Blackberries and Black Students: A Cultural Profile of New York City Schools

The New York City public school system is currently experiencing the debilitating, convulsive fits of an existential crisis, a crisis exacerbated by its physical enormity, impersonality and utilitarian orientation. Blackberries and Black Students represents a rather impressionistic account of this crisis as it is objectified in many predominantly black schools in New York City. Personifying this crisis is an emaciated centralized bureaucracy of politicians-cum-educators; a cadre of abysmally inept, inexperienced administrators with little or no pedagogical experience; demoralized teachers who often lament their premature loss of intellectual idealism; uncooperative parents whose socializing efforts are at best perfunctory and indulgent; and a population of maladapted students whose worldview is shaped by an afrocentrist (multiculturalist) orientation that routinely romanticizes and exculpates much of their rebelliousness and recusant, anti-intellectual behavior.