So, as I think I mentioned in passing, Nashville’s school system is embroiled in a huge lawsuit in which it’s contended that the city conspired to resegregate the public schools, which would then have the foreseeable consequence of putting a lot of black kids in a lot of shitty schools (though the other truth is that there are already a lot of black kids in a lot of shitty schools in Nashville).
As you can probably guess, Nashville’s school system was segregated prior to Brown. After Brown, white people mysteriously began loving private schools. Or the suburbs. Or homeschooling. And the public schools came to be predominately African American and, as they were neglected, predominately poor and African American.
This is not to say that there aren’t white kids in Nashville’s public schools, though, and there are even some schools with large white populations. And some very good schools in the Nashville system.
And then there was busing.
Busing has been a mixed blessing here in Nashville, at least from where I’m sitting. It has allowed some kids in bad neighborhoods access to better schools, but not all. It has not had the effect of bringing improvement to all schools and we still have situations where predominately black schools are predominately the worst schools in our system. It has also hurt neighborhoods and neighborhood cohesion. Parents of bused students have complained that busing makes it hard for their kids to participate in after-school activities. And parents of bused students complain that it is very difficult to participate in their child’s school life if they work and the kid’s school is out of the neighborhood.
And it also just seems weird that kids don’t go to schools near where they live. But that’s just me.
And, of course, there are all the racial undercurrents you can imagine.
So, the idea was to return to the neighborhood school model, with kids attending schools they could walk or ride their bikes to, in the hopes that parents in those neighborhoods would then return their children to the public school system, if they were not already in it.
It’s hard to over-emphasize how important getting people to put their kids back in public school is for the well-being of our public schools. It means powerful parents and parents with money who can make things happen being invested in our public school system.
It means, frankly, getting middle and upper-class people, who are predominately white, to put their kids back in the public schools.
It should be said, at this point, that a lot of parents send their kids to private schools in Nashville now, of all races. If you can afford to do it, the conventional wisdom is that you do, at least for high school, if not sooner. And while it might be racist why our school system sucks (and I believe it is institutional and codified and generational), our school system does suck, in general (though there are some very bright spots).
It is hard, very hard for me to blame parents for putting their kids in private school if they can afford it.
But I also know that, if they don’t start putting their kids in public schools, our public schools are going to have a hard time improving.
So, what do you do? Neighborhood schools are supposed to be a way of luring these folks back.
As you can imagine, though, poor black people are convinced that, once all their kids are stuck in the poor black neighborhood schools, those schools are going to get short shrift.
Last year, when the city tried to sell this plan to the people, they promised that they would dump tons of money and resources into the poor, black schools.
We just recently learned that some kids in these schools don’t have text books and we’re a month into the school year. When the city had to explain itself to a judge, our argument was that it’s not that we’re picking on the black schools, it’s just that we’re incompetent in general.
Not a glowing recommendation for private school parents to pull their kids out of private school, exactly.
So, it feels like an impasse. It may be that the economy starts to take care of some of this–that more middle class families will have to take their kids out of private school in order to make ends meet, that neighborhoods become more integrated as financial pressures force people to move closer to work, etc.–but I don’t know.
Even if everyone were to wake up tomorrow free from racist ideologies, we’d still have this problem of folks who can afford it putting their kids in better schools than most of the Metro schools and the kids who are left in public school suffering because of it. It’s one of the lasting legacies of racism that we all have to live with.
As one of our city council members, Jerry Maynard, says, “As a city, we’ve already lost.”
It sounds to me like your argument is if we mix poor kids and rich kids in the same underfunded public school, the poor kids will benefit educationally from that exposure.
Maybe what you are trying to say is that a public education system funded by local property taxes is not working, that it results in unequal levels of education, that affluence essentially guarantees good public schools, and that poverty does not. If so, then I agree with you. Brown v. Board of Education changed very little.
Are you for real? Brown v. Board of Education changed very little? You really say that out loud in public? I mean, even if you had somehow managed to avoid cracking open a history book your whole life, did you even read my post in which I discuss two major changes to how kids are educated just in my own city?
