Lily Rose-Wilen Photo
AP students Jordan Lampo, Lewis Nelken, Sam Smith.
Wilbur Cross High School is the largest school in New Haven, and is supposedly a center of diversity. Cross routinely has assemblies celebrating the school’s diversity, and a whole section of the school is called the International Academy.
However, the school is divided, in part by the Advanced Placement Program.
The Proclamation conducted a survey, and received some 324 responses from 181 students taking AP classes at Cross, and interviewed a broad array of Cross students. Wilbur Cross is 50 percent Hispanic, 36 percent Black, and 11 percent White, but the results of the survey show a disproportionately white AP program, incongruous with the student body’s demographics as a whole.
Thirty seven percent of survey responses were from white students, representing 68 individuals, including students who said they were white and something else. Fourteen percent of survey responses, or 12 percent of the individuals, were from black students. The AP program is around three times whiter than Wilbur Cross’s student body as a whole.
AP classes are considered the most rigorous at Wilbur Cross, followed by honors classes, with college-level or “standard” classes considered least rigorous.
One respondent, a Hispanic girl, wrote that she’d felt isolated in the AP program: “People tend to stay away from others simply because of skin color.” Another survey read, “I’m constantly one of the only black people in my class, and other people expect different of me.”
The demographic disparity between classes at Cross seems to have its roots in elementary and middle schools. The majority of the students in the AP program come to Cross from four middle schools. Three, Worthington Hooker, Nathan Hale, and Edgewood, are located in generally high income, white, affluent areas of New Haven, Edgewood’s neighborhood having the highest voter turnout. The fourth, Betsy Ross, an arts magnet school, is disproportionately white compared to the citywide school system.
Only two of these schools, Hooker and Nathan Hale, have neighborhood preference for Wilbur Cross, meaning that their students go to Cross unless their parents request they attend a different school. Betsy Ross is unaffected by neighborhood preference. Students from the area surrounding Edgewood have neighborhood preference for Hillhouse High School, which is 74 percent black. According to our survey, there are 15 students from Edgewood in the AP program here, 12 of whom are white.
Gabe Freiman (pictured above right) is a white junior who said, in response to the middle school data, that the AP program was so disproportionate because “a lot of the white kids here at Cross don’t actually come from the neighborhoods that Cross is supposed to [draw students from].” “Middle schools are where those communities start to develop, the ones that make people join AP classes. If we didn’t have AP classes, the division would still exist but it would be that minorities would be in college-level classes and white students would be in honors classes.”
Nylevet Elias, a Hispanic student Shauntasia and I interviewed, said, “I feel like an outsider.” While discussing some of the kids in her AP classes, she said, “They all knew each other, they grew up together, they’re like the best of friends. If you, like, try to talk to them they look at you a certain type of way. Or if you say something in class that’s not very smart or something, they’ll judge you.” She said the atmosphere in the class makes her “underestimate” herself, “like ‘Oh I’m not good enough.’ I don’t try as hard. I could be a top person in the class but I just feel like since I’m judged I just basically shut down.”
I interviewed a white senior with four APs about why he thought the atmosphere between AP and college classes was so different. After a long pause he said, “Because college students expect not to go over a lot of content.” He said that AP classes “were just a lot less nonsense.” When asked what his AP classes looked like, he replied, “like fifty percent white.” He described Cross’s atmosphere as “a zoo” and elaborated saying, “I always hear some pretty stupid things in the halls, like broken English about childish things.”
A black AP student, Amaris Topper, said “If you’re a minority you know you’re a minority.” Later adding, “If you think of a black girl at Cross, you’re not going to think ‘Oh she’s in AP courses.’ But if you think of a white kid at Cross you think, ‘Oh they’re the top of their class, AP class.’ Stuff like that.” Enoch Cain, a half black and half white senior in multiple APs, told us, “I think more kids have the potential to take AP classes, but a lot of them don’t see that, because of the atmosphere in this school. It is discouraging kids from challenging themselves.”
White students are the largest presence in at least half of the AP classes. Seven of the 22 classes are mostly white. In another four classes, white students represent a plurality, and in a twelfth class, there are as many white students and Hispanic students. Thirty two of the 61 students taking three or more AP classes identified themselves as White. Seven identified themselves as Black, and 18 said Hispanic. So a student who takes only one AP class likely has class with several kids who have many other APs. In this way, relatively few students with a large number of AP classes have an outsize impact on the atmosphere and classroom composition of the program.
