The school post
Last week, in response to my post about the middle class, bj commented "I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot because we have just made the final step to enrolling our first child in private school" and asked what we were doing about school for our kids.
After an awful lot of agonizing back and forth, what we’re doing — at least for now — is enrolling D in the public school that we’re zoned for. This is not without some real misgivings. The test scores are lousy — it’s failing under both "No Child Left Behind" and the Virginia-specific standards. Something like 70 percent of the students qualify for free lunches. It’s on something like the 5th principal in 7 years.
But, it’s literally three blocks from our front door, so we’ll be able to walk D to school and be part of the school community with ease. The class sizes are very small, especially in the early grades. The teachers and principal seem enthusiastic and committed. The city has committed significant resources to the school. We’ve talked to some parents we trust who are happy with their kids’ experiences. And we can always try something different down the road if we’re not happy with it.
With private school tuitions in the area in the $20,000s and rising, I don’t see us trying that route unless we truly find ourselves out of other options. If we’re not happy at this school, we can request a transfer into a different Alexandria school (because ours is a "focus" school, we could request a transfer even if it wasn’t failing under NCLB). Moving is also a possibility, although not one that I’m thrilled at.
Fundamentally, I’m not worried about whether my kids are going to learn to read. (D is probably going to be reading by the time he starts kindergarten in the fall.) What I worry about is whether they’ll learn that school is something to be endured.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:11 am
I have similar feelings about the schools here. I’d say our schools are adequate–test scores are not great. But it’s really important to me that our kids go to public schools, and in a lot of ways, I think that the things that my daughter learns from going to school with people who are not like her are just as important as academic learning.
April 10th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Your situation sounds exactly like ours. (Except we moved from Northern VA to Madison, Wisconsin 10 years ago….)
Just this year, we sent our daughter off to Kindergarten to the local public school with the 70% low income students and the low test scores.
We LOVE it. She is thriving. Not only is she excelling academically, but she has learned the one thing that matters most to me: compassion.
On field trip days, she (with no prodding from us) asks if she can bring in extra money to cover “studentX” because “his mom is gone and his dad works at a carwash and they don’t always have the field trip money.”
The classes are small due to SAGE funding. And I’ve found that the teachers that choose to stay at a school like ours are absolutely phenomenal. They are making a real difference in the lives of kids who have had a very rough start.
I am able to volunteer in the classroom, and it’s been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Jesus H. Christ. $20,000? For, like, first grade?
That’s completely mad. You’re better off leaving the kid at the public library all day and socking the money away so she can do something useful with it at age 18 or 30. Seriously, with that kind of money, you’re not just talking about the money, you’re talking about future investment yield. You shell out $20K/yr for 1st-12th, and you’re not only spending $240K (!) on tuition, you’re giving away $180K in interest at only 6%. Over that twelve years. You’d have to be living on some kind of gigantic scale to make that loss of buffer & opportunity worthwhile for the kid. Or to whack away at your own retirement savings like that. $420K when your kid’s 18, that’s still got a lot of time to stack up before you hit old. You could save your middle-aged kid a lot of agony by setting yourself up that well, and leave something for the grandkids, too.
Elizabeth, you can’t buy the kind of education he’ll get at that school. 70% with free lunches? Good. After high school he’ll never see it again unless he makes a special trip. Good to grow up knowing.
I don’t think it’s the world’s worst thing to learn that school is to be endured. It’s an administrative fact of life, and the odds that the school’s interests will be consonant with yours are pretty small, I think. Maybe a bigger question is how you learn to endure that, how you learn to work the system to get what you need & want — or how you learn to co-opt or get out of it. Chances are you’ll run into it again on the outside. I still lean on the feel of the discipline I had in 9th/10th grade, when I wanted out of highschool and into college, and had to learn a year’s math in six weeks for some test date.