So, no, my argument is not that mixing poor kids and rich kids in the same underfunded public schools benefits poor kids because they are exposed to rich kids. My argument is that public schools tend to be better run and better funded when rich and powerful people have children in those school systems, thus benefiting everyone who attends, but that getting rich and powerful people to put their kids in schools that are not yet well run and well funded is very difficult, if not impossible.
And I said nothing about local property taxes.
But hey, you got your pot shot in at Brown v. Board of Education, so that counts for something, right?
The problem here is that affluent parents want their kids to go to good colleges, and there develops a big division in how resources should be allocated– getting the best students into the best schools, or dragging everyone through the same muck and depending on affluent parents to send their kids to tutors and specialized programs after school… in which case, why send them to public school at all? Children from affluent families will always perform better, because they have access to more educational resources at home, because they generally come from families that are better educated and therefore place more emphasis on education (this doesn’t always hold true when you have immigrant-heavy communities, where poor families also often put a big emphasis on education, but in non-immigrant communities, well, the poor tend not to be as well educated as the affluent), and because their parents can, like, help them with their homework.
New York schools ran into this problem when some magnet schools taking classrooms in public schools… magnet schools that were open to everyone who passed an interview that demonstrated parental commitment to the child’s education and where the child demonstrated above a certain level of performance… and the magnet schools, unsurprisingly, had much larger populations of white professional families than the general-access public school around them. When one of the magnet schools got shut down due to protests by the largely latino immigrant community that populated the regular school in the building, and the high-achieving families ended up in private/catholic schools… and, in that one famous case in the east village, a parent body that had been raising money for improvements to the whole school building, including the non-magnet parts, dissappeared, and the general school ended up as crummy as all the other public schools. At the end of the day, ‘good’ families will want their kids separated from kids from ‘bad’ families any way possible, because kids from ‘bad’ families are violent underachievers in their minds. Schools aren’t the answer; families that can, and have the will to, support students’ development as citizens and workers (in the ethical sense, not in the economic sense) will lead to higher performance at all levels. When public school student bodies show their will to break from the diseases of poverty, families with money and power will return to the public schools and bring the resources to empower that will.
Also, if affluent families are respected as such as not treated as wallets taking up seats and arguing for racist policies, that’d help too… the bottom line is that people bother putting in the work to become or stay affluent in order to not to have to live like low-income families, and public schools won’t get the positive attention, with all its power and money implications, of affluent families, if the children of affluent families are going to have to worry about the concerns of the average crummy public school, like violence, social promotion, bad student/teacher ratios, and teachers’ unions that make bad teachers impossible to get rid of.
Also note the success of students from underprivileged backgrounds who attend schools like hunter, bronx science and stuyvesant, in New York– schools with substantial affluent populations, but that are public schools with high-threshold entrance exams, and that give all their students a private-school-level amount of resources. At the end of the day, underachieving kids won’t win out in any scenario– either the resources go to the high-achieving kids, or the families that bring the resources will flee. There is no communist success in education in America, it must be meritocratic within the context of our privilege-afflicted society.
One of the best stabs at a solution that I’ve seen is magnet schools as they’re implemented in the city where I went to high school.
They would build magnet schools in low-income and majority-black areas, and the local students would be districted there automatically. Meanwhile, the rich suburban parents would be fighting tooth and nail for one of the remaining places at the school, because the school offers computer programming, Latin and Japanese, great performing arts, lots of AP classes, et cetera. It’s as good as a private school but it’s free.
The problem is that by high school, the kids are already on their own tracks. The rich suburban kids get tracked into the advanced/AP classes, and the poor black kids don’t, and it’s almost as if you have a poor school and a rich school that just happen to be in the same building.
I don’t have any experience with magnet elementary schools, but I’m sort of hopeful that if you start off with good integrated public schools before kids start going off into separate academic tracks, things can improve.
My boyfriend went to a magnet school and that was pretty much his experience while he was there.
