OutRight

by Dale Carpenter

THE HARVEY MILK MUDDLE
Public funding for this school for gay kids is not the solution
What to do about New York City’s Harvey Milk School for gay students? Now that a lawsuit has been filed against public funding for the high school, it’s time to ask anew whether it’s a good way to combat the pervasive problem of antigay harassment in public schools.

The Harvey Milk School (HMS) was started in 1984 by the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a private nonprofit organization devoted to helping gay youth. HMS is now a four-year, fully accredited high school created, in the words of its website, “to offer an alternative educational program for LGBTQ youth that often find it difficult or impossible to attend their home schools due to continuous abuse and harassment.”

HMS boasts a 90 percent graduation rate and a 60 percent college acceptance rate, both far higher than the numbers for public high schools. This is probably because of its low student-teacher ratio and the numerous ways it offers special help to its students, like tutoring, employment training and placement, and after-school activities. It now has only about 50 kids. But a recent $3.2 million grant from the city will allow HMS to expand and accommodate three times that number. This means substantial public money will go to a school organized around sexual identity.

From the social right come the usual and false charges of pedophilia and “indoctrination.” More plausibly, social conservatives have criticized HMS as another example of special rights for gays. Culture and Family Institute director Bob Knight derides it as “an elite institution.”
The exceptional performance of HMS students and the special services they get, a source of great pride to the school, do indeed sharply contrast with the attention given 1 million poorer-performing students in New York’s public schools. The public money spent on HMS could go to other needs, like getting better schoolteachers.

Yet special problems call for special solutions. Social conservatives never seem to acknowledge the hard fact that gay kids are subjected to exceptional amounts of taunting and bullying from their peers. That environment can make it very difficult—under extreme circumstances impossible—to learn. HMS was understandably created as a response to this reality. The question is whether it is the right response.

Then there’s the objection that HMS segregates, effectively discriminating against straight minority youths who attend lesser public schools. Democratic State Senator Ruben Diaz has filed a lawsuit claiming just that. “I am opposing segregation in any shape, type, or form,” Diaz told the New York Times. This criticism is overwrought. Segregation is a loaded word, conjuring up images of water cannons, attack dogs, and separate schools for black people. The word just doesn’t apply here.

HMS responds to the discrimination charge by saying it doesn’t bar straight kids. That’s disingenuous. Even HMS acknowledges its purpose is to help gay kids. The exclusion of straights may not be a formal policy, but it is a fact. Is it wrong?

To queer separatists, this may not seem like much of a criticism. But separating gay students from straight students may do both groups more harm than good, teaching them that the way to deal with the tension arising from diversity in a plural society is to avoid it.

Most fundamentally, HMS is simply not an effective response to antigay abuse. Hetrick-Martin estimates there are about 100,000 gay students in New York. Shipping 150 of them off somewhere is no solution. School system administrators may feel better, but they have done nothing to fight the problem. We’ve just let them off the hook.

The problem needs to be addressed systematically within the schools, perhaps by greater pedagogical emphasis on sensitivity, awareness, and tolerance, and perhaps by greater levels of security. And if anyone should be sent away, it’s the bullies.

It's also likely the 150 or so who attend HMS will be among the most self-motivated and self-aware of the gay students, with supportive parents or guardians who, after all, must sign off on their kids’ attendance. The worst abuse will be visited on those thousands of gay kids left behind who have nobody to support them, not even their parents, and can’t speak to anyone about the harassment, much less apply to attend an explicitly gay school. These invisible kids need the most help, but they get nothing from the existence of HMS.

If public funding for HMS were part of a general effort to foster healthy competition with public schools, as through a voucher program, these concerns about it might be offset by some gain. But HMS is not that, since liberal school system bureaucrats would never support such a reform.

Public funding would also be justifiable to support a temporary learning shelter for kids who are truly in psychological or physical danger that cannot be controlled by other means. But an HMS applicant can be admitted even if she has suffered no harassment and simply wants the special attention she will get at the school. There’s no principled way to use tax dollars to subsidize her desire for a superior education but leave out other similarly ambitious students.

HMS has a right to exist as a private high school, like any other private high school. But, except as a temporary refuge for gay kids in immediate danger, it isn’t an answer. And as well intentioned as the school is, public money would be better spent on the harassment problem within the public schools themselves.

Writing from the conservative end of the political spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a University of Minnesota Law School professor.

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