The ultra-elite private schools, the super schools; places where the resources, the curriculum and the tuition are comparable to the best liberal arts colleges. These are schools where lineage is a factor in the admission process. These are not schools for those who can afford better, they are schools for those who can afford only the very best.
These are places of privilege.
Rarely do they include black students. In the 1960’s, they almost never did.
In New York, the crown jewel place of privilege is The Dalton School; one of the most prestigious, elite prep schools in the nation, recognized globally for its visionary progressive educational philosophy and its ultra-wealthy, celebrity student body. Dalton is where Anderson Cooper was a student, Jeffrey Epstein was a teacher and Robert Redford and Bob Fosse were members of the PTA.
In the mid-1960s, Dalton reached out to previously unfamiliar communities and for the first time actively recruited minority students. Mark Robinson and Raymond Smaltz are among the very first young Black men to attend Dalton. “Place Of Privilege” provides the remarkable narrative of the pathfinder courses their lives would take.
The ultra-elite private schools, the super schools; places where the resources, the curriculum and the tuition are comparable to the best liberal arts colleges. These are schools where lineage is a factor in the admission process. These are not schools for those who can afford better, they are schools for those who can afford only the very best.
These are places of privilege.
Rarely do they include black students. In the 1960’s, they almost never did.
In New York, the crown jewel place of privilege is The Dalton School; one of the most prestigious, elite prep schools in the nation, recognized globally for its visionary progressive educational philosophy and its ultra-wealthy, celebrity student body. Dalton is where Anderson Cooper was a student, Jeffrey Epstein was a teacher and Robert Redford and Bob Fosse were members of the PTA.
In the mid-1960s, Dalton reached out to previously unfamiliar communities and for the first time actively recruited minority students. Mark Robinson and Raymond Smaltz are among the very first young Black men to attend Dalton. “Place Of Privilege” provides the remarkable narrative of the pathfinder courses their lives would take.
There are private schools all across the country, places with better resources, better teachers, better budgets. By definition, these schools are not for the public. They are private. They are exclusive. They are for those who can afford better. Rarely does that include black students. In the 1960’s, it almost never did.
And then there are the ultra-elite private schools, the super schools; places where the resources, the curriculum and the tuition are comparable to the best liberal arts colleges. These are schools that taught computer programming to high school students using the same state of the art machines that NASA used, and offered classes in Russian taught by a Russian countess. These are schools that served London Broil in the cafeteria, along with eclairs that rivaled the French patisserie around the corner. These are schools where lineage is a factor in the admission process. These are not schools for those who can afford better, they are schools for those who can afford only the very best.
These are places of privilege.
Think that’s an exaggeration? Let’s put that in terms of simple dollars and cents. In New York, the average tuition (2018/2019) for a year of private high school is $24,011. That’s $2,000 per month. And that is an average that includes many subsidized parochial schools. New York’s ultra-elite private schools are in a different league entirely. At New York’s top 100 private schools, tuition begins at $50,000 and continues to climb like a Saturn rocket. The Dalton School, our alma mater, boasts one of the lowest tuition rates in its peer group, with $51,350. One year of tuition at THINK Global, a progressive “alternative” school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan costs $85,500. What if you have more than one child?
What kind of income do you need in order to climb this walled garden?
Sure, most of these schools offer financial aid and scholarships for students who cannot afford the prohibitively high tuition. But unlike colleges and universities that also have huge endowments, the admission process at these private schools is not “need-blind.” That means that the applicant’s need for financial assistance becomes a significant factor in the school’s decision whether to admit. It means that financial disadvantage becomes admission disadvantage. Unless the school is trying to fulfill a diversity objective, this means that minority students with excellent grades and test scores are not competing equally with their affluent white counterparts.
What happens then is that the school’s own diversity objectives become a Catch-22. Minority students are admitted, but then automatically assumed to be less worthy of a place at the table, because “diversity consideration” was given. So is it worse to be stigmatized by your teachers and fellow students, or to be excluded altogether? You might insist that there has to be a third option. Most of the time there is not.
