Sex (Ed) in the (NY) City

NYC schools are in need of a better approach on sex education. Also, Westchester County stumbled last week as it attempted to address its history of racial discrimination in housing.

Sex Education for NYC Schools

With Manhattan (and all other NYC boroughs other than Staten Island) experiencing teen pregnancy rates well above the New York State average and above the national average as well, the lack of effective sex education in our schools should be addressed.

Teen pregnancy rates are rising across the country, largely as a result of the George W. Bush Administration policies opposing quality sex education and forcing school systems to embrace abstinence-only education in order to obtain federal funds. Now that the George W. Bush Administration has receded into history, there is no longer an excuse for New York City's lack of effective sex education.

In New York State, the abstinence-only curriculum was so thoroughly discredited that it was abandoned during the Bush Administration's reign. In some communities outside of New York, health officials are encouraging teens to ask questions of health experts, including through the use of text messaging. It is time for some innovative approaches to this issue to make their way to our city.

NYCLU Principles

The NYCLU has proposed steps to institute comprehensive sex education in New York City schools. Below are their proposed principles for moving forward in our city. With the end of the abstinence-only era, New York City should help lead the country in applying 21st Century tools and common sense to the sex education effort.

Sex Education Must be Taught Every Year: Research shows that when young people have accurate information -- whether or not they are sexually active at the time -- they are much more likely to protect themselves when they do enter into relationships. The Chancellor should issue a regulation requiring the teaching of age-appropriate sexuality education every year, rather than leaving inclusion to the discretion of individual principals. Ideally, sex education lessons would be integrated into the six HIV/AIDS lessons mandated to be taught in grades seven to 12 every year. The former Family Living including Sex Education (FL/SE curriculum), which was in use in the 1980s, was required every year; we can not afford to take a step backwards regarding the new curriculum.

Contraception and Prevention Must be Taught: 95 percent of parents of junior high school students believe that birth control and other methods of preventing pregnancy are appropriate topics for sexuality education programs in schools. We know many NYC middle school students are already sexually active; one in 10 students reports having had sex before the age of 13. Incorporating information on contraception promotes health and prevention strategies; to deny middle school students access to the information to protect themselves is irresponsible from a public health perspective. Furthermore, DOE should heed the advice of their consultants and curriculum and include condom demonstrations as a part of comprehensive sexuality education at the high school level. Condom demonstrations are vital to teaching proper usage and should be included in classrooms at the high school level.

Sexual Orientation Diversity Must be Acknowledged: DOE must clearly commit to including issues concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth (LGBTQ) youth in the sex ed curriculum. CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Surveys have found that, as a result of violence and isolation, LGBTQ young people are two to five times more likely than their heterosexual peers to report skipping school because of feeling unsafe during the past month, and more than four times as likely to say they made a serious suicide attempt in the past year. Curricular inclusion, especially within health education models, is a necessary component of remedying the isolation of LGBTQ youth. Additionally, 79 percent of parents want their children to learn about sexual orientation in sex education classes at school.

Sex Education Must Have An Implementation Plan: We recognize that implementation will take time given the complexity and size of the New York City school system; however, we hope that the implementation of health education will be given the same attention and priority as any other subject matter. When the DOE updated the HIV/AIDS curriculum during the last school year, it created an ambitious schedule of parent meetings and selected a week in March for implementation in elementary schools, but offered no implementation plan for middle and high schools. The sex ed implementation plan that is created should be comprehensive for grades seven to 12.

Sex Education Must Be Taught By Trained Teachers: Both state and city mandates require specific levels of teacher training for HIV/AIDS education. We are delighted that DOE has finally selected evidenced-based curricula, but the best curriculum in the world isn’t of any use if teachers are not comfortable teaching. Teachers don’t need a “script,” but rather training to empower them to make appropriate decisions regarding their students. For the HIV/AIDS curriculum a “train the trainer” model was used, but we have yet to learn how many teachers were actually trained or even which schools sent staff. DOE must ensure that teachers receive adequate training to accurately and sensitively offer sexuality education.

Sex Education Requires a Plan for Evaluation: There must be a purposeful and public evaluation plan for the curriculum. Best program practices dictate that evaluation occurs from the very beginning of implementation, should be both quantitative and qualitative and should have buy-in from all stakeholders. Tools that will best measure knowledge, attitudinal and behavioral changes and track positive outcomes on a continuing basis must be designed as soon as possible and integrated into the implementation plan to ensure future success and public support of the curriculum. These components were not included in any meaningful way in the implementation of the HIV/AIDS curriculum. DOE should not make the same mistake again.

Westchester County's Housing Discrimination Response Plan Is Rejected

Westchester County was so aggressive in its racial discrimination in housing for all of the first decade of this century that it was forced to agree to a settlement of a racial discrimination suit. The settlement included having Westchester Country commit to build 750 units of housing geared toward attracting residents of color and spend $30 million on housing while paying the US government a penalty of $30 million for a total of $60 million of settlement costs of Westchester County. The US District Court for the Southern District of New York accepted the settlement in 2009.

Last week, Westchester County's plan for addressing its history of racial discrimination in housing was rejected by the court's monitor. The monitor gave specific feedback on the plan:

1) The county has not identified who would be responsible to ensure the settlement's mandates are carried out and fulfilled.

2) The plan "lacks any concrete short-, medium-, or long-term strategies for how the county plans to develop" the housing that will address the history of discrimination.

3) The county has not stated how it "will employ carrots and sticks" to ensure that the housing will be built over the objections of local municipalities targeted for units.

4) The county has not included general information about sites under consideration and should do so, even though the county expressed concerns that such information could affect the price of property.