I asked Equan Williams, a black college class student, what he thought of AP students. He responded, “Just because they’re in the AP classes, they might just think that they’re smarter than everybody else, but that’s not the case.” With regards to the demographic disparity he said “[white kids] might have a better relationship with the teachers.” He said that this was true with certain teachers. When asked if he learned a lot in normal classes, he responded with a drawn out “Hell no.” He told me that teachers put more effort into teaching AP classes because “if there are kids in that classroom they put one hundred percent effort into teaching those people.” He told me that the self-segregation was entrenched, “it’s always going to be like that.”
Much of the AP program is self-replicating; kids go where their siblings went, and people hear about the program through family and friends. With the exception of a couple of students from Worthington Hooker, no one Shauntasia and I interviewed mentioned being told about AP classes by their middle school. I went to Cross because my brother went here, it was through him that I first heard of AP classes. Seeing as there is not an effective system to educate kids about AP classes before they come to Cross or during their freshman year, the program’s population remains similar year to year.
One student, Robert Vallombroso, a white 12 grader, told us, “In eighth grade I had this guidance counselor. She told me I should take Biology and Algebra 2 when I was a freshman. But she told me that if I did that I couldn’t take honors.” When I asked if his counselor told him about AP courses he said, “No, because she had no idea what she was doing.” As a freshman, he knew that “AP courses were college courses.” He said, “I thought that they were off-campus courses, because I still had no idea what an AP course was. No one ever bothered to tell me.”
Greg Cherry, a white senior in AP classes from Edgewood, told us that he found out about the AP program through “Cameron, like hearing stories from his brothers, Zach and Coulter, about the classes they took.” Jordan Counsel, a black junior who attended Amistad, a largely black charter school, said, “My guidance counselor doesn’t even talk to me, so it could be that they’re not spreading awareness.” Julia Joy, a white Junior, told The Proclamation that “an alum of my middle school, Worthington Hooker, came from Cross and told us about AP classes and clubs.” Dimas Catalan, who is a Hispanic AP student, told us that he thought many minority students didn’t take AP classes because, “there’s nothing to encourage them to take it, other than their peers.” He later added, “There’s no one to push them.”
A Hispanic student I surveyed wrote this about his teachers: “They see my skin color and think I won’t cooperate with anyone or do any work. They see me and put me with other colored kids when group work comes along.”
There’s a joke I’ve heard about college classes, that “the kids in there couldn’t even spell AP.” I laughed the first couple of times I heard it. But after a couple of years, and a series of college classes where I was one of the only White students, I started wondering what it would be like if the college kids heard the stuff we’d said about them. There are a lot of jokes that stopped being funny to me after that.
Questions were raised regarding the AP program that couldn’t be answered by numbers alone. The last field in our survey asked students if they’d ever experienced racial discrimination at Cross. A mixed race student wrote, “Yes, because it’s hard to connect to people who don’t want to connect to you due to race.” Many respondents expressed similar sentiments; some felt actively discriminated against, more felt isolated or acknowledged the existence of a racial hierarchy. Though a majority of students did not feel discriminated against, there was a tendency in the surveys, and later in our interviews, to conflate bigotry with discrimination.
Eric Lumpkin
The program is not a closed door to minority students and it is not run by bigots. The demographic disproportion raises the question of whether or not the program is institutionally racist. Eighty one percent of white students take multiple AP classes, which contributes to an insular atmosphere that can lead to students of color feeling isolated, or avoiding the program altogether.
Shauntasia Hicks is the co-editor in chief of The Proclamation. She’s a junior, she’s black, and she is in three APs. She worked on this story, doing interviews, surveys, organizing, data analysis, editing and revising. She was the last student I interviewed. We spoke extensively about what it is like to be a black female in AP classes. She said that often her peers, especially her white peers, “bring up an irrelevant topic to disqualify me.” I asked her if she felt isolated in her classes, she said, “Yeah, I know what some kids think about black people here. They think we’re stupid. They think we’re lazy, and they say it out loud. It’s subtle, but they will mention it. On the school bus I heard someone get called three-fifths of a person.” Shauntasia said that even though our teachers were great, many of them turned a blind eye to the racial tensions in their classrooms, AP or otherwise.
