School roundup
There’s been a series of interconnected posts around the blogosphere on how concerned parents should be about less than perfect schools, and I wanted to pull them all together.
I think my post on Debunking the Middle Class Myth started it off, at least in this round. For anyone who’s new here, here’s more background on what we’re doing, and my worries about our choice.
LizardBreath at Unfogged linked to my post, writing:
"Now, some schools with a poorer student body are objectively worse, but they’re worse largely because of the middle-class flight. And the degree to which they’re worse seems to me to be wildly exaggerated — the inner-city immigrant neighborhood school I send my kids to is great."
The discussion there is up to about 300 comments. Bitch PhD picked up on one of those comments, and recommends to nervous parents:
Try the school you’re afraid might be mediocre before you move out to that more expensive suburb, and see if it’s really actually better than you think for the particular personality of your particular kid.
This is essentially what we’re doing.
But then Jackie at Esperanza responds:
I want the girls to be in the same school from kindergarten through eighth grade, because switching schools was very hard for me…. I really want my girls to start a school next year and not leave it again until they leave for high school. I want that security and stability for them, because losing it was very difficult for me.
I understand where she’s coming from, and agree that I’d rather not keep moving my boys around. And if D was less socially gifted and adapatable, I might be less willing to take this risk. But I’m quite confident that he won’t be traumatized if we move him in a year or two.
SuperBabyMama also picked up on Bitch’s post, commenting that it’s reassuring to know that she’s not the only one stressing about school choices. (And I really hope that her daughter thrives at her new school.)
I think this whole issue ties back to the point that I was trying to make on Monday, about how hard it can be to give up on being a perfect parent. Knowing that the local school is less than perfect, how can I justify sending my kids to it? Well, everything comes at a price.
If we opted out of our local elementary school into another one, D would have to ride the bus every day, which would eat into the time he has to play and do other things. It would be harder for us to be involved with the school. His friends would be less likely to live nearby, making casual playdates harder. If all of his friends lived near each other, they might be less likely to make the extra effort to get together with him.
If we moved into a different district, it would almost certainly mean that we’d be further away from public transit. My commute would be longer, and I’d have less time to spend on everything from being with the kids to reading to volunteering.
There are some really nice private schools in the area, but they’re really expensive. We could maybe afford private school for one kid on my salary, if we gave up on the idea of saving for retirement. It’s pretty hard for me to see how we could afford it for two (although we’d probably qualify for financial aid). T could go back to work. I could try to find a higher paying job. And D would probably feel poor if he went to one of them, because many of his classmates would be better off.
None of these are inconceivable sacrifices, but I’d rather not do them if I don’t have to. But it’s almost unheard of for an upper-middle-class American parent to say "Yup, my kid’s not going to the best school possible, but I think he’ll be ok."
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More for the roundup (I’m going to keep updating this as long as I keep finding relevant posts):
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Jody at Raising WEG has a post on her family’s choices and a reaction to an article recommended here.
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Jennifer at Penguin Unearthed reports in on school choice, Australian style.
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Eileen Gale Kugler comments on my post about her book. Cool.
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Amy at Mamazine is also settling for okay schools.
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Dawn at this woman’s work writes about deciding based on your values, rather than your goals. (Not responding to the other posts in this series, but relevant anyway.)
September 9th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
I sometimes say that I live in the worst school district I could live in, without having to fight with my in-laws about it every day. It’s not that it’s a terrible district, but it is mediocre. However, to move to a much better public school district, we’d be moving to a place that’s much whiter and better off. I don’t think academics are the only things of importance that kids learn in school. I think they learn a lot from being around diverse groups of people.
September 9th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
So far my favorite article on the subject is this one:
http://progressive.org/mag_rcb082206
Probably because her daughter is going to the same school as my daughter….but, I think it is incredibly well written, and it articulates my personal views on supporting the local public schools.
I became a co-President of the PTA at this particular school for the upcoming year. I’ve spent most of my life making fun of moms who join the PTA, and here I am – suddenly one of them.
