Education in and around the neighborhood of Harlem, in Manhattan, New York City, is provided in schools and institutions of higher education, both public and private. For many decades, Harlem has had a lower quality of public education than wealthier sections of the city. It is mostly lower-income.
For purposes of this article, the modern boundaries of greater Harlem are considered to be West 110th Street, Fifth Avenue, East 96th Street, the East River, the Hudson River, and 155th Street, although some variation occurs with the southwestern boundary. This area includes both the neighborhood of Harlem itself, as well as the adjacent neighborhoods of East Harlem, Manhattanville, and Hamilton Heights.
Community districts
New York City is divided into many Community School Districts (CSDs), although many functions formerly performed at the district level are now distributed elsewhere. Those districts with jurisdiction in parts of Harlem are Districts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 75, with 2, 3, and 6 also serving other parts of Manhattan and 75 being a citywide district covering special education schools.
Some schools located outside of Harlem may have programs that take place in Harlem. An example is City-As-School, a public non charter high school headquartered in downtown Manhattan that supports education in conjunction with internships across the city, thus potentially including Harlem.
History and quality of education
In the 1930s, overcrowding in schools in Harlem was identified as a major impediment to education and a subject for reform efforts. Lucile Spence, Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, and Layle Lane were educators involved in the reform efforts. "Opportunities to enter a racially mixed high school were minimal, and by 1913 fewer than two hundred Black high school students attended racially mixed high schools," Jeffrey Babcock Perry wrote in Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism in 2009.
By 1993, Harlem was predominately African-American with incomes below the current national median. Many residents, who lived in poverty and thus were subject to racism as well as classism, found education disadvantaged. In standardized English and math tests, Harlem schools posted the worst average scores. Not receiving Regents high school diplomas on time was more common in Harlem than in most other communities in the city by 2006. This excluded GEDs, special education diplomas, or alternative certificates, as well as children in the criminal justice system who were not counted.
District 3, which covers most of southwestern Harlem as well as the Upper West Side, did not have any gifted & talented education programs in the Harlem section of the district , while in the Upper East Side, there are several gifted programs. The schools in the district are also highly segregated and are gradually losing enrollment to charter schools and better-performing schools elsewhere in the district. Most District 3 schools in Harlem are majority-black and Hispanic with decreasing enrollment over the years, while District 3 schools in the Upper West Side are mostly white with increasing enrollment. This is also true of Harlem schools in general. For example, PS 241 STEM Institute of Manhattan, a school on 113rd Street near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, lost three-fourths of its enrollment in ten years, going from 582 students in 2007 to 125 students in 2016. Less than 25% of kindergarten students zoned to PS 241 actually attend that school. It was proposed to be closed in 2008–9 but the school was kept open due to opposition from a teachers' union. An October 2016 proposal to merge PS 241 with nearby PS 76 was poorly received by parents from the latter school, so the 2016 merger was also canceled. By contrast, further south in district 3, 89% of kindergartners zoned to PS 87 on West 78th Street are enrolled in that school.
Principals of Harlem public schools give different reasons for low enrollment. Some said that their schools had not been advertised enough, while others stated that charter schools promoted their own enrollment at the expense of public schools. , two Harlem schools, PS 180 and PS 185, had seen increases in enrollment in the preceding years.