Furthermore, when they are the beneficiaries of financial aid or scholarships, students and their parents relinquish a degree of agency in their relationship with the school. The school knows that you did not pay “full sticker price.” The school knows that you are the recipient of their generosity. That takes a lot of the punch out of your role as the “customer” and the school knows it. They want you to know it too. You can complain. You can advocate for your child – up to a point. Beyond that, however, they politely suggest that you consider other school options for your child.
The next time you are seated in first class on a flight somewhere, ask the flight attendant – as I did once – if they know which passengers got their first class seat through a mileage upgrade and which passengers paid full price. The answer came with a knowing glance and a smile, “Oh yes, we know.”
This is the difference between having privilege and being given privilege.
***
They don’t call them “private schools” anymore. The term was abandoned, no longer politically correct. It implied exclusivity. It implied elitism. Of course, even without the old obsolete label, these traits were still entirely true. That was never going to change. But the old label was simply bad for image management in the new millennium, and so it was retired.
Today, “independent schools” are fully committed to the values of diversity and inclusion. Today, it is explicit to their mission to “level the playing field.”
Yes, but we have a different perspective; a point of view borne of our own experiences as young black men attending one of the most prestigious, most exclusive, most “private” schools in the nation.
The playing field is never going to be level.
In this book, Ray and I are going to try to explain that. We’re going to attempt to explain the paradox of how the most prestigious “independent” schools in the country can be so zealously fully committed – simultaneously and concurrently – to both exclusion and inclusion. It’s not hypocrisy and it’s not deceit. It’s paradox; two conflicting realities that are both true. And where else would you expect that to be possible, after all, than in an extraordinary place of privilege?
In the mid-1960’s, for a variety of complex reasons, The Dalton School, and many others like it, chose to be inclusive, chose to admit black boys for the first time. Ray Smaltz and I would not be here, we would not have a story to tell, if not for the fact that Dalton, one of the most elite, expensive private schools in the country invited us in. And once we were in, we were most definitely part of their closed community, a walled garden. It quickly became clear to us that whatever culture we might have brought with us to our new, wealthy white environment, it would be ignored, dismissed or rejected in favor of their own social customs and mores. Our experiences in our own communities, our history, our family upbringings were overwhelmed and overrun (both intentionally and unintentionally) by the Daltonian outlook on life, no matter how unrealistic those options may have been for us. It was up to each and every black and brown student at Dalton and elsewhere at other independent schools to figure out how much we were willing to adapt, assimilate, or transform in order to achieve. Every day that we went to school we found ourselves navigating an elaborate matrix of choices and decisions; when to be like them, when to be like their expectations of us, and when to just be ourselves. Even so, as boys who were just beginning their teenage years, “being ourselves” was a question we were only beginning to work out.
This push and pull of assimilation versus self-actualization had one other critical variable; our families. We were in private school because of our families. Because of our parents. They sent us there. They wanted us there. They invested in us (quite literally) their hopes and dreams that we might have a better life, a better future. Their dream was that the magic of these places of privilege would rub off on us and imbue our lives with great possibilities. They wanted us to succeed in that world, but that meant pushing us away from their world. Although they too were probably conflicted about this impulse, they wanted us to turn our backs on the world we came from.
It was like a struggling mother putting her baby up for adoption so that it could have a better life. In the end, even good intentions and good outcomes leave everyone wounded and damaged.
Bring us in, but keep the essence of us out.
The private school paradox of exclusion and inclusion became like the riddle of the Sphinx. The Sphinx, of course, was the legendary mammoth creature that guarded entrance to the great temples of Egypt (and the city of Thebes, in Greece). All those who failed to answer the riddle correctly were devoured and destroyed. Those who could answer correctly were granted admission. And ironically, the answer to the riddle was a metaphor for how our individual nature changes over time. Some of us understood this. Some of us recognized what was being asked of us. Sadly, Ray and I both bore witness to the crushing defeat of more than a few of our black fellow students who failed to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and did not survive their private school experience.
