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Student Loans: The Profit and the Pauper

Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The New York Times
July 29, 2007
Student Loans | Viewpoint
The Profit and the Pauper
By JOE NOCERA

I GRADUATED from college about $8,000 in debt.

Yes, I know, with English majors now emerging from graduate school saddled with as much as $100,000 worth of student loans, my puny amount seems almost laughable. But it was a different era — 1974 — and, at least to me, it was real money.

I was exactly the kind of person the student loan program is intended to help; without those loans, I could never have afforded to go to a private university. But I was also the kind of college graduate who was always going to struggle to pay the loans back. I entered the job market in the teeth of a recession. I had to ask for a one-year “hardship” delay because I couldn’t find a job. And when I finally did find work, it was fulfilling but low-paying.

Consequently, I was constantly falling behind on my payments. The bank that administered my federally guaranteed loans would send a stern notice whenever I got too far behind, which would prompt me to cobble together a few payments by skipping some other bill. Then I would start falling behind again.

Though I found the situation onerous at the time, what strikes me now is how benign it actually was. My bank probably didn’t make a dime on me. It never raised my interest rate as punishment, nor did I ever have to pay any late fees. My chronic tardiness didn’t even affect my credit rating. And had I defaulted, I would not have had my wages garnished, or been stuck with the debt if I had filed for bankruptcy. All of which can happen today.

“Student loans have become big business,” says Barmak Nassirian, the executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers — and high interest rates and hefty late fees are part of what makes it so profitable. Many a student comes out of college only to discover that his loan has become a noose around his neck.

For some months now, the news about student loans has largely been about scandal — how lenders have curried favor with financial aid officers to get on their “preferred lender” lists, for instance. Bills in both the House and the Senate aim to reform the system. But there is a larger, perhaps sadder story here: How did this critically important social program become so unmoored from its original intent, which was to help poor and middle-class students pay for college? To put it another way, why did student loans become more about shareholders than about students?

GEORGE MILLER, a Democratic Congressman from California, has been obsessing about student loans for a long time. “If you were going to start this program all over again,” he says “you would go back to the concept that this is a service, and an investment, provided by the federal government. And you would probably go back to a direct loan program, funded with some sort of revolving fund. That is how the G.I. bill worked. But that is now viewed as foreign and wrongheaded. Now we have this idea that there has to be a business model.”

Representative Miller is the author of the bill passed by the House earlier this month. It calls for many useful changes. It raises the amount a student can borrow, which is necessary because the cost of college has risen so dramatically. Over the next five years it cuts interest rates in half, to 3.4 percent, for the neediest students. It insures that no more than 15 percent of a graduate’s income would have to go toward repayment — an important idea, since recent graduates shouldn’t have to choose a job based solely on how much it pays.

But let’s be honest here. No reform legislation is going to change the essential nature of any business, and student loans are no exception.

Big lenders will see their subsidies lowered, but they will still be guaranteed big profits. They will still be able to charge those late fees and higher interest rates when borrowers get in trouble. And they will still be able to pursue deadbeats practically into the grave, since people who file for bankruptcy have to keep paying back their student loans — an astonishing exception to the bankruptcy law that lenders lobbied for, and won, in the 1990s. The student loan business will still be, well, a business.

The critical markers in the evolution of the student loan begin, really, with the decision to offer federally guaranteed loans through banks and other financial institutions. It didn’t have to be done that way. Congress could have decided that only the government could lend taxpayer dollars. But without a middleman, the loans would be listed as outstanding on the government’s books, thus increasing the federal deficit. It was far more politically attractive to use banks to make the loans, and then guarantee them with the taxpayers’ money.

Even with the guarantee, banks were not terribly excited about administering a loan program for college students with uncertain job prospects. So the government tried to make lending even more attractive. It subsidized the interest rates. In the case of a default, it guaranteed that banks would get back not just the principal but the interest. It took all the risk out of lending.

And to get more loans into the hands of students, in 1972 the government established a quasi-government entity, the Student Loan Marketing Association, now known as Sallie Mae. Sallie’s role was to buy up student loans from banks, freeing capital for yet more loans. It could also market and service loans, but it could not originate them. Although always a corporation — much the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have both government status and corporate status — “it didn’t go all out in search of the next buck,” Mr. Nassarian says.

In the 1990s, two important events took place. First, Congress finally decided to lend directly to students. The Direct Loan Program was an immediate hit; within a few years, it had 40 percent of the market. But this was not the kind of G.I. bill, revolving-fund loan that Representative Miller envisions; its intent was to minimize the cost to the taxpayer, not to the student. So it had many of the late fees and higher interest penalties that private lenders were allowed to impose, and the interest rate was the same, 6.8 percent. Shortly after the program passed, the Republicans won both houses of Congress, and began fighting a rear-guard action against it.

Second, Sallie Mae broke away from the federal government. Its chief executive was an aggressive, profit-oriented man named Albert L. Lord, who feared that the Direct Loan Program would hurt Sallie. Privatization would enable him to fight back.

Once it had the ability to originate loans, Sallie devised marketing plans, sought ways to undercut the government lending program and began convincing college financial aid officers to give it special preference. It wasn’t too long before private lenders won back some of the market share they had lost to the Direct Loan Program; they now control about 75 percent of the market.

As for Sallie Mae, by early 2006, it controlled 35 percent of the federally guaranteed student loan market; No. 2, Citibank, had less than 10 percent. Sallie is also the dominant player in the private student loan market — that is, loans that are not federally guaranteed. Between the two, it originated $23.4 billion in loans last year alone, and made more than $1 billion in profits.

