Choices about school and school choice
In response to Monday’s post about the federal appropriations process, in which I vented a bit about cuts to the education budget, Jen asked me whether I’m still considering sending my kids to public school.
I do expect to send my kids to public school. I’ve been very impressed by the new principal at my local elementary school, and I’ve heard enough positive experiences from parents that I think I’m willing to give it a try. If that doesn’t work out, we’d probably try an out-of-boundaries public school (allowable both because the local school is a magnet or "focus’ school, and because of its low test scores under No Child Left Behind) and then consider moving to another school district, before turning to private school.
With two kids, it’s hard to imagine coming up with the private school tuition for 13 years of K-12 education for each of them, certainly not without both my husband and I working for pay. I earn enough that we’d be unlikely to qualify for much financial aid; plus, even if we could scrape the tuition together, I worry about the consumption expectations set by more affluent classmates. (By contrast, at the local elementary school, we’d be among the wealthier families, which I realize has a set of issues of its own.)
There’s always homeschooling, but I don’t think either my husband or I is really cut out for it. And it’s hard to imagine my highly gregarious older son thriving in that environment. I could may be see us "unschooling" in high school for kids with enough self-motivation, but that’s a long ways off. (I went to grad school with the publisher of New Moon magazine, and her unschooled daughters were among the most impressively thoughtful and poised teenagers I’ve met in my life, far ahead of where I was at that stage.)
In thinking of my kids — rather than all kids across the country — I’m not especially worried about the budget cuts. Most education spending is still from local dollars; federal budget cuts don’t make much difference in affluent communities like mine. Rather, the impact will be felt in places where local taxes can’t make up the difference. I’m more worried about No Child Left Behind (at the federal level) and the Standards of Learning (SOLs, in Virginia) forcing teachers to teach to the test to the exclusion of all else; I don’t know a single teacher who doesn’t think that the overriding emphasis on standardized testing is a disaster. But I assume the pendulum will swing back somewhat in the other direction in the next few years.
I’m a reluctant convert to school choice, meaning both charter schools within the public school system and even vouchers. I don’t think it’s a panacea to everything that’s wrong with the American educational system, but I do think it provides a life raft to some kids who would otherwise go down with the sinking ship of disastrous urban schools. The liberal argument against school choice has traditionally been that by giving some kids an escape route, it undermines support for and funding of public schools. I’ve come to the conclusion that this argument is essentially hostage taking, and I’m no longer willing to take kids hostage.
Plus, it doesn’t work. People like me already have escape routes even without "school choice" — whether moving to suburbia or sending our kids to private school. The only kids being held hostage are those whose parents have the ambition to take advantage of a school choice program, but not the money to escape otherwise. And that’s not enough of a base to change public policy. We’re never going to improve inner-city public schools until we make a convincing case that it’s in all of our interest to do so, not just the interest of those whose kids attend them.
November 28th, 2004 at 1:34 pm
You’ve hit on a HUGE issue in our household. We live in a large East Coast city with the usual disastrous urban public school system. We absolutely adore living here, and do not want to move to the suburbs, but we are faced with the fact that this city’s school system is not a place where we want our child(ren – if we have more) educated. The way I’ve been looking at it, we really have two options: private school or moving out of the city. Both of these options make me very sad. I do not want to spend over $200,000 per child for 13 years of private school, and I also do not want to have to find a new neighborhood to live in. I love where we live now.
My husband and I talk about this issue periodically but I don’t think either of us knows exactly where we stand on it. We still have a fair amount of time to decide, since our daughter is only 20 months old, but considering how quickly the time has passed since her birth, I know the decision point will be upon us before we know it.
I think I might be able to stomach the private school thing if we were planning not to have any more kids, but we really want to have three, so we’re looking at cumulative costs of almost $1,000,000 to send three kids to private school up to high school graduation. And then there’s the whole college thing! It is too much to get your mind around.
Sorry for hijacking your blog with such a long comment — this will probably end up as a topic on my blog one of these days! Thanks for your thoughts on a really important issue.
November 29th, 2004 at 4:45 pm
Elise makes a very interesting point about the dollar cost of private school, and moving to the suburbs. We happen to live in the city of Chicago — where the schools are beyond awful. But in looking into moving elsewhere I ran the numbers and found that it’s actually cheaper for us to stay in the city and pony up private school tuition (currently our daughter is enrolled in a small Lutheran school that costs $360/month per child) than to move to the suburbs with their incredible tax burdens and extremely expensive housing. Property taxes in the city of Chicago are very low, 1.5% of total home value, in no small part because the schools are allowed to free-fall. In the suburbs those taxes are more like 4-6%. Ouch! And in the ‘burbs we’d be forced to buy another car as well.