Left Behind

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June 14, 2009
Left Behind
A City Team’s Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls’ Sports
By KATIE THOMAS

The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.

A cellphone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner.

“You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.”

Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?”

Tiffany stared out a window.

Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.”

Five players. No substitutes.

With this team, it’s always something. In the suburbs, girls’ participation in sports is so commonplace that in many communities, the conversation has shifted from concerns over equal access to worries that some girls are playing too much. But the revolution in girls’ sports has largely bypassed the nation’s cities, where public school districts short on money often view sports as a luxury rather than an entitlement.

Coaches and organizers of youth sports in cities say that while many immigrant and lower-income parents see the benefit of sports for sons, they often lean on daughters to fill needs in their own hectic lives, like tending to siblings or cleaning the house.

Others, like Tiffany’s father, Gavin Binning, are worried for their daughter’s safety, another roadblock to playing.

“Tiffany’s my baby,” he said. “They weren’t going around the corner, they were going to the Bronx. And for me not knowing that, it drove me crazy.”

Since the passage of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX in 1972, girls’ participation in sports has soared. In the 1971-72 school year, girls accounted for 7 percent of all participants in high school sports. By the 2006-7 school year, their share had grown to 41 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as “moderately involved” athletes.

Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys.

Girls in cities from Los Angeles to New York “are the left-behinds of the youth sport movement in the United States,” said Don Sabo, a professor of health policy at D’Youville College in Buffalo, who conducted the study, which was commissioned by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a private advocacy group.

The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents — facing the same obstacles — cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.

Closer to Home

As he waited, Mr. Mariner glanced at the dashboard clock. He had worked hard to ensure that his players would get to the game. He talked his nephew into letting them borrow his Ford Expedition. He pulled the girls out of class 15 minutes early. He even slipped $2 to the cousin of one of his best players, Soledad Pierre, to take over her baby-sitting duties that afternoon.

Now, it was nearly game time. “I can’t just leave you,” he told Tiffany.

Another player, Nia Miller, tried to lighten the mood. She told Mr. Mariner, “Her father might change his mind if he sees your bad self.”

Just then, Mr. Binning pulled up behind them. The men stood between the cars and talked. Tiffany got out, too, and stared at her sneakers. Moments later, the men shook hands. Tiffany and Mr. Mariner climbed back into the car.

“Your pop is all right,” Mr. Mariner said.

Tiffany’s father had reason to be suspicious, Mr. Mariner said later, because she had previously used basketball as a cover when she wanted to leave the house. Mr. Binning said he relented that day because “the coach showed me she’s in good hands.”

Parents rarely question their sons’ whereabouts, Mr. Mariner said.

“I could take my boys to another state, and I wouldn’t get these calls,” he said. “They’d probably say, ‘Oh, you’re back so soon?’ ”

For most of his two decades at M.S. 61, formally known as Dr. Gladstone H. Atwell Middle School, Mr. Mariner has not been paid to coach. In New York City, public school principals must make difficult choices about distributing resources. M.S. 61’s budget for after-school programs is limited to those tied to academics, the principal, Sandra Taylor, said.

“There is very little,” she said. “We make do.”

Along with teaching basketball skills, Mr. Mariner also mops the court before games, persuades reluctant parents to let their daughters play and, above all, tries to ease the way from girlhood to adolescence. Middle school is a crucial time for young athletes, when habits crystallize and they decide whether to continue playing.

“We have so many kids trying to grow up too fast,” he said. “My thing is to try and keep them busy for as long as possible.”

Mr. Mariner asked each player to contribute $80 a year for uniforms, equipment, transportation and other expenses. That is a lot for most of the students. About half the girls paid Mr. Mariner in full. Some gave $1 or $2 at a time.

The Have-Nots

New York City education officials say they are making efforts to involve more girls, but they acknowledge that the system is recovering from decades of neglect. Physical education was nearly eliminated from public schools during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and did not resurface as a priority until 2004, when the Department of Education created an Office of Fitness and Health Education. Among other initiatives, the office has set up spinning classes and invited nonprofit organizations like the New York Road Runners to work with students. City high schools have added golf, lacrosse and double Dutch as varsity girls’ sports.

Another program in more than 200 middle schools is aimed at encouraging students to be physically active, said Lori Rose Benson, the office’s director. Of nearly 500 schools with seventh and eighth graders, 62 fielded girls’ basketball teams this year in a citywide tournament that attracted 107 boys’ teams. For about two months, the students had a taste of what suburbs routinely offer: paid coaches and referees, scheduled games and free uniforms. This spring, the Cougars won one playoff game before losing to a team from Queens. Mr. Mariner was paid about $2,500 for coaching in the tournament, and the girls received MetroCards after every game.

Yet city programs do not come close to matching what the suburban schools provide. On Long Island, most middle schools have a menu of sports and pay for all expenses. So many children try out that schools often field separate seventh- and eighth-grade teams, said Ed Cinelli, the executive director of Section XI of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, which covers Suffolk County. Large middle-school teams also play extra quarters in sports like basketball to give everyone a chance to compete, he said.