One of the most important things I hope I can teach my children is that they have the power to make positive changes in society. I hope I can teach them that if they see something unfair – they should not immediately run away and ignore it. I hope I can teach them to get involved and change their little corner of the world.
We could opt for the cushy private school a mile north….or move to the lily-white suburbs…or we could face the fact that there is horrible unfairness and poverty right under our nose and live up to our personal responsibility to do what we can to eradicate it.
PTA, here I come…
September 9th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
In regards to switching schools as a child, it’s not always a bad thing. My parents moved between my 1st and 2nd grade years, and it was the best thing that could have happened. They moved for jobs not schools, but I was being teased and treated as a social outcast in 1st grade, and completely moving to a new school in 2nd great was a great change for me, I made friends and people weren’t picking on me in recess anymore.
September 9th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
We’re in the “worst” school district on the main line. Which means it’s actually really good. The other main line districts compete with private schools, not with other public schools. Some people in this area send their kids to private schools. There are certainly tons of them nearby. But I agree with what others have said, kids learn much more than academics in school. I was in a school that was 95% lower class kids, including the kids from the one government housing complex in town, and 5% upper middle class (mostly white) kids. At nine, I had a good understanding of the welfare system. I learned that sometimes kids didn’t get meals except at school. And I saw for the first time, the luck I had in being who I was. I realized people weren’t poor because they didn’t work hard enough. It just happened and it was a hard cycle to break.
Unfortunately, although our school district is more diverse economically than the other nearby (and “better”) districts, it’s still pretty homogeneous racially and ethnically. The suburbs really are pretty white and that kind of bothers me. But the city school system is kind of a mess and I wouldn’t even know how to begin to navigate it. So maybe my kids won’t end up at Harvard. I’m betting they’ll do fine.
September 10th, 2006 at 8:28 am
Laura: Calder taught at one of Harvard’s close competitors, and it’s not clear to us that those types of universities serve undergraduates best in any case. (I realize that there are many ways to measure “serve undergraduates best,” and that the networking value can’t be underestimated. Still.) And even if that’s your goal right now (I’m thinking you’re being tongue-in-cheek), I can’t imagine that your “least best mainline public school” will hurt your prospects.
The best predictor of admission to one of those schools is residence in a small-population state far from its geographic location, assuming you apply. In other words, move to Wyoming two or three years before your kids hit college age.
I’m being only slighly tongue-in-cheek about this.
Applications at the top schools have reached such a volume that admission, or lack thereof, has become almost entirely randomized. Harvard and all of its direct competitors could create at least two more incoming classes, nearly-identical to the class admitted, from the students they reject each year. Granted some people find this even more anxiety-inducing. I find it liberating. At least, I find it liberating 13 years out.
In all honesty, assuming you were being somewhat tongue-in-cheek yourself, I find it hard to imagine that a middle-class [white? is that a necessary qualifier here?] child’s elementary-school education matters all that much when it comes to her college prospects. The idea that choices made in kindergarten or second or even fourth grade dramatically limit a child’s prospects strikes me as, for the most part, absurd. I can never tell whether the parents interviewed in magazines (I haven’t had time to read any of Elizabeth’s links yet) are genuinely worried about college when their kids are six, or whether that’s a shorthand for other anxieties — about social success, love of learning, etc. I wonder how much of a parent’s willingness to take chances on so-called “less than ideal” schools has to do with a parent’s feelings about his or her own elementary education.
September 10th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
We live in the lily white suburbs, but my son just started kindergarten at a Title I school with the lowest scores in town. I know parents who opted to homeschool instead of sending their children to this school — I know parents who have committed to sending both children to a decade’s worth of Montessori instead of using this school system. I don’t have the patience for the first option or the money for the second. Is this the absolute best we could do for our son? Probably not. Certainly not if our goal was to send him to an Ivy League school. (Like Jody says, if THAT was our goal, the best thing we could do would be to move to Wyoming. Boston-area smart kids are a dime a dozen in Ivy League applicant pools.)
