly the way that it's been designed in many big cities like in New York. You then see these programs continue in some cases through the elementary grades until middle school and high school where you start talking about more advanced classes for those sorts of students. The big question, of course, is how do we make sure that those programs are as equitable as possible to make sure that everybody has a chance at getting into them and that they

are not set in stone, so that once you're out of the program, you can never get back in. Let me get to Dr. Borland, you are of the opinion that these programs promote segregation. Explain why. Well, I wouldn't go that far and I don't disagree with anything that's been said. I think it's clear that children differ in their needs and we need to accommodate those differences, need to respond to them. High concerns are the way that's done in some settings such as New York City. We have real equity issues in New York City. About a third of the students in grades kindergarten through five are Caucasian or Asian American. Get these children occupied three-quarters of the slots in our gifted and talented programs. African-American and Latino children make about two-thirds of the population, but about a quarter of the kids in gifted and talented programs. So we have real issues with regard to equity, it's not so much the concept to give the education. That's my field. I've been an advocate for these kids for years, but it's the way that sometimes the

programs are implemented and the consequences such as the work we're seeing in New York City. Michael, what about this idea that that was actually forwarded by the mainstream press that these programs reinforce segregation in public schools? What do you have to say to that? Well, look, there's an issue for sure in that, and the doctor is right, that we see these big differences in race, but really what we're seeing more than anything are differences in class. In other words, African-American and Latino students in New York City, as in many big cities, are much more likely to be poor than the white and Asian students. And it's the poor students who tend to come in so far behind, especially when it comes to their vocabulary development. Now there's a lot of efforts to try to fix that, to try to incorporate preschool education, to try to help catch those kids up so that they can compete for these kinds of slots. But there are huge disadvantages that they come in with, and I think that's what you're really seeing. It's not so much by race, it's really by class.

You imagine all the advantages that affluent kids come with, from better prenatal care, to better nutrition, to all of the words that they're hearing in their own homes and their own families that they're growing up with professional families, certainly families who are speaking English at home, all of that translates into these huge advantages. And when they come in and they take a test or they get assessed for gifted education on average, they're going to tend to do better. And that's what you're seeing in New York. I don't know that there's a real solution to that other than to keep working hard at helping the disadvantaged kids catch up as fast as possible. Dr. Berlin, talking about the preparation that goes into being accepted in the gifted and talented program, you were talking here not only about the stress to parents and to the child itself. We're talking about four-year-olds having to undergo these tough tests. You're talking about lots of money that have to be paid for books, preparation books. I read about boot camps, websites that parents can subscribe to for $40 or so a month, explain what's going on.

Well, the city just switched tests and introduced a non-verbal test, the Nagliari non-verbal aptitude test. If you do a Google search for the Nagliari test, the first three things that come up are commercial sites for test preparation and materials for parents. Another one of the advantages that affluent parents have is that they know what the system works. They know it's test-based. Kids are admitted to the New York City gifted and talented programs solely on the basis of two tests taken when children are four or five years old for the most part. The test preparation, there's a thriving test preparation industry that's going up around this and other forms of admission in New York City such as an admission to private schools. And this is another one of the advantages that affluent parents have. And while it's true that it's a matter of socioeconomic status as much as anything, socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic status in our society are highly correlated. So the outcome is that we find that in Caucasian and Asian-American kids predominate these programs, and I'm not convinced that giftedness is less likely to be found among Latino

and African-American children. I do that's the case or the city's doing something wrong and I think it's the latter. You mentioned that they changed the test and it's less based on verbal abilities. Would that be likely to increase the number of children of color in these classes? I doubt it. We have decades of research that show that nonverbal tests actually tend to disadvantage poor children and children of color. It seems counterintuitive but in fact that's what the data show. Michael, you're taking that? I think if you're talking about four or five year olds, no matter what kind of test you use, you're going to have the situation where the kids coming from poverty are going to be at a disadvantage. So one thing New York City might consider is to delay its gifted programs until the kids are older to maybe third or fourth grade or to make sure there are processes in place to make sure that the older kids have a chance to demonstrate their giftedness so that by the time that the kids coming from poverty or another kids can demonstrate their giftedness maybe more so when they're a little bit older they can do so and they can get