“Sallie revolutionized the industry,” says Representative Miller, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment. It imposed fees and penalties that added costs when students were already having trouble repaying loans — while increasing Sallie’s profits. It bought its own collection agency. It lobbied to make it nearly impossible for borrowers to escape their student debt. (It was aided along the way by occasional reports of the wealthy reneging on their student debt, thus saddling the taxpayer with the bill.)

On one level, what Sallie Mae did under Mr. Lord’s leadership was consistent with the times. The dotcom bubble was in full flower. The only thing Americans seemed to care about was whether a company’s stock price was rising. And Sallie’s was certainly doing that — more than 1,400 percent between 1995 and 2006. But in our obsession with the market, we had forgotten that this stock’s performance resulted in no small part from Sallie Mae — like many of its competitors — making money on the backs of struggling college graduates. It was a little like the credit card business: the “best” customers aren’t the ones who pay off their monthly charges on time; they’re the ones who can’t. For the student loan industry, the best customers are the students who take on more debt than they can handle to get through school. What’s been lost is the idea that student loans are a service with benefits that transcend the financial.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lord, who stepped down as C.E.O. in 2006 and is currently chairman, was getting rich; between 1999 and 2004, his pay package was worth $235 million, most of it in stock options. In April, Sallie Mae agreed to be bought by a private equity consortium for $26 billion. When the deal closes, as it is expected to in the fall, Mr. Lord will walk off with an additional $135 million.

No company likes to think of itself as rapacious, and Sallie Mae is no exception. When I spoke to the company spokesman, Tom Joyce, he portrayed Sallie Mae as a company that is doing well by doing good.

Sallie dominates the marketplace because people like its products, he said. If wages are garnished to pay back a college loan, that is Congress’s fault, because Congress passed the law. “The private sector is more efficient in making and collecting loans,” he said. “When is the last time you had good service from the government?”

As for the pending legislation, Mr. Joyce said that cutting government subsidies will whittle Sallie’s already thin margins to nearly nothing, and student borrowers will wind up bearing extra costs. “Let’s be careful of the unintended consequences,” he said. When I asked him about the social goals — as opposed to the business goal — of lending to college students, he replied, “Universities are huge businesses with huge endowments. Shouldn’t their vendors be in business, too?”

It’s good that Congress is wrestling with the problem of student loans. Let’s hope a decent law emerges. But let’s also keep in mind that student loans went from being a service to a business because that’s the way the larger society has evolved over the past few decades. And until society changes, we can hardly expect the student loan business to change.

It’s a sobering lesson in the limits of capitalism. As a culture, we praise the ability of the market to create the proper incentives and do more good than not. And mostly that’s true. But there are some things that are too important to entrust to the profit motive. Shouldn’t paying for a college education be one of them?

Joe Nocera writes the Talking Business column for The Times.

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Bracing for the Lion: Manhattanville

Monday, July 23, 2007
The New York Times
July 22, 2007
Bracing for the Lion
By TRYMAINE LEE

Luisa Henriquez gazed softly from her living room window into the partly hollowed-out old factory across West 132nd Street.

The construction workers who had been pounding away inside had left for the day, taking with them their gruff chatter and their clanging and banging. What remained for Ms. Henriquez, 54, were grainy memories of times past, when local folks toiled there for the Madame Alexander doll company before it transferred most of its work overseas.

Ms. Henriquez’s mother, who moved her family from the Dominican Republic to New York in 1966, was one of those workers. Back then, her mother’s voice unfurled from the windows of the burnt-orange factory like a sweet Dominican bachata, a salve of grocery lists, reminders and reprimands.

This new noise, brought on by the workers and their power tools, is no salve. It is a bugle sounded by the building’s owner, Columbia University, announcing a brand-new day in Manhattanville, a day that Ms. Henriquez says is a direct threat to her dreams. The university has been readying the location for some of its administrative staff, and neighbors say the noise is just one more signal that the school is pushing forward with its plan to use 17 acres of the neighborhood for a huge campus expansion.

“They want us out of here,” Ms. Henriquez said, her brown eyes moistening as she turned from the window. “They want it all.”

The expansion recently reached a milestone. Last month, after three years of work, Columbia completed the rezoning application that is a linchpin of the Manhattanville plan; the formal process of review will probably last till year’s end.

Columbia foresees a Manhattanville graced with grand educational institutions and infused with money and energy after many lackluster years. Some people, among them merchants who expect a boom in business, are eager for the change. But others in Manhattanville are unsure, and still others are strongly opposed, saying that the university is charging into Manhattanville just as the neighborhood begins to perk up, that they will be priced out of the revamped area and that other initiatives, like building affordable housing, are much more compelling.

Ms. Henriquez knows where she stands. “Columbia should work around us,” she said as she sat by the window that overlooks the factory. “They say everything is for the students, for the students. What about us?”



When Columbia officials look at Manhattanville’s ramshackle warehouses, garages and decaying factories, they see temples for teaching and research. Where car engines crank and roar from dozens of auto repair shops, the university envisions a new business school or a school of the arts.

Columbia, of course, expects to reap vast benefits for itself in this scene. The university says it offers only half the space per student that Harvard University does, and only a third of the space available at Princeton and Yale, and that the expansion will help it compete with those and other renowned educational institutions.

And the benefits will also spill over to others, the school argues. “Columbia wants to work on the kinds of issues that impact humanity, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” said La-Verna Fountain, a Columbia spokeswoman.

The project, which is scheduled to be completed in 2030, will also bring 6,000 jobs to Manhattanville and 1,200 construction jobs a year for two decades, according to Ms. Fountain. (Columbia already owns or controls more than two-thirds of its proposed 17-acre footprint, and to acquire the remaining land, it is negotiating with owners individually and, in the case of commercial spaces, may seek to acquire them through eminent domain if negotiations fail.)