I went to a HUGE school that actually had a fairly diverse student population. That is, until they split the school into two, which needed to happen. However, somehow all the ‘country club’ kids ended up at one school, and everyone else ending up in the other school (which was also in the old building). “Everyone else” being mostly minorities, especially black kids. So when my sister went to school it was a different story. Oh, and did I mention that the ‘poor school’ somehow ended up with double the amount of people as the ‘country club’ school. God only knows how that happened, especially since the country club crowd and the local council crowd happen to be the same people.
That said, it was my senior year when they split, and seniors got to pick whether to go to the new school or not. I went to the new school, where my friends were going. And I almost think those two graduating classes were more segregated – which is pretty sad. I do think it’s because white kids tend to be pushed more into certain tracks (unless their too poor, like my best friend was, to be able to participate in certain things). Especially academic tracks. I remember segregating ourselves in the cafeteria as well. I don’t really know what can be done about that – other than encouraging minority students in extra-curricular activities and making it easier for poor students to do the same.
But then my high school didn’t actually desegregate until 1965 – 11 years after Brown v Board.
Texano- The parents of the rich kids are still paying taxes into their local schools, even if the kid is in private school or homeschooled. I think what Aunt B is referring to is that the more well-off people in each neighborhood need to put their kids in the neighborhood schools so that everyone can benefit from their power and clout. Right now they’re just abandoning the schools but if their kids were in those schools they’d make damn sure their kids had textbooks on the first day of class.
Neighborhood schools need involvement from those with the luxury of time, power, and wealth- in whatever combination– in order to thrive. When the people with the luxury of time all choose to homeschool, or those with wealth choose private school, the neighborhood schools miss out on kick-ass room parents, or generous donations for special projects, and all the other myriad of things that make a school good.
Excuse me, but I think you are stating the obvious when you say schools are better funded when the “rich and powerful” have a vested interest. But the schools will be better funded in part due to the fact that they are in a part of town that has a better tax base. If the schools are run better, it is perhaps because they can afford a better staff, not just because the “rich and powerful” are, well, rich and powerful.
Brown v. Board of Education was the right thing to do, but the decision continues to be crippled by the fact schools are *not* funded equally across a state or even across a city. That’s my point.
I don’t like the basics of this argument, although I agree with many other things mentioned in the post.
I don’t like it because it puts the onus of improving the school on the child. Improving schools is the responsibility of adults. The solution needs to be financial and political. Children should not be used like bargaining chips to increase the stake of the adult.
On a personal level, I live in a neighborhood with a terrible neighborhood school. How bad is it? It’s the school that made nation news earlier this year where the 11-year-old boy killed himself because of homophobic bullying. I am not sending my son into that environment. His life could literally be at risk. He goes to a charter school. The other (predominantly black) parents in my neighborhood also do everything they can to send their kids to non-neighborhood school.
I believe it is the responsibility of adults to fight for educational reform that improves all public schools. I support progressive political candidates who will work for this. It’s an insanely difficult, uphill battle, however.
Neighborhood schools don’t need more parental involvement in order to thrive… I think that’s a red herring. They need better funding, they need higher standards for teachers and better compensation for teachers (to avoid burnout of the good ones) and they need better administration.
Our district is mixed income… but asking for more parental involvement in the really poor districts is unrealistic and almost cruel. These are families where people are working one and a half jobs at a time, the lowest paying and exhausting jobs, and they don’t have many resources to get involved.
In the meantime, racist re-segregation measures are just going to make things worse. I’m sorry for the situation in Nashville.
Aunt B, everything you said in this post resonates with me—my city is the same way. All the wealthier people live in the plush neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, or have moved just across the city boundary into the suburban school districts that have all the educational trimmings. Meanwhile, my daughter attends a school where around 98% of the student population qualifies for free or reduced price breakfast and lunch. And we don’t even live in one of the deepest-poverty neighborhoods; we live in what used to be (as far as I can tell—I didn’t grow up here) a working class/lower middle class neighborhood. (hey, the economy wasn’t/isn’t kind to the Rust Belt. the cool kids call us “flyover country”.)