into these programs. Dr. Borland, what about this idea that Michael is suggesting? Well it's certainly something to consider. The younger the children are the more that relative advantages or disadvantages in family situations are going to loom large in the identification process so that using a test driven process with children as young as four and five is guaranteed to lead the inequities that we're seeing persist in New York City gifted and talented programs today. Other things we can do would include using other forms of identification. We seem so enamored of tests and wedded to objective measures but there's nothing sacrosanct, nothing wonderful about objective forms of assessment. There are other ways that we can identify kids that would open up the process. Michael when we talk about the place of the United States in the global education, in global education rankings the United States has fallen to average according to the organization

for economic cooperation and development. Would you like to see the gifted and talented programs continue and do you see these programs as a plus to the public school education in the United States? They're definitely a plus. What we need to be doing in our education system is making sure every child gets challenged to fulfill their full potential and gets pushed as much as possible to learn as much as they can. Without a lot of these programs which you'd have a lot of kids sitting in a class board and not learning much. These are absolutely essential programs and you're right that we are not doing very well compared to many of our international competitors and it's not just in averages. Even when you look at the top of the spectrum you look at our highest performing students compared to the highest performing students in other countries even our top students aren't doing all that great compared to our competitors especially the competitors in East Asia and some of the Scandinavian countries.

So if we want to compete on a global stage this is essential for us to do at the same time that we're helping all kids even those who are far behind catch up and learn as much as they can too. We've got to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. Dr. James Borland, Michael Petrili, thank you both for being in studio with us today. Pleasure player, thanks. Still to come on the show, publishers of ethnic media vindicated by a new report. Before that, Zephiz Lebron has some other news. Thanks Villanora, here's a look at some headlines from the ethnic and community media. From L.D. Ariel of Prenza, politicians are demanding that the Department of Transportation make neighborhood streets safer for pedestrians and school children. This after six-year-old Amadeira Sabusa was crushed by a truck, seven blocks away from his school in Harlem. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and other politicians recently gathered that the boys school, PS155, to highlight steps that the DOT should take to address the issue. According to Stringer, three other children have been fatally run over within seven blocks

surrounding that school since 2009. Public advocate Bill de Blasio has slammed Mayor Michael Bloomberg for what he says is the city's unfair treatment of small businesses in the outer boroughs. de Blasio recently released a report titled, Burrow Bias, How the Bloomberg Administration drains. The document highlights the disproportionate amount of inspections conducted on businesses in the outer boroughs compared to the ones in Manhattan. As a result, many have paid more fines than their Manhattan counterparts. According to the report, businesses in Manhattan have paid 18% less in fines than the citywide average. That from the Queen's Chronicle. From immigration nation, many immigrants and their advocates are having mixed feelings about the sequestration's spending cuts. On the one hand, some immigrants and activists were pleased when thousands of detainees were released from immigration facilities in February to save government money. But many now worry about increased delays at ports of entry, including airports and border crossings.

They also fear longer waits for visas and immigration cases. The state department processes tourist and work visas and has already seen $850 million in cuts. This would likely cause a longer wait time for cases that have already been backlogged. Mayor Al candidate Bill Thompson has expressed concern about the city not advertising enough in ethnic publications. The Center for Community and Ethnic Media released a report earlier this month, revealing that 82% of the city's $18 million advertising budget goes to mainstream papers such as the Daily News and the New York Post. Thompson, who is Caribbean American, wrote an opinion column for Voices of New York, criticizing the current administration for overlooking the ethnic media and depriving communities of important information and access to their government. We'll have more on that story in the second half of the show. And finally, a youth arts collective based in the Bronx has been forced to shut down after their members were evicted. The Rebel DS, an arts collective devoted to hip hop culture, used to offer activities like open mic competitions and community service for the past four years.

The group was recently planning to open a hip hop library to celebrate the culture. But members of the group say police arrived to their space on February 28th and barberically throughout their paintings, musical instruments and recording equipment. Rodrigo Vinegas, one of the group's leaders, says they would throw not because they refused to pay their landlord on $1,000 rental increase. Those are just some stories making headlines from the ethnic and community media, back to Abby and Vienna. Thanks, Ciphers. Publishers at ethnic media outlets have always complained that the city does not advertise in their pages. Now a recent report from the Center for Community and Ethnic Media is lending support to these claims. As we mentioned earlier in our news of the week story, ethnic papers receive less than 20% of the city's multi-million dollar ad revenue. That's left some to ask whether various city departments are actually reaching immigrant communities and fulfilling their legal obligation to provide information in all languages. I spoke with Sarah Bartlett, the director of the Urban Reporting Program at the CUNY Graduate

School of Journalism, and David Grieves, co-founder of the African American Publication, Our Time Press, about the report's findings. Before we begin, full disclosure, independent sources co-host Gary Pierre is also the director of the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, the group that compiled this report. So Sarah, I'll start with you. Why did your organization decide to do this report on how the city overlooks ethnic media when it comes to advertising? Well we'd heard reports from publishers for a number of years complaining that they felt very left out and they'd showed us how there were ads running in some of the large mainstream publications, and they just couldn't understand why they didn't get a piece of that. And we started asking questions and we realized we were pretty curious too, so we decided to really research it and look into it. Okay, I just want to read this, of the $18 million the city spends on advertising 82% goes to major publications.