In Huntington, the middle school offers 11 teams for girls and 13 for boys, across four seasons, said Georgia McCarthy, the district’s athletic director. Coaches are paid $3,500 to $5,000 a season, and there is no cost to players. “That’s a given,” she said.

Although boys in the city also have fewer opportunities in sports, other factors work in their favor. Lean athletic budgets leave a gap that is filled by a blend of volunteers and private groups that have traditionally served more boys than girls.

“The needs of boys just have always been, and to a large extent remain, the unspoken, often unrecognized priority,” Mr. Sabo, the professor, said.

Other Responsibilities

One cold afternoon in March, the Cougars trickled into the gym for practice. But Soledad did not join them. Her grandmother had left her to care for her younger cousins.

As her teammates ran half-court sprints, Soledad crouched in the basement of a day-care center, rummaging through the cubby that belonged to her 3-year-old cousin Gardyne. She extracted a pink hooded sweatshirt and, with practiced motions, guided Gardyne’s hands through the tiny sleeves. Her 8-year-old cousin Brianna was waiting at the top of the stairs. The girls walked home, three backpacks bobbing in unison down New York Avenue.

Soledad is not the type of girl most basketball coaches recruit. She is 5 feet 5 inches, can be painfully shy and is sometimes ill prepared. One day this winter, Soledad arrived for a game in her uniform and snow boots. She played in Mr. Mariner’s size-9 sneakers.

Yet Soledad loves basketball. In her seventh-grade English class, she composed a poem.

“I am Soledad Pierre,” she wrote. “I am a Haitian girl. I am a basketball player. I am a gift of God.”

Soledad’s after-school routine is different from that of her cousin Karl Pierre, a freshman at Paul Robeson High School, who plays basketball nearly every day after school and says he dreams of earning a college basketball scholarship.

Karl lives in an apartment with Soledad, her father, their grandmother and other relatives. But boys in the family are not asked to baby-sit.

“It’s not fair,” said Soledad, who also hopes to play college basketball. But if she were to complain, she said, “They’d just make me stay home for a week.”

At first, Soledad’s family, especially her grandmother and uncle, resisted the idea of her playing.

“They thought it was strange for a female,” said her aunt Johane Pierre, 26, who was a fencer and volleyball player in high school. “But they all got used to it because she really likes it.”

And yet her adult relatives make few accommodations for Soledad to participate. Because most of them work long hours, household chores and baby-sitting always take precedence. No one in Soledad’s family has seen her play.

Ms. Pierre, a phlebotomist in a health clinic, said the family relied more on Soledad than Karl to care for their cousins, explaining that Soledad’s school was closer to home than his. Besides, Ms. Pierre said, “she’s better with the kids — giving them a bath, feeding them.”

Soledad’s frequent absences present a challenge to Mr. Mariner, who leads the team with intensity and joy. He buries his head in his hands when the girls dribble in the wrong direction, and throws himself to the floor when they miss layups. At a recent game, Soledad’s jump shot arced toward the basket but bounced off the rim. He shouted, “I’ll take that all day long, Soley!”

In March, Soledad missed a Saturday game against a friendly rival, Intermediate School 285, and the Cougars lost. For a time, Mr. Mariner considered pulling her from the starting lineup.

“I’m not going to start someone I can’t count on,” he said.

A Mother’s Doubts

Of all the Cougars, the eighth grader Olivia Colbert would seem to have the best chance to become one Mr. Mariner’s success stories — players he has guided into better public and private high schools. But her mother may prove to be her greatest obstacle.

Olivia, 14, takes the court like a star but is still learning the game: she trips over her dribble, fouls often and sometimes bursts into tears when she makes a mistake. But at 5-9, she towers over opponents and is the team’s top scorer. Last winter, high school coaches showed up more often than her mother to watch her play.

Olivia has enthusiasm. She shows up to nearly every practice and game, and was the only member of the team to accept Mr. Mariner’s invitation to watch two of his former players compete this spring in a citywide girls’ tournament at Hunter College. They sat in the bleachers with Mr. Mariner’s 10-year-old son, Bryan Jr.

In March, Olivia was accepted by Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a private school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She had applied at the suggestion of Rocco Romano, the girls’ basketball coach, who knows Olivia because he also coaches at I.S. 285.

It is still not clear that Olivia will be able to attend in the fall because the school is offering only up to $1,400 in aid toward the $7,000 tuition. Mr. Romano is trying to find private sponsors. If that does not work, she will probably attend and play for South Shore, a public high school in Brooklyn.

Olivia’s mother, Bertha Colbert, is open to the idea of private school and visited Bishop Loughlin with Olivia in the spring. A single mother, she works as a school crossing guard and says she would be satisfied if Olivia winds up in public school. Olivia’s father died before she was born.

“I told her and told her, there’s more to life than basketball,” Ms. Colbert said. “But she doesn’t see it.”