Many businesses and residents, like Ms. Henriquez, would be relocated under the plan. But Columbia says they will be placed in situations equal to or better than the ones they leave.

Moreover, in a stroll through the neighborhood, Ms. Fountain pointed out certain structures that date from the area’s manufacturing heyday, like a 1927 Art Deco building on Broadway and 133rd Street owned by the Nash car company, that sit within the project footprint but will be reused rather than torn down.

“It is a painful process,” Ms. Fountain said of the expansion as she trekked through the dank valley of warehouses and auto shops between 12th Avenue and Broadway. “Part of the question for me is, what will this area be in the year 2030; what will this area be like 50 years from now?

“Sometimes we forget the bad parts. I think we always love the good old days; of course we do. But I think if we want to get ready for the future, we have to work together to create the bright new days.”



Manhattanville, bounded by the Hudson River on the west and St. Nicholas Avenue on the east, and running from about 123rd Street north to about 135th Street, is a poor- to-working-class neighborhood. The feel of the area is industrial and mechanical. The neighborhood sits under the colossal structure of the Riverside Drive viaduct, a steel backbone that hovers above 12th Avenue.

From most points in the neighborhood you can hear the menacing sounds of the No. 1 train, grumbling as it charges to and from 125th Street. That station’s elevators are frequently broken, so riders often trudge up and down its steep steps, like worker ants from a gritty colony.

Water is another hallmark of Manhattanville. Vicky Gholson, born and raised nearby, said it has always been the waterfront that has drawn people to the area, especially country folk with ties to the South.

“These days people know Manhattanville mostly for the housing projects,” said Ms. Gholson, an educator and member of Community Board 9. “But I know that place. I remember how the guys used to go fishing on the river. How as kids we would go down there and look across the river to New Jersey to see all the bright lights in Palisades Park. Even if we couldn’t go to that park, as a child you could fantasize.”



Despite Columbia’s long interest in Manhattanville, the neighborhood has had a generally low profile in the city, perhaps because of its industrial nature. But its history is long and textured.

For hundreds of years, the water that would draw Ms. Gholson and her friends was what attracted the American Indians who inhabited the area. They had carved out trade routes and trails — much of what we know today as 125th Street, Broadway and Old Broadway — and the future Manhattanville was ideal for them because of its direct access to the Hudson.

In 1806 the industrialist Jacob Schieffelin and a handful of mostly Quaker merchants established an official village in Manhattanville. Schieffelin is still an organic part of the neighborhood, buried under the front porch of the rectory of St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church, on 126th Street near Old Broadway. The rectory and the church look much as they did 100 years ago, but the congregation, like the local population, is mostly black and Hispanic, and the liturgy includes a Friday service known as the Hip-Hop(e) Mass.

In 1850 the Hudson River Railroad was extended to Manhattanville, making it the first northbound stop out of the city. Over the next several decades, the rail line, the waterfront, and the boom in industry drew to the area not only the city’s wealthy and enterprising, but also its roughnecks and dockworkers.

The Great Depression paralyzed the area, however, and in the 1940s and ’50s, Robert Moses took aim at the neighborhood for what was known as “slum clearance” — tearing down tenements to make room for moderate-income housing projects. The area had long been home to a mix of races and religions, but whites fled, and the Moses projects, Manhattanville Houses and Grant Houses, became largely minority.

In 1968, local tensions exploded when Columbia proposed building a gym in nearby Morningside Park. The dispute involved issues of race, class and town-gown relations; for example, a plan to have separate entrances and separate facilities for students and the public struck some as little more than Jim Crow segregation. Columbia students and concerned residents clashed with the university and the police, at times violently.

The gymnasium was never built, but as Ms. Fountain, the university spokeswoman, suggests, its shadow hangs over Columbia’s current plan.

“I think that’s a huge battle for us to overcome,” she said. “I can tell you that almost any discussion that I have with a reporter, every discussion I have with the community or with a student, it always points back to 1968.”



On a recent afternoon, Nicholas Sprayregen, president of Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage, sat in his office at Broadway near 131st Street, stewing over the university’s desire to take over his building. His father started the business in 1980, when the neighborhood was at its worst. Today, Tuck-It-Away has five locations in Manhattanville, most of which stand in the way of the university’s plan.

Mr. Sprayregen, who is white, likened the expansion to a form of “ethnic cleansing,” an attempt to rid the area of poor minorities to make way for a more affluent crowd. He said he is willing to fight the university at every turn, pointed out that his family business has been in the community for nearly 30 years, and said he plans on being around for another 30.

“Most of us are not against the university expanding; I welcome that, but they have this all-or-nothing attitude,” he said, leaning forward in his chair for emphasis. “They are like the dumb horse in Central Park with the blinders on, self-imposed blinders. They can’t do anything but move forward like a battering ram.”

Managers of other businesses nestled in or near the footprint are not so critical, among them John Stage, the owner of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, a two-year-old rib joint about a block west of Tuck-It-Away, on 131st Street.

“Columbia owns this building, so I’m between a rock and a hard place,” Mr. Stage said the other day as he sat at a table in the back and watched the staff hustle past with plates of brisket, ribs and chicken wings. “But Columbia has been very fair to me, and it has been a good customer, too.”

Mr. Stage said he started coming around the neighborhood about five years ago, when the area was still pretty “raw.” He has a 15-year lease with the university, and as is the case with other businesses, Columbia has promised to relocate him if it decides it needs the space.

“I have no fear,” Mr. Stage said. “I’m not going to worry at all. Business is very good right now.”

Evelyn Dominguez, who the other day could be found standing behind the counter of VNV Optical International and studying prescriptions from behind her mahogany Armani frames, is positively ecstatic about the plan.