Later in our conversation she said, “If I didn’t know the AP program was important in furthering my education, I would not be a part of the AP program.” When I asked her about getting into AP classes she told me, “I had to go to my guidance counselor. I knew about it at West Haven High. I was taking AP US [History]. I was going to take it sophomore year back when I thought I was going to stay there. But then I came here and I couldn’t take it, which was odd, because I guess they don’t accept transfer students, but I know a student who definitely got in because his dad came in.” She told me that this other transfer student was rich, and white, and had gone to Edgewood. “Kids in Westville don’t go to Hillhouse like they’re supposed to. They go to Cross, because supposedly they offer more AP classes. But the truth is, for a lot of them at least, that they just don’t want to be around a bunch of black kids.”
I asked if the administration could improve minority enrollment, and she told me they could by “telling students of color, students in college and honors classes, that ‘You guys are more than capable of taking AP classes.’ They’re not that hard. The way college kids get treated here is crappy.”
One of her teachers was particularly odious. “She would talk normally with the white kids, but with the black kids she would be like, ‘Do you know what rent is?’ ‘Do you know what a lease is?’ Everyone knows what rent is.” She later added, “I was in a college class for two months, until it just got too easy. And during that time the teacher condescended to kids all the time, to their faces.” I asked if the teacher treated his honors class differently “Oh yeah,” she told me. “And he said that I’m going to treat you guys way differently.”
A white classmate from one of Hicks’ AP classes once threw a tray and crumbs at her. “I was in lunch, this was a couple of months ago, and some guy decides to throw his tray on me like I’m some kind of zoo animal. It only happens to me with the white people, no kid of color has ever done that to me.” She suggested there should be a channel for students to report and resolve harassment that could be racially motivated.
Towards the end of our conversation, she gestured around the cafeteria. “Look at that table.” she said. Two of the long tables were populated by white AP students. There were at least half a dozen empty seats. The other tables on the senior side were packed with students of color. “This cafeteria is a reflection of how New Haven is.”
In my four years at this school, administrators and teachers and guidance counselors have told me that my friends and I are special. They said we are special because we are smart, because we work hard, get things done. We are the good kind of kids. They were right; we are special. We are because we have this island in Wilbur Cross where we get to take the classes we want, where doors are open to us. We are special because we don’t have to work for this benefit; we get it based on our schedules and our addresses and our skin. When I was a freshman, a kid in college world history tried to convince me that the college-level classes were better than the Honors and AP classes, because college classes taught you more. In the end, he was pretty much right.
Great article. The discrepancy between the composition of the Cross honors/AP program and the rest of the school is, alas, nothing new.
However, it sounds like, sadly, some of the attitudes from students are. When I attended the school (in the honors track), though we may have been smug and self-important, we didn't look down on the kids in other tracks; we recognized that we were privileged. Plus, we had an earnest interest in interacting with students different from ourselves. If that's not the case these days, then one of the finest and perhaps most distinguishing aspects of a Cross education has been lost.
As to whether or not the honors track represents institutional racism, I'd say that's a stretch. The soft bigotry of low expectations for students outside the honors track that exists at Cross and elsewhere is very real. However, if the survey were to include it, I'd guess the strongest factor determining student participation in the honors program at Cross is related to the level of parent education - at least, this was the case when I was Cross student. In this city, education, race, place, and class overlap to an almost incredible degree, and to a great extent this gets reflected in the schools kids attend and their educational outcomes.
For what it's worth, given the statistics cited above, it sounds as if the honors program has grown MORE diverse relative to the student population since I attended in the late '90s. That said, much work still remains to be done.
On the flip side, I also think there is something to be said for learning to operate into a new, albeit mainly white, academic milieu. After all, most colleges are mostly white, and sadly these are issues students will continue to confront down the road. As more nonwhite students enter mostly white classes and diversity increases, it can only pave the way for more of the same.
If he's out there reading this, I'd be curious to here Mr. Doss-Gollin's take on the matter.
Go Governors!