Does that mean that to survive, and to thrive inside the temple, we must acknowledge and accept the changes imposed upon our individual nature? We’ll see.
We have chosen to use our own experiences and our own stories as a window into a different world, a place that gave us an “education” in the broadest, most transformational meaning of the word. Without diminishing or making less of the abilities that Ray and I already possessed, Dalton gave us tools and perspective that changed the way that we engaged with the world. Sure, we both retained a very strong connection to who and what we were before Dalton. But whether we intended to be or not, Dalton bestowed on us privileges we never imagined and enabled us to plant at least one foot permanently in the world of the ultra-elite.
In New York, the crown jewel place of privilege is The Dalton School; one of the most prestigious, elite prep schools in the nation, recognized globally for its visionary progressive educational philosophy. Whenever popular culture needs a readily recognizable reference for the alma mater of the extraordinarily rich and famous, they simply say “Dalton.” Time Magazine called Dalton “the most progressive of the city's chic schools and the most chic of the city's progressive schools.” Dalton, and the extraordinary places of privilege like it, are where the purebred 1% are taught and groomed to become the next generation of America’s power elite.
Ray and I came to Dalton in the second half of the 1960s. For nearly 50 years, Dalton’s high school had been a very proper – and quite prestigious – school for girls. But now Dalton decided to make the biggest change in its history by embracing – in one sweeping decision – both coeducation and integration. Change seemed to be the only viable choice for the moment. This was, after all, a period of unprecedented, involuntary, wrenching change in America, and few, if any, were optimistic about the outcome of that change. It was a time of omnipresent conflict: young vs. old, black vs. white, north vs. south, haves vs. have-nots. The Civil Rights movement. The Black Power Movement. The Anti-War movement. Everything moving. The assassinations of MLK and RFK led to riots, despair and fear.
It was in this historic, revolutionary time and place that the board of trustees of Dalton felt compelled to reach out to the previously unfamiliar communities of New York and actively recruit minority students. Black boys.
The Dalton trustees committed themselves and their school to a radical course of actions that would not merely embrace change, but would attempt to shape that change into a better, more progressive, more inclusive and more diverse future.
Why did they do it? What was their strategy and what was the benefit they saw? What did the presence of this small group of black boys do to change Dalton forever? …Assuming, of course, that they changed Dalton at all. And what happens to black boys who are placed in this strange new world, without any support system, without any precedent and without any rules of engagement?
It is a long way to look back to the second half of the 1960’s and the first half of the 1970’s. Do any of those memories still matter to anyone? Are the truths that those memories reveal still relevant to anyone? After all, for the young men and women who are in school today, even their parents were probably not yet born when Ray and I were in school. Perhaps our experiences are now nothing more than ancient history.
Or perhaps not.
As part of our research for writing this book, Ray and I interviewed more than 50 other minority students from our era and just as many post-millennial minority students. We spoke with teachers, administrators, parents and a handful of subject matter experts. What we learned was that certain statistical, quantifiable metrics have made enormous progress since our time in school, while certain other metrics appear to be frozen in time from 50 years ago. Why some numbers have changed dramatically, while others haven’t, is not so much a mystery, but more a part of the private school paradox we have only begun to describe.
Has the drive for diversity and inclusion over the past 20 years or so made things any better, or are the ultra-wealthy still gaming the system for their own advantage and privilege? Despite the recent headline-grabbing scandal involving college admissions and the rich and famous, the answer isn’t quite so simple or obvious.
By reaching back into our own experiences and sharing stories, we’ll answer some of these questions. We will offer our own perspective on how attending school in a place of privilege changed our lives, as well as how our presence there changed Dalton and other places like it.