“I think it will be really good for business,” said Ms. Dominguez, whose store is on Broadway, near 126th Street. “And any improvements to the area would be great. You know, so it won’t be so ghetto around here.”



At 125th Street and Riverside Drive, two pet chickens named Melissa and Tumba played peck or be pecked outside their home, the 125th Street Tire Corporation. The chickens flopped about with no regard for motor or man, just for their little games.

Nearby, on Old Broadway, a barrel-chested 42-year-old named Mustafa handed a man a few dollars to wash his car and mused upon the bad old days, when a stretch of Amsterdam Avenue was so drug-infested it was known as Cracksterdam.

According to him, the police have pressed hard on local drug dealers and the projects are kept much cleaner, and the grass is greener, than he can remember.

“But it is what it is,” he said, tossing a dirty rag to the guy who was scrubbing his vehicle. “This is still Cracksterdam, and we still call this Murderville.”

Local teenagers say that gangs control the projects, he added, with Grant Houses run by the Crips, and Manhattanville Houses by the Bloods.

Still, with crime much lower than it has been, outsiders now feel safe enough to move in. “They were scared of us before,” Mustafa said. “But now everybody wants a piece. You even see white people jogging through the projects now.”

He was joking a bit, but was deadly serious about one thing — the fear residents have of being kicked out of the only neighborhood many of them have ever known. Some have even sold their homes and left town, he said, especially the older folks, with many headed back down South.



In the middle of Manhattanville Houses, boys from Intermediate School 286, the Renaissance Military and Leadership Academy, gathered on a concrete field to play baseball. They’re an upstart team of middle school boys, without an official team name or fancy uniforms, but on this mild afternoon, mothers and sisters and other schoolchildren had filled the worn blue benches to watch the action.

Andrew Jarboe, one of the coaches and a teacher at the school, essentially agreed. “This is a neighborhood that has emerged from the crack epidemic of the ’90s; it pulled itself up from the ground,” Mr. Jarboe said as he kept his eye on a few of his more rambunctious players. “An institution like Columbia could do a lot of good here, especially for kids this age. But if the property gets gobbled up and people with more money start moving in, nobody around here will be able to afford anything.”

Mr. Jarboe remembers waiting at a nearby bus stop not long ago and striking up a conversation with two local women. As a double-decker tour bus pulled around the corner, he recalled, both women expressed the same sense of foreboding.

“They were just looking down at Harlem,” Mr. Jarboe said, “and one of the ladies says to me, ‘You know what they’re doing, right?’ I said uh, not really. She says to me, ‘They’re shopping for property.’ ”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less

Friday, July 20, 2007
The New York Times
July 18, 2007
The Minimalist
Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less
By MARK BITTMAN

The pleasures of cooking are sometimes obscured by summer haze and heat, which can cause many of us to turn instead to bad restaurants and worse takeout. But the cook with a little bit of experience has a wealth of quick and easy alternatives at hand. The trouble is that when it’s too hot, even the most resourceful cook has a hard time remembering all the options. So here are 101 substantial main courses, all of which get you in and out of the kitchen in 10 minutes or less. (I’m not counting the time it takes to bring water to a boil, but you can stay out of the kitchen for that.) These suggestions are not formal recipes; rather, they provide a general outline. With a little imagination and some swift moves — and maybe a salad and a loaf of bread — you can turn any dish on this list into a meal that not only will be better than takeout, but won’t heat you out of the house.

1 Make six-minute eggs: simmer gently, run under cold water until cool, then peel. Serve over steamed asparagus.

2 Toss a cup of chopped mixed herbs with a few tablespoons of olive oil in a hot pan. Serve over angel-hair pasta, diluting the sauce if necessary with pasta cooking water.

3 Cut eight sea scallops into four horizontal slices each. Arrange on plates. Sprinkle with lime juice, salt and crushed chilies; serve after five minutes.

4 Open a can of white beans and combine with olive oil, salt, small or chopped shrimp, minced garlic and thyme leaves in a pan. Cook, stirring, until the shrimp are done; garnish with more olive oil.

5 Put three pounds of washed mussels in a pot with half a cup of white wine, garlic cloves, basil leaves and chopped tomatoes. Steam until mussels open. Serve with bread.

6 Heat a quarter-inch of olive oil in a skillet. Dredge flounder or sole fillets in flour and fry until crisp, about two minutes a side. Serve on sliced bread with tartar sauce.

7 Make pesto: put a couple of cups of basil leaves, a garlic clove, salt, pepper and olive oil as necessary in a blender (walnuts and Parmesan are optional). Serve over pasta (dilute with oil or water as necessary) or grilled fish or meat.

8 Put a few dozen washed littlenecks in a large, hot skillet with olive oil. When clams begin to open, add a tablespoon or two of chopped garlic. When most or all are opened, add parsley. Serve alone, with bread or over angel-hair pasta.

9 Pan-grill a skirt steak for three or four minutes a side. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, slice and serve over romaine or any other green salad, drizzled with olive oil and lemon.

10 Smear mackerel fillets with mustard, then sprinkle with chopped herbs (fresh tarragon is good), salt, pepper and bread crumbs. Bake in a 425-degree oven for about eight minutes.

11 Warm olive oil in a skillet with at least three cloves sliced garlic. When the garlic colors, add at least a teaspoon each of cumin and pimentón. A minute later, add a dozen or so shrimp, salt and pepper. Garnish with parsley, serve with lemon and bread.