This is all more or less why we’ve decided not to do private schooling for A. There would have to be some sort of miraculous difference between public & private schooling to make the lost potential worthwhile, and I don’t believe we’ll see a miraculous difference. Partly because the public schools here are very good, and because we’re in a doctor/foreign-grad-student school area, but partly because A’s a bright, able kid (and surprisingly tactful, I don’t know where she gets it from) and I’m not afraid of the pushy-mom label in the principal’s office. Even if the demographics change for the school, she and I are the same, compound interest works the same way, and the freedom and safety of having money in adulthood are not to be underestimated.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
This is one of those important topics that people are hesitant to talk about because it is so personal and divisive. It is also very revealing of people’s real values and bank accounts. The growing gap between the haves and have-nots is really showing up in school tuition prices.
The disparity in cost between private and public is mind boggling. Obviously the bulk of the money in private school isn’t going to the teachers. Private schools usually do have better facilities, but that isn’t central to education either. So you’re left with the conclusion that what people are really paying for most of the time is the label, and membership to a country club like community of select individuals.
Which is not to say that all private schools are “snob factories”. Some are relatively down to earth places, while others offer a particular brand of education that parents may prefer–religious, progressive, traditional.
Choosing schools is one of those areas where parents really do have a large effect on shaping who their kids become. Kids can be surprisingly cliquish, even at a young age. If they are sent to a boutique school that distinguishes itself purely on socioeconomic grounds, kids are more likely to develop elitist attitudes. For some reason more boys seem to come out of private schools with a sense of privilege and entitlement. Perhaps this is because boys tend to be more competitive and hierarchical to begin with, so they buy into the idea that their family wealth is justified by their superior ability.
The bottom line is it’s hard to see how anyone can justify spending 15 to 20 grand yearly on a child’s education, even if you can afford it. So there is a certain sense of pride people can take from sending their kids to public school. And of course at these rates many of us don’t really have a choice in the first place.
April 10th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
One of the reasons why people send their kids to the super-fancy private schools in our area is Ivy League Ticket Punching. The parents think that going to a prep school makes the odds of getting into an Ivy that much higher – and truth be told, having seen a subset of the Harvard admissions statistics, the odds are probably a bit higher. But elite college admission is a long shot no matter what. I agree with Amy – trading $20K a year for a long shot at Ivy admission, given that the private school will probably have the unfortunate side effect of elitist training, is not, I think, a good idea.
And yet . . . I was so bored in elementary school (NYC Catholic school). The things I’ve heard about how they teach at the private schools (my neighbor teaches at one of them) are fantastic.
So, who knows? We’ll start my son in public kindergarten this fall, keep an eye out for boredom, and hope that public school all the way through makes sense. But if he starts glazing over, and if the public school doesn’t respond, and if his grades are suffering – and if we can afford it (big if) – well, maybe we’d look into private schools despite my misgivings. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, right?
But boy, for many of Elizabeth’s reasons, I hope the neighborhood school works out.
April 10th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
yikes. This comment thread is an earful for someone who made the difficult decision to send our kid to private school. I worried about precisely the type of things people are suggesting here. Ultimately, the things that flipped us in that direction was first, the school itself (we hope that it’s not a “boutique chosen on socioeconomic grounds” but instead offers a form of education that we found to be truly exciting — in our visit we sat there wanting to engage in the lessons the children were doing) and second, the fear that in the public school, we would be forced into an unhealthy competition for resources for our child.
In considering the second, I have to wonder if part of the difference in our decision is that we are in a socioeconomically well off region of our city, where we expect that most of the parents are engaging in the kind of “hyperparenting” described by Lareau. Maybe the decision would be easier in a school that is _more_ socioeconomically disadvantaged? One of the things that drove us to the private school was the idea that the same basic economic population was being served, but with more resources.
I’ll echo the last commenter though — who chose public school, but is watching for boardome. We’ve chosen private, but we’ll be watching for signs of elitisim and “ivy league prepping.” We want our daughter to love school (we did ourselves) and we’ll be watching to see if she gets that.
bj
April 10th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
PS: I wonder if the economic impact of 20K education (in my neck of the woods it’s 15K) plays a greater role for those who make less extensive use of daycare? It always seemed to me that if you’d already prepared yourself to shell out 10-12K/kid for childcare, that continuing to pay for htat wouldn’t seem a big deal.