I know our situation isn’t really comparable to yours in a lot of ways, but ultimately it’s the same decision-making path that we’re both on. My sense is that this school — low test scores and all — will prove to be good enough for the purpose that we need it to serve, that its strengths will match my son’s potential weaknesses, and his strengths might help another child or two get a leg up on the world. In other words, my kid’s not going to the best school possible, but I think he’ll be OK.
So it may be unheard of, but you’ve got some company anyway.
September 10th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Oh, for pity’s sakes. That last one was me.
September 10th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Our Local Public School
Elizabeth at Half-Changed World sparked a conversation about middle-class public school choices in various spots around the internet. The debate strikes close to home. We moved to Red Clay State in 2004. We bought our current home almost entirely because
September 11th, 2006 at 5:44 am
All through my childhood and early adult life, I was a staunch supporter of state schools; until it came time to send my son to one. I’m now in the camp that while I’m still a supporter of state schools in theory, I give my child a poorer education for ideology.
That said, I very much agree with your wider view on school choice – it’s not just about the teaching, it’s about the life.
We’re now sending our son to a state school out of district (because they would take our son early, and the local school wouldn’t), and we are definitely suffering from the lack of local playmates, walk to school, ease of volunteering that you talk about.
But the local school would be more diverse, particularly income-wise, but also race-wise, and I’m starting to wonder about that too.
September 11th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
I think you are defining “best” too narrowly. The best school has to be the best one that fits the needs of your entire family, not just your child; otherwise it would be obvious that you should sell everything you own to pay the tuition of the *best* school (assuming it would be private is not much of a stretch).
September 14th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
I live in the lily white suburbs (no diversity here) and we are likely to stay here since my husband is an officer on the call fire department, and loves that work. We are homeschooling. I want my three boys to grow up together and I feel that school takes over their lives with school time and homework. I want them to have time to find out who they are and what they like, and time to pursue those interests. I think everyone’s time is so precious, and I’m far from convinced that 30+ hours/week in school is a good way to spend it. Our elementary is school fine, but not stellar. There’s a good liberal private school two towns away that I haven’t even looked at because sending three kids to private school would significantly change our lifestyle (I’d have to get a really good, full-time job to cover tuition).
Probably the biggest reason for homeschooling comes from my feeling that my husband and I are only just figuring out in our mid (ahem!)–thirties what it is we want to do when we grow up. And it’s late to be making dramatic changes if we want to also keep our standard of living. I don’t think schools or our culture in general do a good job of allowing kids to learn about and experience adult life so that they can begin to build themselves a roadmap of how they, personally, will get there. I hope that by having my kids out and about in the world, and giving them time to explore their interests, they will do better than my husband and I have. And I feel very lucky to have the option to do it.
I’m not the best person to make the public policy argument for homeschooling, but I wanted to offer the comment since I haven’t seen another homeschooler commenting here.
September 14th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
“In other words, my kid’s not going to the best school possible, but I think he’ll be OK. ” Isn’t this true for all of us? How can we possibly know what the “best school possible” would be? One of the schools my daughter visited told her that she was there because her parents were searching for the “best school” for her. I remember being distressed when I heard this through her — really, my goal had been to find a satisfactory school, a good school, and at the minimum, an adequate school, a school that doesn’t do harm.
My daughter is going to an independent school, and for us the money is irrelevant (and moving out of the city unacceptable, though we did chose our neighborhood for the satisfactory nature of it’s public schools). So the real question was the commute, and the 1 hour or so she looses in her day in the car, and the fact that her friends (hopefully there will be friends) will be scattered throughout the city. We chose the school because we liked it, but I’m still not absolutely certain that it will be worth the trade for the neighborhood school. Will it really be the “best” school? Who knows? And, that’s even given that I have absolutely no interest in how her elementary school effects her college (or life future). I just want her to be happy to go to school in the morning;
bj