12 Boil a lobster. Serve with lemon or melted butter.

13 Gazpacho: Combine one pound tomatoes cut into chunks, a cucumber peeled and cut into chunks, two or three slices stale bread torn into pieces, a quarter-cup olive oil, two tablespoons sherry vinegar and a clove of garlic in a blender with one cup water and a couple of ice cubes. Process until smooth, adding water if necessary. Season with salt and pepper, then serve or refrigerate, garnished with anchovies if you like, and a little more olive oil.

14 Put a few slices of chopped prosciutto in a skillet with olive oil, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and a bit of butter; a minute later, toss in about half a cup bread crumbs and red chili flakes to taste. Serve over pasta with chopped parsley.

15 Call it panini: Grilled cheese with prosciutto, tomatoes, thyme or basil leaves.

16 Slice or chop salami, corned beef or kielbasa and warm in a little oil; stir in eggs and scramble. Serve with mustard and rye bread.

17 Soak couscous in boiling water to cover until tender; top with sardines, tomatoes, parsley, olive oil and black pepper.

18 Stir-fry a pound or so of ground meat or chopped fish mixed with chopped onions and seasoned with cumin or chili powder. Pile into taco shells or soft tacos, along with tomato, lettuce, canned beans, onion, cilantro and sour cream.

19 Chinese tomato and eggs: Cook minced garlic in peanut oil until blond; add chopped tomatoes then, a minute later, beaten eggs, along with salt and pepper. Scramble with a little soy sauce.

20 Cut eggplant into half-inch slices. Broil with lots of olive oil, turning once, until tender and browned. Top with crumbled goat or feta cheese and broil another 20 seconds.

21 While pasta cooks, combine a couple cups chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon or more minced garlic, olive oil and 20 to 30 basil leaves. Toss with pasta, salt, pepper and Parmesan.

22 Make wraps of tuna, warm white beans, a drizzle of olive oil and lettuce and tomato.

23 The New York supper: Bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon. Serve with tomatoes, watercress or arugula, and sliced red onion or shallot.

24 Dredge thinly sliced chicken breasts in flour or cornmeal; cook about two minutes a side in hot olive oil. Place on bread with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise.

25 Upscale tuna salad: good canned tuna (packed in olive oil), capers, dill or parsley, lemon juice but no mayo. Use to stuff a tomato or two.

26 Cut Italian sausage into chunks and brown in a little olive oil; chop onions and bell peppers and add them to the pan. Cook until sausage is browned and peppers and onions tender. Serve in sandwiches.

27 Egg in a hole, glorified: Tear a hole in a piece of bread and fry in butter. Crack an egg into the hole. Deglaze pan with a little sherry vinegar mixed with water, and more butter; pour over egg.

28 New Joe’s Special, from San Francisco: Brown ground meat with minced garlic and chopped onion. When just about cooked, add chopped spinach and cook, stirring, until wilted. At the last minute, stir in two eggs, along with grated Parmesan and salt and pepper.

29 Chop prosciutto and crisp it in a skillet with olive oil; add chopped not-too-ripe figs. Serve over greens dressed with oil and vinegar; top all with crumbled blue cheese.

30 Quesadilla: Use a combination of cheeses, like Fontina mixed with grated pecorino. Put on half of a large flour tortilla with pickled jalapenos, chopped onion, shallot or scallion, chopped tomatoes and grated radish. Fold tortilla over and brown on both sides in butter or oil, until cheese is melted.

31 Fast chile rellenos: Drain canned whole green chilies. Make a slit in each and insert a piece of cheese. Dredge in flour and fry in a skillet, slit side up, until cheese melts.

32 Cobb-ish salad: Chop bacon and begin to brown it; cut boneless chicken into strips and cook it with bacon. Toss romaine and watercress or arugula with chopped tomatoes, avocado, onion and crumbled blue cheese. Add bacon and chicken. Dress with oil and vinegar.

33 Sauté 10 whole peeled garlic cloves in olive oil. Meanwhile, grate Pecorino, grind lots of black pepper, chop parsley and cook pasta. Toss all together, along with crushed dried chili flakes and salt.

34 Niçoise salad: Lightly steam haricot verts, green beans or asparagus. Arrange on a plate with chickpeas, good canned tuna, hard-cooked eggs, a green salad, sliced cucumber and tomato. Dress with oil and vinegar.

35 Cold soba with dipping sauce: Cook soba noodles, then rinse in cold water until cool. Serve with a sauce of soy sauce and minced ginger diluted with mirin and/or dry sake.

36 Fried egg “saltimbocca”: Lay slices of prosciutto or ham in a buttered skillet. Fry eggs on top of ham; top with grated Parmesan.

37 Frisée aux lardons: Cook chunks of bacon in a skillet. Meanwhile, make six-minute or poached eggs and a frisée salad. Put eggs on top of salad along with bacon; deglaze pan with sherry vinegar and pour pan juices over all.

38 Fried rice: Soften vegetables with oil in a skillet. Add cold takeout rice, chopped onion, garlic, ginger, peas and two beaten eggs. Toss until hot and cooked through. Season with soy sauce and sesame oil.

39 Taco salad: Toss together greens, chopped tomato, chopped red onion, sliced avocado, a small can of black beans and kernels from a couple of ears of corn. Toss with crumbled tortilla chips and grated cheese. Dress with olive oil, lime and chopped cilantro leaves.

40 Put a large can of chickpeas and their liquid in a medium saucepan. Add some sherry, along with olive oil, plenty of minced garlic, smoked pimentón and chopped Spanish chorizo. Heat through.

41 Raita to the rescue: Broil any fish. Serve with a sauce of drained yogurt mixed with chopped cucumber, minced onion and cayenne.

42 Season boneless lamb steaks cut from the leg with sweet curry powder. Sear on both sides. Serve over greens, with lemon wedges.