Let us hope that Westchester County does a better job addressing its long history of racial discrimination in housing than it has addressing its settlement commitments thus far.

Ethics Challenges from Bloomberg and Housing Discrimination Persists

In a stunning move, Mayor Bloomberg hired an ethics-challenged campaign aid to a senior position in the Department of Education, and we separately see fresh evidence of racial discrimination in housing availability in New York City.

Bloomberg Embraces Campaign Aid Who Broke the Law

Last week, the Bloomberg administration very nonchalantly selected a serious government ethics law violator as the New York City Department of Education’s executive director of external affairs. The embraced ethics law violator will be a key spokesperson for the Department of Education, an ironic role for a person whose credibility is horribly impaired on her first day in her new job.

Before this appointee became a part of the Bloomberg campaign for a third term as Mayor, she helped push through the City Council the change to the City Charter that allowed Bloomberg to seek a third term. At the time, this new appointee was working for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, but she violated the law in that role by soliciting donations from unions for Speaker Quinn while working on legislation related to unions for Speaker Quinn.

The Mayor's double-standard is both stunning and infuriating. He attacked former Comptroller Bill Thompson repeatedly for "pay to play" politics - asserting that Thompson's willingness to accept campaign donations from individuals doing business with the City made Thompson unacceptable as a Mayoral candidate. It was a particularly cynical campaign tactic for a self-funded candidate who did not need to accept any campaign donations. Because the new Department of Education appointee's ethics violations were made on behalf of an ally of the Mayor, because that same appointee helped the Mayor gain the right to seek a third term, and because that appointee worked on Bloomberg's campaign for a third term, the Mayor sees no problem with appointing an admitted ethics law violator. He says that she made a "mistake" and pay her fines, so we should all ignore the violation of the law and move forward.

But, the double-standard also applies to "mistakes" made by supporters versus those made by others. When Plaxico Burress made a "mistake," the Mayor had a different approach. Here is what he stated, "It would be an outrage if we don't prosecute to the fullest extent of the law." When his Department of Education appointee made a "mistake," he stated, "When you screw up, you fess up to it and pay your penalty and get on with it." He made that statement as he was defending appointing an ethics law violator to a high ranking City position. When you support the Mayor, your illegal activities are ignored, but when you are not a supporter of the Mayor, the Mayor wants you to face the maximum possible penalty for any "mistake."

Racial Discrimination Persists in Housing in NYC

We live in 2010. Yet, racial discrimination in housing continues to persist in NYC.

Last week, two communities in the Bronx were accused of racial discrimination in a law suit filed in federal court in Manhattan. The Fair Housing Justice Center filed the suit after sending "test" couples to seek housing in the two Bronx communities. While the two communities require reference letters from at least three existing residents of those two communities, the white test couple, after saying that they knew no one who lived in the communities, was shown multiple potential housing options and told that the reference letter requirement could be ignored. The Black test couple was refused the opportunity to see any housing options and was told that their inability to identify existing residents to write reference letters would prove fatal to their efforts to join either of these communities.

The suit says that 2000 Census figures show that while blacks account for 35 percent of owner-occupied homes in the Bronx, they account for less than 1 percent of the 1,100 homes in Edgewater Park and Silver Beach Gardens. Diane L. Houk, a lawyer representing the Fair Housing Justice Center, and also its former executive director, said the requirement of three reference letters from existing owners “sounds neutral at first, but has a discriminatory impact on nonwhites.”

As we in NYC face our examples racial discrimination in housing, we need to be vigilant in finding an eliminating racial discrimination throughout our city.

Harlem's Shrinking Black Population

In an alarming trend, African Americans are leaving Harlem.

Rise and Fall of the African American Population in Harlem

Based on statistical estimates and analyses by Social Explorer, the New York Times focused last week on the amazing fact that African Americans in Harlem have ceased to be a majority of the population for the first time since the Depression.

While the African American population in Harlem was a small minority at the beginning of the twentieth century, it grew quickly in the early part of the century. As we have discussed in the past, the legendary Abyssinian Baptist Church moved from mid-town Manhattan to Harlem in the 1920's as it both chased the African American population's movement and served as a catalyst for accelerating an African American migration to Harlem that lasted into the second half of the twentieth century. The African American population growth momentum encountered the countervailing forces of redlining and Jim Crow but moved forward powerfully nonetheless.

The decline in the Harlem African American population that ultimately resulted in the loss of the African American majority had the turmoil of the 1970's as a catalyst. The 1990's and the first decade of the twenty-first century brought many new residents to Harlem, but the African American population declined as a whole in Harlem.

The distinction between Central Harlem and Greater Harlem is important to understand. Central Harlem is the part of Manhattan that sits between 110th Street and 155th Street between 5th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. Greater Harlem is the full area of Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River and from East 96th Street and West 110th Street to West 155th Street.

The New York Times specifically looked at the rising white population:

The 1990 census counted only 672 whites in central Harlem. By 2000, there were 2,200. The latest count, in 2008, recorded nearly 13,800.

The Times discussion of the declining African American population included numbers that were equally dramatic:

The number of blacks living in greater Harlem hit a high of 341,000 in 1950, but their share of the population didn’t peak until 1970, when they made up 64 percent of the residents. In 2008, there were 153,000 blacks in greater Harlem, and they made up 41 percent of the population.

The African American population is now smaller in Harlem than it has been since before the Depression, and it is now less than half of the size of the 1950's peak levels. It is a trend that is difficult to reverse, but it is a trend that we should not accept.

Bed-Stuy Stumbles As Well

Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood is experiencing a decline African American population as well. The African American population in Bed-Stuy declined from 98% to 72% between 1980 and 2006.