That's what you found in your report. So which ethnic media outlets are the other 18%. Hispanic publications like LDRO, the Prince, they do give to some community publications like the Amsterdam News if they're trying to reach the African-American community. The world's urinal and Cintao get a little bit. There's not a lot of others, I mean it's really very, very limited. And David, do you think that the ethnic media needs to do more to be more visible to the city to actually get advertising dollars from them? Well, we do outreach to the city agencies and try to get these dollars, but they call us with their press releases. We get press releases from them to do that they want to place in the paper for free. But the advertising, we don't get certainly not the level that we should be getting. Okay, and the city puts out ads like public service messages and job postings and those kinds of things.

It would be very interesting to people in bed bed bed for starters and certainly you know, aids, aids, awareness, tax things, re-recruitment things, the lean, lean notices. All these things would be very interesting to our readership, but we just don't get the advertising dollars that would help us to get that message out. Okay, obviously your readership would benefit from it. How does the city benefit from targeting them? Well, first of all, it's a very important part of the city demographic and if you're putting out health messages, certainly you want to get them to the, if you will, the grassroots folks who really need it and in our circulation in central Brooklyn would give them that. A lot of our readers don't read them in the New York Times, don't read the daily news and have an aversion to the New York Post. So they would benefit the city would benefit by being more inclusive in their advertising. Okay, and Sarah, in the report, you found that there are two agencies, advertising agencies

that handle the city's ads. How does that work? The city, in order to get the best rates and to sort of be very efficient, has a contract that they want to use just two CDH, two independent advertising firms. So they place all of their ads through those two firms, one's called Miller and the others called Creative. And they've had the contracts for many, many years, in one case 14 years, I think in the other 25 years, which is an extraordinarily long time for a vendor to have a contract with the city. It spans multiple administrations and, you know, I don't know if it's fair, it's unusual. And the most recently, we had heard that they really wanted to have more competition for that contract so that they could get some fresh thinking and really try to make sure that they were up to date with their approach. And instead, the same two people have gotten it, the same two firms have gotten it, and they lengthened the terms of the contract of five years, from up from two. So it's very puzzling, and I mean, it could be totally fine, but we just, we don't know,

there isn't enough research into that. And I hope the controller's office looks into that. So, David, how would ethnic publications, like your own, benefit from the ad dollars from the city? Well, we'd be able to, we pay our writers, and we'd be able to pay them more, and two have them do more articles, so that when there are events, community events go going on, when there's community happenings, and we'd be able to cover it better. Without those dollars, you can't ask people to work for free, it just doesn't work that way. Are people ever at risk of closing down because they don't have enough ad dollars? Oh, absolutely, absolutely every week is a drama when you don't have enough ad dollars, because the printer has to be paid, the distributors have to be paid, and be nice to be able to pay your own rent and things of that nature. And without the advertising, not dollars, there's always the juggling, so it makes it harder

when you don't have, obviously, the advertising, not dollars to make it work. Okay, and Sarah, what's been the response to the report so far? Well, so far we've had several politicians, issue statements, Bill Thompson, who's running for mayor, the former controller, wrote a very strong op-ed article, which ran in Queen Satino, and I think some other publications, basically saying, this is wrong, this is not the way to run a railroad if we want to reach an important segment of our community. We need to change these policies, and of course, since he's running for mayor, he said, you know, and if I'm mayor, I'll make those changes, you know, that remains to be seen. The controller, John Lewis, who just statement also running for mayor, saying that these are, the policy is wrong-headed and needs to be changed. He didn't offer any specifics, and we were hoping he would say something about the contracts, but not yet, maybe at some point in the future. Do you think they would change their tune after the elections?