April 10th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
We’re in very much the same position, except we’ll be looking at public kindergarten in Montgomery County, MD. Our local school is a middle class school paired with a low income school; substantial middle class flight (from the school, though not the neighborhood) has produced a pair of schools that is racially and economically homogenous: poor and heavily Hispanic. Test scores are poor, which is what you might expect in such a situation. On the other hand, I am told that the school has excellent teachers and plenty of resources. There is a wave of middle class families (like us) new to the neighborhood who, if we choose to enroll our kids in this school, have the opportunity to shift the balance a bit so that the school as a whole is lifted by a more mixed demographic profile. But, do we want to pioneer with our child? And I also fear that she may learn, as I did, that school is something to be endured until you can go home and actually learn something. So, our plan is to apply to some of those $20K per year schools, see if she gets admitted and with what kind of financial aid, and make the ultimate decision about public vs. private at the very last instant.
April 10th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Sorry, I got my math wrong — it’s $140K of lost yield, not $180K. In reality it’d probably be more anyway, since it’s a very conservative yield.
bj, it may have more to do with your default way of thinking about money. With large sums I think in terms of yield and opportunity cost, not “can we afford it monthly or yearly, given monthly/yearly income”. I view $380K as a very big deal. Just out of curiosity I did the calc for letting that sit another 18 years at 8%, by which time I’d be 70. Stacks up to $1.6 million, which would generate income and then pay for whatever nursing care would take the sandwich-generation burden off my kid, let me eat nice, maybe let me leave something to kid & grandchildren. To me, that’s a big deal. If there’s a way for A. to do all right by going to public school and having me doing the Jewish-mother routine with the admins and teachers, I think we should take that plus the $1.6 million.
For us, though, this is all highly theoretical, because we don’t have an extra $20K/yr (!) for tuition anyway. Schools around here are much cheaper, and if we did private, it’d be more like $7K. While I’m appalled at what daycare costs (though relatively we’re pretty lucky here), my way of thinking of it is, “This stops soon. Good, because I’d like to send the kid to college and eat when I’m old.”
April 10th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
I’m anon for this, because I don’t want to jeopardize my spouse’s job by revealing a little of how the sausage is made. My spouse works at an expensive private school in our large metropolitan area. $25K per year tuition. The problems my spouse describes with his students sound just like the thing teachers encounter in the inner city. Parents who are never around and show no interest in the kids. Depression and stress in the kids. The difference is that the parents think they’re doing a great job because they have hot and cold running nannies for the kids, but it’s not the same as involved parents who actually care about you. These kids either don’t care, or have learned how to work the system, or are at their limits because they’re under a ton of pressure to achieve but have no guidance or real face time with their parents.
At least if my spouse taught in the inner city, we could feel like my spouse was hvaing an impact on kids who really needed a caring adult in their lives. These rich but abandoned kids are fluent in pop culture and knowing how to buy the best things money can buy, but they have no idea how to create real human bonds, how to work hard to achieve something, or how to shake the loneliness and fear of being alone from birth. It’s demoralizing.
I don’t know that public school is necessarily better, but I’d rather give my kids a chance to interact with other kids with “middle class values” (lots of time talking to the kids, staying on top of their interests and friends, etc.). In some areas you won’t find that in public schools, and in others you won’t find it in privates.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
we’re in Arlington VA where the local school district spends $19000 per pupil. It’s well spent. We’re thrilled with the school our kids attend (3rd and 2nd now, next year 4th, 3rd, and K). Our neighborhood has been yupping up, so we have a lower fraction of reduced-price lunches every year, but we do still have some mix, and I think that’s good. After we started our first here we have never looked back.