43 Migas, with egg: Sauté chopped stale bread with olive oil, mushrooms, onions and spinach. Stir in a couple of eggs.

44 Migas, without egg: Sauté chopped stale bread with chopped Spanish chorizo, plenty of garlic and lots of olive oil. Finish with chopped parsley.

45 Sauté shredded zucchini in olive oil, adding garlic and chopped herbs. Serve over pasta.

46 Broil a few slices prosciutto until crisp; crumble and toss with parsley, Parmesan, olive oil and pasta.

47 Not exactly banh mi, but... Make sandwiches on crisp bread with liverwurst, ham, sliced half-sours, shredded carrots, cilantro sprigs and Vietnamese chili-garlic paste.

48 Not takeout: Stir-fry onions with cut-up broccoli. Add cubed tofu, chicken or shrimp, or sliced beef or pork, along with a tablespoon each minced garlic and ginger. When almost done, add half cup of water, two tablespoons soy sauce and plenty of black pepper. Heat through and serve over fresh Chinese noodles.

49 Sprinkle sole fillets with chopped parsley, garlic, salt and pepper; roll up, dip in flour, then beaten egg, then bread crumbs; cook in hot olive oil about three minutes a side. Serve with lemon wedges.

50 The Waldorf: Toast a handful of walnuts in a skillet. Chop an apple or pear; toss with greens, walnuts and a dressing made with olive oil, sherry vinegar, Dijon mustard and shallot. Top, if you like, with crumbled goat or blue cheese.

51 Put a stick of butter and a handful of pine nuts in a skillet. Cook over medium heat until both are brown. Toss with cooked pasta, grated Parmesan and black pepper.

52 Grill or sauté Italian sausage and serve over store-bought hummus, with lemon wedges.

53 Put a tablespoon of cream and a slice of tomato in each of several small ramekins. Top with an egg, then salt, pepper and grated Parmesan. Bake at 350 degrees until the eggs set. Serve with toast.

54 Brown small pork (or hot dog) chunks in a skillet. Add white beans, garlic, thyme and olive oil. Or add white beans and ketchup.

55 Dredge skate or flounder in flour and brown quickly in butter or oil. Deglaze pan with a couple of spoonfuls of capers and a lot of lemon juice or a little vinegar.

56 Make a fast tomato sauce of olive oil, chopped tomatoes and garlic. Poach eggs in the sauce, then top with Parmesan.

57 Dip pork cutlets in egg, then dredge heavily in panko; brown quickly on both sides. Serve over lettuce, with fresh lemon, or bottled Japanese curry sauce.

58 Cook chicken livers in butter or oil with garlic; do not overcook. Finish with parsley, lemon juice and coarse salt; serve over toast.

59 Brown bratwursts with cut-up apples. Serve with coleslaw.

60 Peel and thinly slice raw beets; cook in butter until soft. Take out of pan and quickly cook some shrimp in same pan. Deglaze pan with sherry vinegar, adding sauce to beets and shrimp. Garnish with dill.

61 Poach shrimp and plunge into ice water. Serve with cocktail sauce: one cup ketchup, one tablespoon vinegar, three tablespoons melted butter and lots of horseradish.

62 Southeast Asia steak salad: Pan- or oven-grill skirt or flank steak. Slice and serve on a pile of greens with a sauce of one tablespoon each of nam pla and lime juice, black pepper, a teaspoon each of sugar and garlic, crushed red chili flakes and Thai basil.

63 Miso steak: Coat beef tenderloin steaks (filet mignon) with a blend of miso and chili paste thinned with sake or white wine. Grill or broil about five minutes.

64 Pasta with fresh tomatoes: Cook chopped fresh tomatoes in butter or oil with garlic until tender, while pasta cooks. Combine and serve with grated Parmesan.

65 Sauté squid rings and tentacles in olive oil with salt and pepper and garlic; add chopped tomatoes. Cook until the tomatoes break down. Serve over pasta.

66 Salmon (or just about anything else) teriyaki: Sear salmon steaks on both sides for a couple of minutes; remove. To skillet, add a splash of water, sake, a little sugar and soy sauce; when mixture is thick, return steaks to pan and turn in sauce until done. Serve hot or at room temperature.

67 Rich vegetable soup: Cook asparagus tips and peeled stalks or most any other green vegetable in chicken stock with a little tarragon until tender; reserve a few tips and purée the rest with a little butter (cream or yogurt, too, if you like) adding enough stock to thin the purée. Garnish with the reserved tips. Serve hot or cold.

68 Brush portobello caps with olive oil; sprinkle with salt and pepper and broil until tender. Briefly sweat chopped onions, then scramble eggs with them. Put eggs in mushrooms.

69 Buy good blintzes. Brown them on both sides in butter. Serve with sour cream, apple sauce or both.

70 Sauté squid rings and tentacles in olive oil with salt and pepper. Make a sauce of minced garlic, smoked pimentón, mayo, lots of lemon juice and fresh parsley. Serve with a chopped salad of cucumber, tomato, lettuce, grated carrot and scallion, lightly dressed.

71 Press a lot of coarsely ground black pepper onto both sides of filet mignon or other steaks or chopped meat patties. Brown in butter in a skillet for two minutes a side. Remove steaks and add a splash of red wine, chopped shallots and a bit of tarragon to skillet. Reduce, then return steaks to pan, turning in the sauce for a minute or two.

72 World’s leading sandwich: prosciutto, tomato, butter or olive oil and a baguette.

73 Near instant mezze: Combine hummus on a plate with yogurt laced with chopped cucumbers and a bit of garlic, plus tomato, feta, white beans with olive oil and pita bread.