There’s a book, “The Hidden Cost of Being African American” by Thomas Shapiro that really lays a lot of this out on the line—how white people use generational wealth to privilege themselves, while maintaining the line about “bootstraps”. He used an interesting methodology for the book, combining statistics with interviews and narratives, and if you’re at all familiar with St. Louis, you’ll get the nuances of his comparisons instantly (he uses other cities as well, but probably had the most on St. Louis). His key is that assets are more important than income, which is where the “hidden” part comes in—there were white folks in the book who were practically jumping up and down insisting on how they’ve worked for everything they have (and they did work), all the while ignoring that the only reason they reached the economic station they have is because of the assistance of generational wealth (inheritances and/or help from in-laws in the forms of….fully-paid college educations/no student loans, downpayment on houses and/or help with hefty mortgage payments in the “better” neighborhoods, payments for grandchildren to attend private schools, etc.). Black folks with the same education and work-hard ethic who didn’t have that extra assistance are skating along without a safety net, struggling to make ends meet despite the getting an education, working hard, saving money, deferred gratification, etc. Income disparity is one major gap, but it’s nothing compared to the disparity in wealth.
I kinda agree with you….and I kinda don’t. I’m skeptical enough to believe that this horse has already left the barn—I can’t see the wealthy folks in my area bringing their kids back into the public schools unless there was some form of guarantee that their children wouldn’t have to rub elbows with the children in my neighborhood (and others like it). Right now, there’s a fight on about getting a new high school built out by the tony subdivisions (as opposed to the center of town—the “rich kid” high school, though more than rich kids attend there. The other two high schools are in the north end (mixed race, with the whites being predominantly ethnic Catholics) and the east side (mixed race, predominantly black). As you can imagine, the arguments fall neatly along race and class lines. If the wealthier people lose the argument, and the school in the center of town is renovated, they’ll move out to the suburbs (whose schools are already overcrowded, despite being new). If that happens, we’ll have a renovated school that we won’t be able to maintain due to lack of property tax income (eventually). Seriously, you can’t underestimate the impact of job losses in the Rust Belt. It’s like economic musical chairs, and the wealthier are busy removing the remaining chairs out from under the asses of the working class still fortunate enough to have something to sit on.
In other words, for some people, the whole point is to keep the disparity. And they will pay any price it takes to do that. Legislation needs to be passed to mandate equal school funding and equal school resources. I could give a shit if the rich folks don’t want to deal with my child—as long as my child has the same educational resources. Right now, she doesn’t, and there’s fuck-all I can do about that as an individual. I don’t have access to that generational wealth I mentioned above. Even if vouchers were implemented, I’d have the same lack of access (very few private schools, and even fewer I’d consider as providing a decent nonsexist education). All vouchers are going to do is take public money and put it into (mostly fundamentalist) private hands—who still get to cherry-pick students.
My daughter is finally reading at grade level. It’s been a struggle—preemie issues don’t stop after infancy or toddlerhood. Part of why she is doing so well now is because of summer school. Summer school is held at the newest west-side school (among the subdivisions!) because of its air-conditioning. My daughter has been going to summer school there for the past three years. She has noticed the distinct difference in how clean that building is, how well-maintained, how new the textbooks are. Everything about that building speaks of “we value you as a student! you will be somebody!”, in stark contrast to her own school. Kids notice this shit. I noticed it too, when I was a kid.
So we’re talking about convincing wealthy parents to send their children to neighborhood public schools. Well, in my area there are not that many mixed-income neighborhoods–or even mixed income suburbs. “I am from [X]” pretty much says everything you need to know about how much money that person has. In fact, here the question “Where did you go to school” has nothing to do with college–it means “where did you go to high school,” and the answer to that tells you (a) how smart the person is and (b) how much money they have.
Most of the kids at private high schools in my area already live in the best local school districts. So convincing those parents to send their kids to the “neighborhood school” wouldn’t change all that much.
