So many feel school choice to be an undeniable right. But the consequences are dire, as Nikole Hannah-Jones argues in “Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools?” with a powerful reflection on the meaning of what’s created for the public good and how actual public participation keeps institutions sound and meaningful. As applied to public schools, this is both hopeful, as Hannah-Jones points out, with 90 percent of American children attending public schools, but also deeply troubling, given all of the incentives for the essential institution of public education to privatize and erode. What happens when we apply this concept of choice to other public institutions? Usually, most of us are far worse off, and so it will go with schools unless we all commit public education not only with our feelings, and not even only with our dollars, but with ourselves and our children.
My husband and I have made the choice to send our kids to neighborhood public schools in a urban public school system.
And now, here goes with the several paragraphs needed to explain and unpack that sentence.
My husband and I
We’re lucky to be a functioning team. Not that single parents, family members raising kids who may not be their own, or anyone else has less parenting game. Likely not. But I am well aware that we’re a married, white, heterosexual, fairly normative, involved parenting pair. We don’t set off a lot of alarm bells or provoke questions from folks around us. This matters because it gives us plenty of privilege.
made the choice
That’s the whole ballgame, right? Our financial resources are such that we have choices. We made the choice by choosing where to live, and we made that choice before our kids ever started school based in part on finding schools that met our criteria. I won’t go here into what those criteria were or are, and they aren’t likely to be the same as yours, but we used our financial flexibility to put down roots and continue to stay in a community and in schools that work for our kids. The majority of the families in our city, and so many millions nationwide, can’t do that, which seems to be a powerful argument for increasing school choice within communities. I’ll leave that right there for the moment.
neighborhood public schools
We chose our neighborhood, and it’s by far the whitest and wealthiest neighborhood in our city. Because Providence has neighborhood public schools that are obligated to accept up to 80 percent of the children designated to be in their zones, my kids had access to two elementary schools, and then one middle school, that met our criteria. There was nothing accidental about this. High school is a different story. Our oldest kid doesn’t attend his neighborhood high school. He attends Classical High School, a selective high school halfway across town for which he and his fellow students had to take a test to earn entrance. That too is a choice–a choice that makes me feel all kinds of ways. The predominant two are fortunate, as he’s for the most part learning and thriving at a solid school with some real commitments to equity, and frustrated, because we’re not walking a walk that is even slightly ideologically sound. Yes, we remain committed to and involved with public education. But we do so without being a part of the community of the school he would have gone to had he not taken the Classical entrance test and been accepted. Multiply that times the 1,100 students who attend Classical instead of their neighborhood high schools. The losses are real, even as the benefits to those 1,100 students are real.
urban public school system
A zillion times during the 12 years that we’ve been parents of kids in the Providence Public Schools, I have said, “We don’t send our kids to the Providence Public Schools.” And it is true. We send our kids to specific schools within the system, schools to which we have access as a result of privilege and a bit of luck. In this system, we are notably atypical in several ways. We’re white; the system is more than 90 percent students of color. We’re Jewish; I don’t know how many Jews attend public school in Providence, especially elementary schools, but it’s safe to say that it’s not a lot. In an elementary school of 500+, my kids are/were nearly always the only Jew not only in their class but in their entire grade. We only speak English at home; more than 50 percent of Providence’s families who send their kids to public school speak at least one other language at home. We’re (relatively) wealthy; my kids do not qualify for free or reduced lunch in a system where 80 percent of student do. And as described herein, we’re immensely privileged. We chose a situation that happens to be working fairly well (we think and hope) for our kids even though most of our peers chose differently. As a result, demographically, in several ways, my children aren’t representative. That privilege expressed through our choice makes our participation in a sometimes-struggling system very different from that of a family whose neighborhood school may not be working well, or for whom the support and services that schools provide are much more essential than they are to us. We can pay for plenty: music lessons, sports teams, tutoring, books, excellent healthy care, and much more. One could make the argument (and if you’re me, one often does) that my children aren’t really attending the same school system at all. They’re not exactly tourists, but they’re not at all the norm. This is delightful from the perspective of valuing intersectionality, which we certainly do value, but also troubling because we’re always, always opting in rather than making do with what we’re stuck with.
At this rate, with nearly a thousand words to explain one sentence, I’ll probably finish this reaction to Hannah-Jones’ piece one day. Or never, as it’s at the heart of the mission of this blog and the projects that will flow from it. For now, I’ll leave it here: my husband and I have made the choice to send our kids to neighborhood public schools in a urban public school system, and our lives and those of our children are immeasurably better as a result. We’re grateful for the public good of public education.