74 Canned sardines packed in olive oil on Triscuits, with mustard and Tabasco.

75 Boil-and-eat shrimp, cooked in water with Old Bay seasoning or a mixture of thyme, garlic, paprika, chopped onion, celery, chili, salt and pepper.

76 Make a thin plain omelet with two or three eggs. Sauté cubes of bacon or pancetta or strips of prosciutto until crisp. Cut up the omelet and use it and the meat to garnish a green salad dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

77 Sear corn kernels in olive oil with minced jalapeños and chopped onions; toss with cilantro, black beans, chopped tomatoes, chopped bell pepper and lime.

78 Cook shrimp in a skillet slowly (five minutes or so) to preserve their juices, with plenty of garlic and olive oil, until done; pour over watercress or arugula, with lemon, pepper and salt.

79 Liverwurst on good sourdough rye with scallions, tomato and wholegrain mustard.

80 Not-quite merguez: Ground lamb burgers seasoned with cumin, garlic, onion, salt and cayenne. Serve with couscous and green salad, along with bottled harissa.

81 Combine crab meat with mayo, Dijon mustard, chives and tarragon. Serve in a sandwich, with potato chips.

82 Combine canned tuna in olive oil, halved grape tomatoes, black olives, mint, lemon zest and red pepper flakes. Serve with pasta, thinning with olive oil or pasta cooking water as needed.

83 Pit and chop a cup or more of mixed olives. Combine with olive oil, a little minced garlic, red pepper flakes and chopped basil or parsley. Serve over pasta.

84 Cook chopped tomatillos with a little water or stock, cilantro and a little minced fresh chili; serve over grilled, broiled or sautéed chicken breasts, with corn tortillas.

85 A winning sandwich: bresaola or prosciutto, arugula, Parmesan, marinated artichoke hearts, tomato.

86 Smoked trout fillets served with lightly toasted almonds, shredded fennel, a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of lemon.

87 Grated carrots topped with six-minute eggs (run under cold water until cool before peeling), olive oil and lemon juice.

88 Cut the top off four big tomatoes; scoop out the interiors and mix them with toasted stale baguette or pita, olive oil, salt, pepper and herbs (basil, tarragon, and/or parsley). Stuff into tomatoes and serve with salad.

89 Pasta frittata: Turn cooked pasta and a little garlic into an oiled or buttered skillet. Brown, pressing to create a cake. Flip, then top with three or four beaten eggs and loads of Parmesan. Brown other side and serve.

90 Thai-style beef: Thinly slice one and a half pounds of flank steak, pork shoulder or boneless chicken; heat peanut oil in a skillet, add meat and stir. A minute later, add a tablespoon minced garlic and some red chili flakes. Add 30 clean basil leaves, a quarter cup of water and a tablespoon or two of soy sauce or nam pla. Serve with lime juice and more chili flakes, over rice or salad.

91 Dredge calf’s liver in flour. Sear in olive oil or butter or a combination until crisp on both sides, adding salt and pepper as it cooks; it should be medium-rare. Garnish with parsley and lemon juice.

92 Rub not-too-thick pork or lamb chops with olive oil; sprinkle with salt and pepper plus sage or thyme. Broil about three minutes a side and drizzle with good balsamic vinegar.

93 Cut up Italian sausage into chunks and brown in a little olive oil until just about done. Dump in a lot of seedless grapes and, if you like, a little slivered garlic and chopped rosemary. Cook, stirring, until the grapes are hot. Serve with bread.

94 Ketchup-braised tofu: Dredge large tofu cubes in flour. Brown in oil; remove from skillet and wipe skillet clean. Add a little more oil, then a tablespoon minced garlic; 30 seconds later, add one and a half cups ketchup and the tofu. Cook until sauce bubbles and tofu is hot.

95 Veggie burger: Drain and pour a 14-ounce can of beans into a food processor with an onion, half a cup rolled oats, a tablespoon chili powder or other spice mix, an egg, salt and pepper. Process until mushy, then shape into burgers, adding a little liquid or oats as necessary. Cook in oil about three minutes a side and serve.

96 A Roman classic: In lots of olive oil, lightly cook lots of slivered garlic, with six or so anchovy fillets and a dried hot chili or two. Dress pasta with this.

97 So-called Fettuccine Alfredo: Heat several tablespoons of butter and about half a cup of cream in a large skillet just until the cream starts to simmer. Add slightly undercooked fresh pasta to the skillet, along with plenty of grated Parmesan. Cook over low heat, tossing, until pasta is tender and hot.

98 Rub flank steak or chuck with curry or chili powder before broiling or grilling, then slice thin across the grain.

99 Cook a couple of pounds of shrimp, shell on or off, in oil, with lots of chopped garlic. When they turn pink, remove; deglaze the pan with a half-cup or so of beer, along with a splash of Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, rosemary and a lump of butter. Serve with bread.

100 Cook red lentils in water with a little cumin and chopped bacon until soft. Top with poached or six-minute eggs (run under cold water until cool before peeling) and a little sherry vinegar.

101 Hot dogs on buns — with beans!

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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School Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some

Sunday, July 15, 2007
The New York Times
July 15, 2007
School Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some
By JONATHAN D. GLATER and ALAN FINDER

SAN FRANCISCO — When San Francisco started trying to promote socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial diversity would result as well.

It has not worked out that way.

Abraham Lincoln High School, for example, with its stellar reputation and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese descent.

“If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasn’t been as integrated,” Lincoln’s principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. “If you don’t look at race, the school has become much more diverse.”

San Francisco began considering factors like family income, instead of race, in school assignments when it modified a court-ordered desegregation plan in response to a lawsuit. But school officials have found that the 55,000-student city school district, with Chinese the dominant ethnic group followed by Hispanics, blacks and whites, is resegregrating.