Altasien, but that’s exactly my point–at some point it becomes a chicken or eggs thing. If you want things to improve, kids whose parents can force the issue are critical. I mean, it really isn’t (as The Flash says) that affluent parents just work harder. It’s that the poor parents in our school system have a hard time getting heard.
I mean, people have been complaining about the lack of school books (and other issues) but it took a parent whose child had been in a school where they got their books on time and then moved this year to a school where they’re still waiting for books (unless they actually did get there this week and I just haven’t heard) who had the ability to sue to make it an issue that had to be dealt with.
That parent isn’t wealthy, but she also knew, not just suspected, that her child had a vastly different experience at a different school in the same school system.
And we do have some really great schools here in Nashville, too. There’s a middle school in my old neighborhood that has this firecracker of a principal and parents are clamoring to get their kids into his school and using private schools as a fallback.
And the magnet schools I’m familiar with are really terrific, too. So, I’m not trying to give the impression that every Metro school sucks.
But just that the problem is really big and complicated and it’s hard to know what to do. I mean, Atlasien, not to pick on you, but just that you got me thinking. The onus is already on the kids. Not the kids who might have to go to public school in order to help improve the schools, but the kids who are in those public schools right now.
I mean, I agree that the issue is always smaller classes, better paid teachers, involved parents, etc. But at some point, it’s also got to be “deeply invested community.” And I don’t know how you make that happen, except to fight for it.
“The onus is already on the kids. Not the kids who might have to go to public school in order to help improve the schools, but the kids who are in those public schools right now.”
But the strategy you’re talking about is only applicable in mixed income communities, anyway. The model is supposed to be that the richer parents lift up the poor ones. Like I said, in the poor districts, it is simply not tenable because the parents do not have the resources to get involved on the same level.
Also, arguing on behalf of my neighbors, who are mainly black and middle-class, and generally send their kids to charter, magnet and the cheaper religious private schools… anything but the neighborhood school, especially on the middle school and higher level… this responsibility you’re talking about always falls way harder on black middle-class parents than white ones. White ones are more likely to just move to the richer district. And as La Lubu’s comment outlines, they have less generational wealth than white parents at the same income level.
Staying black and middle-class is already hard enough. Getting a better education is a major way to hold on to that.
So the theory that increased parental involvement will save schools is 1) not going to help poor districts at all 2) in mixed-income districts, yes it can work in some cases, but creates a disproportionate burden on black middle-class parents 3) is irrelevant in rich districts because the schools there are good anyway.
Also, it doesn’t address gentrification. There’s another cycle that starts when a school system improves drastically… a richer, whiter demographic will move into the area, driving up property prices, increasing property taxes and making it more likely that the former inhabitants will not longer be able to afford to live there.
I’ve seen too many examples of failure of parent involvement. Maybe it’s because Atlanta has such a huge population of fairly recent arrivals and many community bonds aren’t that strong. But I know a lot of families who gave the neighborhood school their best, but quit because it wasn’t working.
There has to be some kind of reallocation of resources (not just money, but labor and skill as well). Organized systems of tutoring volunteers in lower-income districts is one example. Combined with a major reform effort destroying the whole insane property tax/school link.
The people who would often be the best at changing school quality (having some personal qualities off the list of driven, pushy, powerful, wealthy, unstoppable, education-focused, results-oriented, involved, etc.) are also often the people who are most focused on their kids. That mean that those people are unlikely to voluntarily put their kids in a situation which would benefit the community at large but not their own children. Most of those folks want the best education for their kids; they don’t want to spend any of their effort on being the “helping hand” for others.
Frankly, it’s hard to fault them. It’s easy to say that we should balance the equation when we are speaking in specifics. But if your 8 year old third grader is capable of reading at a 4th grade level, then what? What would you do PERSONALLY about your kids? How many people actually say “oh, sure, you can ignore teaching her this year. She’s already ahead of the curve; just focus on those students who really need help. Anything for the community!”