***
The Boycott & The Strike
Before we can talk about our own personal experiences – and why they matter – it is worthwhile to take a moment for a quick review of what was happening in New York City schools in the 1960’s and the inter-relationship (or conflict) between public and private and the dynamic forces that drove them.
In 1954, when the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously to strike down the Jim Crow system of “separate but equal”, it was in a court case about public school education. More than buses or bathrooms or lunch counters, the classroom was the heart of our nation’s segregation. And the classroom was its most toxic factory. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared an end to school segregation with the banging of a gavel, but the rest of America soon found out that reality fell far short of the legal ruling. The aftermath of the court decision launched several decades of urban flight; white families avoiding integration and abandoning the crowded cities for suburban sprawl, creating “bedroom communities” and rapidly expanding small towns.
The families that escaped the cities and moved to the suburbs were able to send their children to local public schools where the students were pretty much demographically homogeneous, exactly as these parents wanted. All across the country, school district funding in suburban communities is determined by local property taxes. That means that affluent communities – the tony suburbs that surround big cities – are able to endow their local schools with generous budgets so that no legitimate school need goes unmet. Furthermore, these affluent communities benefit from the generosity of well-funded, highly active PTA’s with helicopter stay-at-home moms (or dads) and employers that are happy to match local charitable contributions dollar-for-dollar.
Fairfield County, Connecticut, the home of Greenwich and Westport and my own town of Ridgefield, is also the home of the widest income gap between rich and poor of any county in the nation. Affluent communities stay that way by aggressive political and grass roots lobbying against the threat of “affordable housing” invading their neighborhoods or their school districts. These families don’t worry whether the playing field is ever going to be level. They own the field.
The families that remained in the cities, the affluent urbanites that eschew country and suburban living except on jaunts to their weekend houses upstate, have their own school solution.
Private school.
Northern urban centers like New York City did not have forced segregation backed by Jim Crow laws. The North was supposed to be much more enlightened. Northern cities like New York had “neighborhoods.” They had “ethnic enclaves.” They had ghettos. And in these cities, blacks and whites casually crossed paths on public transportation, at work or even in the department store. There was no “colored section” at the movie theater. In these cities there was the patina of liberal harmony. But in these cities blacks and whites did not live together, they did not worship together, and they did not go to school together.
This last issue – the school issue – was a problem for urban politicians and policy makers. Housing and religion were much tougher to tackle, but with schools, at least they would try. Motivated partly by the legal precedent set by the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and partly by a progressive political platform, city politicians worked to integrate local school districts. And yet, for a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, their efforts continued to fall very far short of their intended objectives. New York City schools that enrolled mostly black and Latino students tended to have inferior facilities, less experienced teachers and severe overcrowding. Schools in many black and Latino neighborhoods were so overcrowded that they operated on split shifts, with the school day lasting only four hours for students. There could not be any evidence more dramatic of the extent to which minority students were being short-changed and left behind.
What’s it like to study biology from a textbook that never even mentions DNA?
What’s it like to attend a school that has too few school psychologists and counselors – but plenty of in-school police officers?
Once again, education became an effective tool for separating and controlling the destinies of segments of society. This time, instead of separation based upon socio-economic class, the educational divide was along racial lines.
One way or the other, the playing field was never going to be level.
All across America, this was the height of the civil rights movement. In August of 1963, a quarter of a million people marched on the nation’s capital to advocate for civil and economic rights for African Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A year later, President Johnson would whip Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was supposed to be our time.
Bayard Rustin, one of the key organizers of the March on Washington, came to New York just a few weeks after the march to meet with Rev. Milton Galamison, a local pastor and civil rights activist. Together they would organize the New York City school boycott of 1964, a protest they felt was necessary to call public attention to years of inaction and no progress by New York school officials. The event is almost entirely forgotten today, with hardly anyone alive who remembers it, and it is unlikely to be found in any history books about that period. And yet, the New York City school boycott of 1964 was at the time the largest civil rights protest in American history, with more than 460,000 students refusing to go to school.