The number of schools where students of a single racial or ethnic group make up 60 percent or more of the population in at least one grade is increasing sharply. In 2005-06, about 50 schools were segregated using that standard as measured by a court-appointed monitor. That was up from 30 schools in the 2001-02 school year, the year before the change, according to court filings.

The San Francisco experience is telling because after the recent United States Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race-based school assignment plans, many districts are expected to switch to economic integration plans like San Francisco’s as a legal way to seek diversity. As many as 40 districts around the country are already experimenting with such plans, according to an analysis by Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group.

Many of these experiments are modest, involve small districts or have been in place only a few years. But the experiences of these districts show how difficult it can be to balance socioeconomic diversity, racial integration and academic success.

Only a few plans appear to have achieved all three goals. Others promote income diversity but not racial integration while still other plans are limited and their results inconclusive. Those who have studied them say a key to that outcome is how aggressively a plan shifts students around and whether there are many schools that can lure middle-class students from their neighborhoods into poor ones.

“Systemwide programs are more effective than piecemeal programs,” said Mr. Kahlenberg, who has studied plans like these.

The purpose of such programs is twofold. Since income levels often correlate with race they can be an alternate and legal way to produce racial integration. They also promote achievement gains by putting poorer students in schools that are more likely to have experienced teachers and students with high aspirations, as well as a parent body that can afford to be more involved.

“There is a large body of evidence going back several years,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, “that probably the most important thing you can do to raise the achievement of low-income students is to provide them with middle-class schools.”

Economic integration initiatives differ from each other, and from many traditional integration efforts that relied on mandatory transfer of students among schools. Some of the new initiatives involve busing but some do not; some rely on student choice, while some also use a lottery. And so it is difficult to measure how far students travel or how many students switch schools.

The most ambitious effort and the example most often cited as a success is in the city of Raleigh, N.C., and its suburbs.

For seven years the district has sought to cap the proportion of low-income students in each of the county’s 143 schools at 40 percent.

To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children, the district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are attracted to magnet schools in the city; children from the inner city are sometimes bused to middle-class schools at the outer edges of Raleigh and in the suburbs.

The achievement gains have been sharp, and school officials said economic integration was largely responsible. Only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight in Wake County, where Raleigh is located, scored at grade level on state reading tests in 1995. By the spring of 2006, 82 percent did.

“The plan works well,” said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. “It’s based on sound assumptions about the environment in which children learn.”

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, North Carolina’s largest, has also tried an economic integration plan, but with less success.

Students were once assigned to schools in Charlotte and its suburbs based in part on achieving racial balance, but that system was struck down in federal appeals court in 2001.

The school board then created an assignment plan based on income and choice; a low-income student could transfer to a middle-class school if he came from a high-poverty, low-performing school. But such transfers could occur only if there was room, and there seldom was. “There are not a whole lot of seats available and so there is not a lot of choice available,” said Scott McCully, the district’s executive director of planning and student placement.

Within several years, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “the schools became markedly more segregated.”

In the smaller school system in Cambridge, Mass., children apply to the city’s 12 elementary schools and socioeconomic status is an important factor in ultimate assignments. The system has been phased in gradually since the fall of 2002.

Last year, 75.8 percent of Cambridge’s low-income third graders were judged to be progressing toward reading proficiency. That was higher than the statewide average for low-income students, 71.3 percent, and better than the rate in more than a dozen other cities in the state.

Other districts have not seen such results. One district in San Jose, Calif., switched to using family and neighborhood income instead of race for assignments two years ago, giving a preference to students in low-income areas who try to transfer to schools in higher income areas, and vice versa.

But in the first year, the number of students switching schools declined significantly and has only begun to recover in the last year.

San Francisco had been under a court order to desegregate for more than 20 years, with no school allowed to have a majority of students from one racial or ethnic group. But after Chinese-American parents whose children were kept out of certain elite schools sued, the district switched in 2002-03 to a plan that sought socioeconomic diversity.

Students apply to the schools they want to attend, and the district uses a “diversity index” for assignments when a school is oversubscribed. The index considers the language spoken at home, whether a child qualifies for free lunch or is in public housing, a child’s academic performance and the quality of a child’s prior schools. But it has not resulted in racial integration.

“We were hopeful that the diversity index would work,” said Stuart Biegel, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was the district’s court-appointed monitor. “No one was rooting against it. But it didn’t work.”

Officials say one problem is that many students apply to neighborhood schools, which do not recruit enough students from outside their area. Another problem is demographics. Mr. Biegel said public school students in San Francisco were relatively low income over all, whatever their race or ethnicity, so the diversity index produced less mixing than hoped.

The wide ethnic diversity in San Francisco’s schools, which are about one-third Chinese, also introduces calculations among parents that make it easier to get income diversity without racial or ethnic diversity.

At Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy, a fourth- through sixth-grade school in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bayview, 75 percent of the students are black. Most are poor.

Tareyton D. Russ, the principal, said students from other neighborhoods did not seek to go there so the diversity index did not even apply. “Poor Chinese kids don’t want to go to school with poor black kids,” Mr. Russ said flatly.

Conversely, one white parent interviewed as she dropped her child off at summer school said some white parents avoided schools with a heavy Chinese concentration, like Lincoln, believing they would be too high-pressure for their children. She declined to be quoted by name.

David Campos, the general counsel to the school district, said the resegregation was so disappointing that the school board might try to test whether Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the recent Supreme Court case left open the possibility of using race if other methods of integration fail.

“We stopped using race at some point,” Mr. Campos said. “And then for a number of years we have tried to use a number of race-neutral factors to achieve racial diversity, which methods haven’t worked. Should the board decide to use race, and they may or may not, we are a very good test case.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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