Big news this week at the G & G household: Lil' S1 was accepted to a DC public charter school. Applicants are selected by lottery, so it's mostly luck, but also S was extremely persistent in checking his status (i.e., bothering the school on a daily basis), and I think that might have helped (it certainly didn't hurt). She's really happy about this. I'm more "meh." Actually "meh" is the wrong exclamation, because it connotes a lack of interested. It's not that I don't care; I'm ambivalent. I have strong feelings on both sides. I haven't totally reconciled them, but I'm going to try to lay them out in this entry.
The first, most important thing is that I wanted this to happen because S wanted it to happen. She's obsessed with getting our kids into the "best" school possible. Rankings and tiers and reputation and things of that nature mean a lot to her, and I don't think she would ever be content sending our kids to the "normal" neighborhood school, when these "better" charter schools exist as an option. She's got a bit of Tiger Mom in her that way.
I'm totally fine with her viewpoint on this -- I think it will probably serve our kids well in the long run -- but as you can probably guess from my use of quotation marks above, I feel differently about things. I'm a socialist when it comes to schooling. I'm not about my kids being as advantaged as possible, but rather about them being part of a system that works for everybody and one in which everybody works for it. Is that too idealistic? Maybe. But it's how I feel.
I also question whether or not "better" schools are actually better. I'm of the mindset that education is much more about what you, as a parent and a student, put into it, than it is about where you go to school. But it could be I'm too biased by my own personal experience on this. I never went to an elite school -- it was public high school and state universities for me -- but I feel I attained the same level of academic success and amassed the same skills I would have if I went to a posh private high school and an Ivy League university. (I don't have the same connections as I would have in that case, but that's another story.) My feeling is that the best schools don't make the best students, but rather the best students make the best schools. Harvard is great because all the smartest kids choose to go to Harvard. If suddenly they chose to go to Middle Tennessee State, then Middle Tennessee State would be great (and Harvard less so), even if nothing else about the two universities changed. That's my broad opinion on the matter. It could be total wrong, but it's worth noting that in his book Everybody Lies, Seth Stephen-Davidowitz highlights a big-data study that lends some support to this theory.
So, I'm not particularly worried about my sons lagging behind academically no matter where they go to school. I want them to go somewhere that's safe and clean and comfortable (and of course it has to have some baseline of academic standards), but also I want them to go somewhere they (and we, as parents) can contribute to the local community. And therein lies my ambivalence with sending him to a charter school.
I haven't totally wrapped my head around charter schools yet. On the one hand, they really can be a savoir for low-income families who are "trapped" in districts with failing schools. On the other hand, they can further disadvantage those students who don't have parents willing work to the system -- that is to say, exactly those students who need it most.
Because here's what happens, or at least here's what happened to us at our school, which I assume is what happens a lot of places. Lil' S1 started going to our neighborhood school two years ago for PK3. It's a decent school, overall. The teachers are mostly good, and I like the principal, but it does have some shortcomings. It's old and needs to be renovated; the thermostats don't work correctly, so students complain about it being hot or cold in their classrooms; the kindergarten classrooms are glorified storage areas, which don't even have windows; and also sometimes it can seem disorganized when dropping off or picking up students. It supposedly is in line for a major overhaul, but DC keeps delaying the funding. Now it's set for 2020 or something like that.
The school is a mix of students I will call "advantaged" and "disadvantaged," for lack of betters terms. The parents of some advantaged students see these shortcomings and want to upgrade (which is totally understandable), so they apply to charter schools or pay for private schools or move to the Maryland or Virginia suburbs. The parents of the disadvantaged students can't or won't do this -- they might be poor or overworked or absent or have substance abuse issues or they just didn't win the charter school lottery (and even applying for charter schools has a cost associated with it in terms of time and incidental expenses). So now the ratio of advantaged to disadvantaged kids is much lower than it was before, and this of course makes the school worse (and cruelly the school has less money to fix things, because funding is dependent on enrollment numbers). Probably the best thing for a struggling student is to be immersed in a school of mostly non-struggling students. And that's how schools should work in my opinion. The privileged students should buoy the underprivileged.
But that's not how it works. Instead all the other parents of advantaged students look around and see everybody else leaving and decided it's in their best interests to leave as well. Everybody could just stay and work together to make their school better, but they don't, and it makes the remaining students worse off. (A friend of mine framed it in terms of the prisoner's dilemma.) And by the way, this doesn't necessarily break down racially the way you might expect. It's true that the vast majority of the disadvantaged children are black and brown, but so are many of the advantaged children. It's not "white flight"; it's "engaged parent" flight. And that's the worst part, because it is precisely those students who don't have engaged parents who need good schools the most.