460,000 students. Only 250,000 people attended the March on Washington.
This did not happen in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia. It happened in New York City, where local politicians and school board administrators said they believed passionately in integration. And yet, according to a study completed by UCLA and The Civil Rights Project, New York City has some of the most segregated schools in the country. Popular public opinion, however, was in stark contrast to the grim reality in the classroom. Popular public opinion was that this could not be true in New York. New York was a progressive, cosmopolitan city of the world. New York could not possibly be segregated. In fact, New York School Superintendent William Jansen instructed school and Board of Education staff that they could not use the word “segregation” when discussing the topic, and instead should refer to “racial imbalance.” The New York media were active collaborators in the culture of denial and largely refused to provide any press coverage to the boycott. That is why most history books make no mention of it. Like an ostrich with its head planted firmly in the sand, the New York Times insisted that there was “no official segregation in the city.” In their eyes this was not a legitimate protest. The boycott was a “violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy.” They dismissed the civil rights demands as “unreasonable and unjustified.”
One month after the boycott, a counter protest was organized by Parents and Taxpayers (PAT), a coalition of white neighborhood groups who brought 15,000 mothers to the steps of City Hall with signs and banners that read "Bussing Creates Fussing" and "Don't Let the Courts Dictate Our Children." In New York, the 15,000 PAT protesters were more powerful and more successful than the 460,000 protesters from the month before. In a poll conducted by the New York Times in September 1964, 54% of white New Yorkers thought “civil rights was moving too fast.” According to the front page, above-the-fold story in The Times, most white New Yorkers felt that Negroes “were receiving everything on a silver platter.” These were New Yorkers.
The New York Board of Education did nothing more for the remainder of Mayor Wagner’s term in office. In 1966, John Lindsey was elected mayor and efforts to address New York’s “school problem” were renewed. Black community leaders throughout New York had been calling for local control of school districts, arguing that the central board was unresponsive to their neighborhood needs. The Lindsey administration launched a test program called the Ocean Hill – Brownsville Experiment, in which this minority community in Brooklyn was given autonomy from the central Board of Education and permitted to manage its own school district.
In September of 1968, local administrators from the predominantly black and Hispanic school district of Ocean Hill – Brownsville dismissed 19 teachers from their schools and told them to report to the Board of Ed’s central office. They weren’t fired. They were just told they needed to work someplace else. This was an attempt to assert “local control” and manage what was best for the local schools. The teacher’s union, the United Federation of Teachers, was not having any of it, and pushed back hard. The teacher’s union led its members on a 36 day strike that crippled the school year and broke the back of the local control movement that black and Hispanic communities had been fighting for. Minority parents and community leaders had lost.
Just as in 1964, the coverage and reporting of the strike by the New York media was heavily biased along racial lines. The New York Times described the Ocean Hill – Brownsville community leaders as “crazy, anti-Semitic black nationalists.” And just as occurred in 1964, public opinion turned against the city’s minority community. New York City’s liberalism, apparently, had its limits.
Of the 1.1 million students enrolled in New York City Public Schools, only 14.7% are Caucasian. That seems like an almost unbelievable statistic. Where did all the white kids go? They went, of course, to private school. In the late 1960’s, a great many went to parochial schools throughout the city, mostly either Catholic or Jewish. Although parochial school enrollment has declined significantly in the past decade, in 1970, parochial schools represented roughly 85% of NYC private school enrollment. At the time, these schools were quite affordable, even within the means of working class families, with annual tuition of only a few hundred dollars. As a result, the opportunity to escape the integrated classroom was an option available across the socio-economic spectrum. You didn’t have to be rich to go to private school.
But what if you were rich? What would your options be then?