I have been reading about the Duke lacrosse team and thinking, I DON’T want my kids at Landon. So I guess I have a positive preference for what we are getting, AND the taxpayers of Arlington are paying for the system, we get it for no extra cost beyond the property taxes we would already be paying. What’s not to like?
April 10th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
bj, thanks for coming back to comment — I’m afraid this is a pretty pro-public school crowd around here. Interesting point about the daycare costs — it’s true that T might have to go back to a regular paid job if we wanted to send the boys to private school. (Although that might actually be counterproductive, as we’d probably qualify for at least a little financial aid on just my salary. I don’t know how the aid formulas deal with the potential earnings of a SAH parent.)
Dave, Alexandria probably spends close to as much as Arlington. And overall, I think the schools are generally as good, although Arlington has more options, especially in the older grades. But our local school definitely got screwed over in the last redistricting, and has also had some very bad luck on the principal front.
The big question, given the test scores, will be whether the teachers have the flexibility to let the advanced kids do things that interest them while they work on bringing the kids who are behind up in time to meet the test requirements. When I visited the classroom, it was very much set up with different activity stations, so I’m hopeful that they don’t try to keep everyone moving in lockstep.
I was talking to the first grader in my CASA family, who has switched from Alexandria to Prince George’s county schools this year, and she was telling me that she misses her school in Alexandria. She’s reading a little ahead of grade level, and it sounds like in her old classroom, they let the more advanced kids get up from their seats and help kids who were struggling, while that’s a big no-no in her new class.
April 10th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
We’ve gone the same route. Neighborhood public school, huge diversity (real diversity: some of everything [except rich white lawyers] from housing projects, to professors, to long-time white working class, to refugees), highest rate of disadvantaged kids in our town, highest ELL, highest free lunch, good test scores only because they frantically teach to the test. Ours has a great principal and fabulous community, but BORING curriculum. M spends a lot of time doing repetitive xerox packets. I look at the fabulous progressive private school where my sister teaches and the fancy suburban public schools where some of my friends’ kids go and worry that we are not giving her opportunities. Bottom line that lets me sleep at night: she loves school. Nice fringe benefit: we are living our principles. But if she starts hating school, the principles will go out the window. All I can tell you is that the angsting will not go away…
April 10th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Two questions:
At $19K per student, what are the Arlington schools spending it on? This seems a fantastic amount of money to me. Now it’s true, I’m in Iowa, and many costs here are lower (notably real estate), and we have a serious problem with not paying the teachers enough. But I think we spend something like $7K per, and we’ve got some of the highest test scores in the country, nice clean schools, enough textbooks, palatial playing fields at the high school (seriously, I was aghast and wondered if there was a polo team), active parent assocs, high state requirements for gifted/talented accommodation, new schools built as needed….I can see higher spending going to teacher wages, but with a $12K per differential, well, that’d be quite the pay hike. I’m not a public school admin person, and I don’t know how the money goes, so it could well be justified — it’s just not readily apparent.
For those of you worried about your kids being bored or unhappy: Do you give tacit approval to your kids’ doing whatever they like so long as it’s not disruptive? I just realized I spent most of public school ignoring the teacher and reading or writing, or working on my own projects. Including retail & political projects, selling candy & revolution to my classmates. It’s true I had no idea what was going on academically most of the time, and my grades sucked until I had a reason to prove I could get A’s, but it didn’t seem to matter. I was civil and well-behaved, so I didn’t really get in any serious trouble, and I don’t remember my parents ever telling me to knock it off, or giving off a vibe that said they disapproved. I think that probably helped enormously. My husband was also tragically bored in school, but for whatever reasons felt he had to pay attention and stick with the class, and I think he had a much harder time of it.