Though proud of Olivia, she is wary of dreaming too big.

“What did she tell me she wanted to do?” Ms. Colbert said of Olivia. “A lawyer or something. I said no, no, no, no. I’m not going through all that school. You’re going to have to work for yourself.”

No Game Today

The opening buzzer reverberated through the Cougars’ gym.

But on this afternoon the girls were not on the court; their game had been canceled because their opponent, Public School 161, did not have enough players. Instead, most of the Cougars sat watching Mr. Mariner coach the boys’ team.

Nia volunteered to operate the scoreboard, while a teammate kept statistics. Soledad pulled up a chair.

During halftime, an eight-girl dance team from P.S. 161 took the court, clapping their hands, stamping their feet and slapping their thighs to a complicated beat. They wore tight shirts and blue jeans with sparkles.

“Boring, boring, boring,” Soledad said.

Nia added, “They could have taken some girls from over there.”

Sidelined, Nia registered each basket and free throw in the boys’ 51-24 victory. She recalled the last time her team faced P.S. 161.

“We beat the girls just like this,” Nia said. “Just like this.”

Griffin Palmer contributed reporting.

No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils

June 15, 2009
No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils
By WINNIE HU

STAMFORD, Conn. — Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.

But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.

So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.

The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)

More than 300 Stamford parents have signed a petition opposing the shift, and some say they are now considering moving or switching their children to private schools. “I think this is a terrible system for our community,” said Nicole Zussman, a mother of two.

Ms. Zussman and others contend that Stamford’s diversity, with poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburban enclaves, demands multiple academic tracks, and suggest that the district could make the system fairer and more flexible by testing students more frequently for movement among the levels.

But Joshua P. Starr, the Stamford superintendent, said the tracking system has failed to prepare children in the lower levels for high school and college. “There are certainly people who want to maintain the status quo because some people have benefited from the status quo,” he said. “I know that we cannot afford that anymore. It’s not fair to too many kids.”

Educators have debated for decades how to best divide students into classes. Some school districts focus on providing extra instruction to low achievers or developing so-called gifted programs for the brightest students, but few maintain tracking like Stamford’s middle schools (tracking is less comprehensive and rigid at the town’s elementary and high schools).

Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes. “We see improvements in student behavior, academic performance and teaching, and all that positively affects school culture,” she said.

Daria Hall, a director with Education Trust, an advocacy group, said that tracking has worsened the situation by funneling poor and minority students into “low-level and watered-down courses.” “If all we expect of students is for them to watch movies and fill out worksheets, then that’s what they will give us,” she said.

In Stamford, black and Hispanic student performance on state tests has lagged significantly behind that of Asians and whites. In 2008, 98 percent of Asian students and 92 percent of white students in grades three to eight passed math, and 93 percent and 88 percent reading, respectively. Among black students, 63 percent passed math, and 56 percent reading; among Hispanic students, 74 percent passed math and 60 percent reading.

The district plans to keep a top honors level, but put the majority of students in mixed-ability classes, expanding the new system from sixth grade to seventh and eighth over three years. While the old system tracked students for all subjects based on math and English scores, the new one will allow students to be designated for honors in one subject but not necessarily another, making more students overall eligible for the upper track.

The staff of Cloonan Middle School decided to experiment with mixed-ability classes for the last eight weeks of this school year.

David Rudolph, Cloonan’s principal, said that parents have long complained that the tracking numbers assigned to students dictate not only their classes but also their friends and cafeteria cliques. Every summer, at least a dozen parents lobby Mr. Rudolph to move their children to the top track. “The zero group is all about status,” he said.

Jamiya Richardson, who is 11 and in the twos’ group, said that students all know their own numbers as well as those of their classmates. “I don’t like being classified because it makes you feel like you’re not smart,” she said.

The other day in Jamiya’s newly mixed social studies class, students debated who was to blame in an ancient Roman legal case in which a barber shaving a slave in a public square was hit by a ball and cut the slave’s throat. At one point, Jamiya was the only one in the class of 25 to argue that it was the slave’s fault because he sat there at his own risk — which the teacher said was the right answer.

Cloonan teachers say they had not changed the curriculum or slowed the pace for the mixed-ability classrooms, but tried to do more collaborative projects and discussions in hopes that students would learn from one another. But Joel Castle, who is 12 and a zero, said that he did not work as hard now. “My grades are going up, and that’s not really surprising because the standards have been lowered,” he said.

In a recent social studies class, the top students stood out as they presented elaborate homemade projects about Roman culture — mosaics, dresses, weaponry — while several of their classmates showed up empty-handed. One offered the excuse that his catapult had disappeared overnight from his bedside.

“A catapult thief?” questioned the teacher, Mimi Nichols, in disbelief before directing him to find his project by the next day.

Afterward, Ms. Nichols said that the less-motivated students had still learned from their classmates’ example. “That in itself is valuable,” she said. “For children to see what is possible.”

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