That’s why the “mix up schools to improve them” model doesn’t work very well. It depends on parents actually giving a hoot about kids other than their own. More precisely, it depends on parents being willing to take away from their own kids to give to other kids. And that is fairly rare.
Money works better. Richer families can spare extra dollars without necessarily seeing a direct effect on their children’s education, so it makes it easier to get money.
In fact, here the question “Where did you go to school” has nothing to do with college–it means “where did you go to high school,” and the answer to that tells you (a) how smart the person is and (b) how much money they have.
Yeah, I think we’re from the same city. Though, in my experience anyway, I’m not sure the question gets you a very accurate answer to (a),
I wish I had a better understanding of all of this, but the questions of what’s fair and what’s feasible get tangled in my head and I can’t imagine a single good solution. I really appreciate this discussion.
Ha, all this good discussion has got me feeling both better and worse about the whole thing.
One difference between a place like Atlanta and a place like Nashville, though, is that we just have one school district. That’s why, hypothetically, supposedly, you could put kids who now attend private school in our best public schools and, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all ships.
I don’t think it would play out that way in practice, but I don’t really know.
I’m starting to come around to the belief that there is no one solution. People are going to have to do something, see what happens, and make adjustments. And maybe that’s the thing we commit to doing–something, knowing it won’t solve the problem and won’t be enough, but will put the people who come after us in a better place to do their work.
And it sucks because it doesn’t solve things for kids in school now. But at least it could improve things.
So, I don’t know. It’s not satisfying, that’s for sure.
On second thought, I’d like to clarify the circumstances under which I think the uplift model can work. It can work when the ratio between disadvantaged and advantaged is artificially kept around 50/50, where there are clear benefits to staying in the school for the advantaged parents, where there is realistic knowledge among everyone that the poorer parents will not be doing much if any volunteering, and where there is administration that strongly values diversity and will not ignore bullying of any kind.
So I have seen it happen. But it’s rare, and it needs major political and economic support… an infrastructure that extends way beyond individual parents. I have seen it happen on the charter level but not the neighborhood school level.
And, yes, La Lubu, I think you’re right that mandating that the money is evenly distributed is probably key.
That reminds me that Elizabeth Warren has marshaled some pretty convincing evidence that one of the driving forces for increased housing costs for middle-class families is that they have essentially been buying schools, or school districts.
Elizabeth Warren is awesome. There are a ton of truly interesting articles by her, and one of the articles she wrote, about the growing impossibility of adequatly raising a child, is a large influence in my thinking about american socio-economics (that is, the situation is pretty much terminal).
My city has magnet elementary schools; I went to a math/science/tech magnet (hee!) for elementary school, in a primarily low-income Hispanic neighborhood. It had programs to get parents involved, like library evenings and sessions on the new math. Some of the people from that neighborhood did end up along with the magnet kids on the fast track in high school, but a lot didn’t. I think part of the problem may have been that the school had the material resources but didn’t use them well; we had a good computer lab, for example, but we were all obliged to go do Type to Learn and nothing else, and although we had high-quality microscopes we didn’t look at anything interesting with them.
I went to a magnet school that had the two school problem also. They tried to fix it, but it seems to me the cure ended up being worse than the original problem.
I don’t blame neighborhood parents for wanting their kids in a better program. I would want the same in their situation. I was upset when I first learned that neighborhood kids had an almost impossible time getting into the magnet side of things.
Where the school messed up was in suddenly trying to plunge everyone into the magnet program. If students aren’t prepared to work hard in their academics and/or don’t have the educational background, there’s only so much benefit to be had from that. Since the local elementary schools that fed into mine weren’t so good, it wasn’t reasonable to expect all their students to suddenly be up to a higher standard.
What I gather happened in the years after I graduated can pretty much be expected. Fewer and fewer parents sent their kids on buses to the magnet program. The school declined.
It got bad enough that they finally tried making it a charter school and when that didn’t work, I gather they closed it.
Real pity because I think there could have been a way to handle things so that neighborhood families would have had a better shot at success in the magnet program. I only know bits and pieces of what happened, but there has to have been a better solution.