April 11th, 2006 at 6:45 am
Amy, I should be paying more attention to where it all goes. Average teacher pay here (best of my memory from a news article couple months ago) is $69000, starts at $40000 and goes as high as $95000, I think, the paper last week said average principal wage is $117000. But that’s not really a Hell of a lot per kid, my 2 are in classes of 20 and 25, so if their teachers get $75000 each that’s only about $4000 per kid in teacher wages, plus maybe a thousand for their share of principal-school nurse-school psychologist etc. There are some subject-area enrichment teachers – art, librarian, music, the computer guy. Where does the rest of it go? Arlington works very hard on special needs kids, a LOT of them have full time aides – that’s one of the things recent graduates can do around here is to work for $100 a day as the aide to a special needs kid. So that mounts up. The County provides intervention-special needs preschool for any 3-4 year old who has been diagnosed, to get them ready for school. Heat, building maintenance. But, yeah, that all sounds like $10000 per student, maybe, I should pay more attention, I don’t know where the rest of it goes.
An ordinary-ordinary 2-bedroom 1 1/2 bath single-family house here is $500000, townhouse further out a little less, we lost my kids’ wonderful first grade teacher to North Carolina when she married because she and her husband could not see themselves affording a house here.
April 11th, 2006 at 7:21 am
I’m astonished by the $19,000 figure above – in Australia when I did a post vaguely on this topic, I found that the average amount spent per pupil in government schools was around $6,000. Private schools were not much more on average (although for the prestige high schools, the parental fee is around $20,000 a year these days, with some in addition from the government)
In sending my boy to kindergarten this year (we start in February) we ended up by-passing the local catchment school and going further afield to another government school that was willing to take us. We’ve had our son tested as gifted (top 0.2% of the population) and the further school had a better response to that information, and wanted him, rather than regarding him as a problem.
We didn’t find the local private schools (some of which have fabulous reputations – we live in a private school rich area, as it has great public transport) any better in response to our very specific needs – I think it’s more about the fit between the student and the school, personally.
April 11th, 2006 at 10:38 am
In the Seattle school district, the average per pupil expenditure is 10,000/student, while the surrounding suburbs spend 7,000. I think that if you look at per pupil figures, you find that costs scale quite well with the cost-of-living (calculated how? I don’t know) of an area, with an adjustment for the number of “extra” services provided (like language learning, special needs, arts, music programs, etc.).
bj
April 11th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
We moved to Arlington last year to be closer to work, get a bigger house, and for the schools. For us, the financials were a no brainer. We were in a tiny 1300 sq ft rancher a little further out but with public schools that we weren’t thrilled about. For the same cost as a very modest 700 sq ft addition to our Falls Church home, we were able to move into a very nice house in a fantastic school district. Sure, the increase in my mortgage is HUGE. But it’s the same as the cost of private school for just one kid, and at least this way I’m getting a tax break and equity.
Regarding the breakout of Arlington school expenses per child, don’t forget to include things like staff health insurance and pension plans. I don’t know if the construction costs for new schools are included in this figure. The figures from the different counties in the area were close enough to lead me to believe that a lot of it is due to the high cost of living in DC.
April 14th, 2006 at 10:27 am
I recently subscribed to The Atlantic (which I am LOVING). In the May issue the following appeared in their section “Primary Sources”:
“Students at private schools tend to outscore their public- school counterparts on standardized tests—but are private schools really better at educating their students, or do they just enroll more pupils from socioeconomic backgrounds that foster academic achievement? A new study takes up this question by examining math scores from the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested more than 28,000 fourth and eighth graders nationwide. As expected, private-school students earned substantially higher math scores on the NAEP tests than did students in public schools—but when the authors controlled for socioeconomic status, the private-school advantage completely disappeared. Indeed, when the authors compared students within socioeconomic brackets, rather than across them, the students from public schools actually outscored their private-school peers, in the fourth and eighth grades alike.
—“A New Look at Public and Private Schools: Student Background and Mathematics Achievement,” Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher Lubienski, Phi Delta Kappan”
On a personal level, this is reassuring to me both because I am a believer (and an “alum”) of the public education system and because my husband and I will probably never be in a position to send (future) children to private school. On a political/public level, this is distressing because it means that, as a country, we have yet to dedicate the resources necessary in order for poorer students to succeed.