So here were are. We are sending our kid to charter school, and I'm feeling very conflicted about it.
Until next time...
The first, most important thing is that I wanted this to happen because S wanted it to happen. She's obsessed with getting our kids into the "best" school possible. Rankings and tiers and reputation and things of that nature mean a lot to her, and I don't think she would ever be content sending our kids to the "normal" neighborhood school, when these "better" charter schools exist as an option. She's got a bit of Tiger Mom in her that way.
I'm totally fine with her viewpoint on this -- I think it will probably serve our kids well in the long run -- but as you can probably guess from my use of quotation marks above, I feel differently about things. I'm a socialist when it comes to schooling. I'm not about my kids being as advantaged as possible, but rather about them being part of a system that works for everybody and one in which everybody works for it. Is that too idealistic? Maybe. But it's how I feel.
I also question whether or not "better" schools are actually better. I'm of the mindset that education is much more about what you, as a parent and a student, put into it, than it is about where you go to school. But it could be I'm too biased by my own personal experience on this. I never went to an elite school -- it was public high school and state universities for me -- but I feel I attained the same level of academic success and amassed the same skills I would have if I went to a posh private high school and an Ivy League university. (I don't have the same connections as I would have in that case, but that's another story.) My feeling is that the best schools don't make the best students, but rather the best students make the best schools. Harvard is great because all the smartest kids choose to go to Harvard. If suddenly they chose to go to Middle Tennessee State, then Middle Tennessee State would be great (and Harvard less so), even if nothing else about the two universities changed. That's my broad opinion on the matter. It could be total wrong, but it's worth noting that in his book Everybody Lies, Seth Stephen-Davidowitz highlights a big-data study that lends some support to this theory.
So, I'm not particularly worried about my sons lagging behind academically no matter where they go to school. I want them to go somewhere that's safe and clean and comfortable (and of course it has to have some baseline of academic standards), but also I want them to go somewhere they (and we, as parents) can contribute to the local community. And therein lies my ambivalence with sending him to a charter school.
I haven't totally wrapped my head around charter schools yet. On the one hand, they really can be a savoir for low-income families who are "trapped" in districts with failing schools. On the other hand, they can further disadvantage those students who don't have parents willing work to the system -- that is to say, exactly those students who need it most.
Because here's what happens, or at least here's what happened to us at our school, which I assume is what happens a lot of places. Lil' S1 started going to our neighborhood school two years ago for PK3. It's a decent school, overall. The teachers are mostly good, and I like the principal, but it does have some shortcomings. It's old and needs to be renovated; the thermostats don't work correctly, so students complain about it being hot or cold in their classrooms; the kindergarten classrooms are glorified storage areas, which don't even have windows; and also sometimes it can seem disorganized when dropping off or picking up students. It supposedly is in line for a major overhaul, but DC keeps delaying the funding. Now it's set for 2020 or something like that.
The school is a mix of students I will call "advantaged" and "disadvantaged," for lack of betters terms. The parents of some advantaged students see these shortcomings and want to upgrade (which is totally understandable), so they apply to charter schools or pay for private schools or move to the Maryland or Virginia suburbs. The parents of the disadvantaged students can't or won't do this -- they might be poor or overworked or absent or have substance abuse issues or they just didn't win the charter school lottery (and even applying for charter schools has a cost associated with it in terms of time and incidental expenses). So now the ratio of advantaged to disadvantaged kids is much lower than it was before, and this of course makes the school worse (and cruelly the school has less money to fix things, because funding is dependent on enrollment numbers). Probably the best thing for a struggling student is to be immersed in a school of mostly non-struggling students. And that's how schools should work in my opinion. The privileged students should buoy the underprivileged.
But that's not how it works. Instead all the other parents of advantaged students look around and see everybody else leaving and decided it's in their best interests to leave as well. Everybody could just stay and work together to make their school better, but they don't, and it makes the remaining students worse off. (A friend of mine framed it in terms of the prisoner's dilemma.) And by the way, this doesn't necessarily break down racially the way you might expect. It's true that the vast majority of the disadvantaged children are black and brown, but so are many of the advantaged children. It's not "white flight"; it's "engaged parent" flight. And that's the worst part, because it is precisely those students who don't have engaged parents who need good schools the most.
So here were are. We are sending our kid to charter school, and I'm feeling very conflicted about it.
Until next time...
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