If you are rich, you attend the ultra-elite private schools, the super schools; places where the resources, the curriculum and the tuition are comparable to the best liberal arts colleges. If you are rich, you are not escaping the integrated classroom. That world never touched you anyway. If you are rich, you don’t have to escape anything because the world is built around you. If you are rich, you exist in your own solar system, where the planets are Collegiate and Trinity and Horace Mann and Nightingale and Brearley. And Dalton.
Places of privilege.
This is how we got here, the speed-reading version of how we arrived at the world of public and private schools at the time and place when our lives, Ray’s and mine, intersected with Dalton.
Place of Privilege is about the journey of Mark Robinson and Raymond B. Smaltz, III as two young, gifted Black students and their time at one of the most prestigious private schools in America, The Dalton School. They attended the school during the late 1960s, a time of uprising, integration, and cultural revolution.
This memoir is told from the frame of the story, the authors look back at their childhood and high school years with deep insight and reverence for the love and support of their families and mentors. Mark and Ray were not only pursuing their own dreams, they carried the dreams of their mothers and fathers while struggling to live between two worlds in privileged spaces that often viewed them as a means to an end, as guests amongst those who “belong” there.
This book is rich with history of the times and fascinating details of the authors’ lives. I had to put down the book and journal throughout, reflecting on society today and what it means to be a “liberal” vs. what it means to actually be a part of dismantling racism.
“Were the Board of Trustees and Headmaster Barr brilliant visionaries who foresaw a better, more enlightened learning opportunity, building on Dalton’s progressive tradition? Were they liberal missionaries who felt an obligation to reach out to the disadvantaged and overlooked students in the surrounding communities, offering a caring and benevolent hand up? Or were they shrewd and cynical businesspeople who understood how to put together a hit show and sell a lot of tickets? I have no idea, but I suppose that the truth is probably a combination of all three.”
The success of the students meant proving the superiority of an education from Dalton, thus increasing their financial backing and elevating their brand. As we see through numerous examples though, the school and most of its faculty were not prepared, nor self-aware enough, to truly address the needs of their newly integrated students. Unfortunately, it was only the Black and brown students who realized this.
“…young Black boys and girls (but most especially the boys) were little more than man-sized lab rats. We did not have our own destiny, our own identity or our own dignity. We were experimental subjects. What’s funny—or perhaps not—is that it did not seem that anyone else at Dalton had any awareness or recognition of this paradox except us lab rats. We knew, even if we were the only ones who did.”
Mark and Ray’s personal histories are very different. Mark came from a middle-class family living in a well-known, affluent, Black neighborhood. Ray grew up in the projects of Harlem. While their family backgrounds differed, they both had parents who sacrificed and passionately supported them. This nurturing is a big part of who they are and their sense of community. Their families were able to see dreams they had for themselves come to fruition in their children.
Much of their struggles in school centered around presumptions about who they were, why they were there, and what they were capable of accomplishing. It was common for white faculty and students to assume they were on scholarship or present strictly because of sports and not intellect. Socially, it was impossible to avoid micro-aggressions on a daily basis. Black and brown students were often seen as taking opportunities away from white students, and the attitudes of the parents and prejudices of the faculty filled the air at Dalton. The exhaustion and trauma of these circumstances and events often caused avoidance of social activity with white students outside of class.
Students of color were viewed as a part of white history, a heroic act of the white savior, and not as people who not only wholly belonged to this world of elite education, but also had insights into the world that their white counterparts would never truly see or understand. This was reflected in the curriculum. While Black students were integrated, Black history was not.
While Place of Privilege thoroughly examines the failures of Dalton to address the needs and celebrate the accomplishments of students of color, it’s also a memoir of inspiration and growth. Mark and Ray both acknowledge the many gifts their experiences brought them. They have brilliant and cherished mentors who shaped their perspectives, access to technology and tools they wouldn’t have had in other schools, and knowledge of a world of privilege and its inner workings that can open doors to success and opportunity.
If you enjoy reading about Black history, the Civil Rights Movement, or just love a fascinating story with excellent Jazz references, Place of Privilege is your next read.