You know, that's just pure speculation, and I try to stay out of that business. Okay. It's the city somehow skirting the law by not advertising in ethnic media and reaching out to people with foreign languages. Well, there are language access laws and executive orders on the books, the Bloomberg administration's actually been one of the national leaders in that. And I think we've had some conversations with the Office of Immigrant Affairs run by Commissioner Fatima Shama, who has been really a leader and an advocate for this. And when we brought it up, we said, you know, why is this not being applied to advertising? It was obvious to us that she really, they had never really thought about that. That was kind of a novel way of looking at it. And as soon as we brought it up, she was like, you know, you're totally right. This needs to be part of our language access policy. So I think her office is going to try to make sure that the annual implementation plans that each agency has to file will now start to take advertising into effect. So I think she's going to make some changes through her office.

Whether it's against the law, I leave that to the lawyers. I think there are clearly responsibilities, especially if you're getting federal dollars, to make sure that you broadcast these messages, especially for recruiting in a widespread manner. So again, it's early days we have to wait and see what other people say who have a legal background. So what's next? Well, you know, this is an election year. And I think that if there's any hope of getting some real commitments to change, this is the time. And then starting in January, you know, it's a blank piece of paper. So whoever gets into City Hall has an opportunity, if you talk to the city, the advertising firms, Miller and Creative, they'll tell you there's nothing they can do about it. They're just doing what they're told by the city agencies. And if you ask the city agencies, they say, well, we're just doing what Miller and Creative. So it's kind of like this. And I think in order to really get some change, you have to have change within the administration saying this is not acceptable, give us a different recipe.

And we'll see what happens with the controller's office with the contracts. OK. And David, what do you hope to see? Well, I would like to see the media sort of put the candidates on the spot on this issue, because they do, they are coming around to us, they're going to our editorial boards, they're courting us, if you will. And I would like to see the ethnic media. You know, we certainly will, and just encourage them to push the candidates on this issue, because it is one of one of the fifth fairness. And I think it's one that people will recognize as being fair. OK. David Grieves, Sarah Bartlett, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. Thank you. When we come back, a pioneer in game agreement producer on public TV helps legitimize a fledgling art form. And finally, from us, today it's common to see video art exhibited in museums and galleries.

But that wasn't always the case. In the 60s, video wasn't even considered art. Jaime de Vittovich was an early pioneer of that art form, and he's never stopped experimenting and creating new works. Not even after he became one of the first public access television producers in New York. The live show with Dr. Vittovich, critiqued television and gave the alternative art scene a presence on cable television. We hear more about the Vittovich in this report from Judith S. Kelowna. Now, do you find critics more receptive to your work than now to your best artist? No, that's actually the why I say that I'm the best artist because the critics will not

touch me with a ten-foot pole. Jaime de Vittovich defies definition. He is a video artist who paints and a television producer more interested in art than in ratings. The Vittovich is a pioneer of public access cable television. He created an art show for TV unlike any other. When it was conceived with the idea of the coverable tear, they will show work that they will confront the audience, that they will question the audience, and sometimes they will very hostile to be on it. The live show debuted on public access in 1979, hosted by Dr. Vittovich, Jaime de Vittovich's TV persona. It was the first show to feature the work of downtown artists in a format that was across between video art and the Ed Sullivan show.

The Vittovich arrived in New York 16 years earlier when the alternative art scene was exploding on 2nd Avenue in South of Houston Street. The area now called Soho. Downtown artists were experimenting with new forms and challenging the status quo. The Vittovich fit right in. I believe that art has to have a political component. Otherwise it's just decoration. In 1963, I decided to move to the United States because the situation in Argentina was very stifled. Downtown artists were also seeking alternatives to the galleries and museums. They wanted to deinstitutionalize art, making it accessible to a broader public. They took to the streets, displaying work on billboards, walls and storefronts.

This is also similar conceptually in all the things that now the people are talking in occupy Wall Street and occupy the art world because the 1% that controls the museums, the 1% that controls the art galleries and the 1% controls what's been seen in television and what's not been seen. In 1973, the Vittovich was invited to participate in the prestigious Whitney Biennial, a survey of American contemporary art held every two years by the Whitney Museum. After the Whitney, I stopped doing the tape process and concentrating on video, and I became part of the video scene in New York City. Video fit perfectly into this kind of art outside the mainstream because video was never shown in art galleries or institutions or was not even considered art.

The live show ended in 1984 after a five-year run. Today, you can watch segments of it on YouTube. YouTube is like public access in the steroids. Nearly 40 years and several accolades later, Jaime the Vittovich is still a working video artist, recently exhibiting in Spain, Argentina, England and the US. A New York solo show is scheduled for later this year. I'm Judith Escalona in the Penance Sources. That's our show this week. Thanks for staying tuned. Until next time, be independent-minded.