I need a clarification on your argument. Are you saying white rich and powerful people should put their kids back in underperforming schools so they can fight for minorities? Why the hell should they care? They are looking out for their own. I know that is harsh, but that is the truth. You can’t force them to do so anyway, so in the long run it would not work. There are many that would homeschool in a heartbeat.
The entire education system and the funding is unfair. I agree funding should be equal, but that would call for nationalizing education or state control over funding. Parents fight combining school districts in favor of very localized control due to taxes. Part of the problem is that schools are tied to real estate values. I also dislike vouchers as an option because it maintains a class system within education. Vouchers are an excuse not to improve the system.
I can’t tell if this is just privilege speaking-it might be, and if so, I’ll just shut up-but I do want to echo sailormans comments about kids being ignored because they were”supposed to be helping the others learn, since they already know it” yeah, no. I wasn’t trained to be a teacher at 13. The best thing that trying to help got me was isolated, made fun of and bullied. and boredom in school. I do agree that mixed neighborhoods, and community is important, but I do think that we need to be careful not to sacrifice children in an effort to get their parents to help others, if that makes sense. really, I think decoupling school funding from property tax is an important part of that. fully fund all schools, not just the rich ones with wealth parents.
Those of you who are advocating that wealthier families send their kids to failing public schools, I just have one question – do you have children?
I mean really…. I think it is pretty ridiculous to ask or require people who do have an option to send their children to higher performing schools to not do so for the sake of children who do n ot have that opportunity. While I understand that this comment reeks of priviledge, if I am not prepared to use my children as a social experiment – and i do not know of many who would either. My aunt lives in Detroit, where the schools are absolutely abysmal and she has sent all three of her children to privateschools. Though she resents the fact that she is paying property taxes into a failing system (one that actually pays more per student than most others in the state), she is not willing to sacrifice her children’s future for the sake of saving the public school system. And, I don’t blame her.
I graduated from a Nashville public school after moving from another state my senior year of high school. The school I went to was horrible. I was bused to McGavock from North Nashville, where because of how the system was set up, I was not able to continue in the extra curricular activities that I participated in in the school I was bused to in another state. There was no afterschool busing system and the public transportation system, as you know, was a joke. So, as a result no kids that were bused participated in after school activities. That is a SYSTEM problem that needs to be addressed – one that perhaps can be addressed by having neighborhood schools.
Prior to moving to Nashville, I was actually excited because I thought I would go to Pearl, where my mom went. I grew up with stories from my mother of how, despite growing up under Jim Crow, Pearl was an exceptional school and my motehr got an amazing education. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact tht it was a neighborhood school AND, the neighborhood and community surrounding her was economically diverse and intact. Maybe having neighborhood schools is a step in rebuilding neighborhoods – where the school is the hub where not only students, but families can be supported. And maybe that will help inner-city, underresourced schools become stronger. What is happening now is not working, nor do I think guilting wealthier or more motivated parents into supporting a broken system at the expense of their children’t future.
TQL, I don’t think anyone is advocating forcing parents to send their kids to public school. I’ve tried to be very clear that we both need parents who are invested in their kids’ schooling (which is the vast majority of parents) and who have enough political clout and power to force systemic change (which is not a majority of parents to put it mildly) and that I don’t blame parents who have that clout and power for putting their kids in schools where they will get the best education.
That’s the problem, as I see it–something must be done and yet what that something is and how you will get parental buy-in is hard to say.
As I said in my post, I think neighborhood schools make sense.
I also don’t in the least blame parents who are concerned that this will further trouble shitty schools in shitty neighborhoods.
It’d be nice if a clear-cut solution were obvious and easy to implement, but I certainly don’t have one.
KB, Sailorman:
It’s easy to say that we should balance the equation when we are speaking in specifics. But if your 8 year old third grader is capable of reading at a 4th grade level, then what? What would you do PERSONALLY about your kids? How many people actually say “oh, sure, you can ignore teaching her this year. She’s already ahead of the curve; just focus on those students who really need help. Anything for the community!”
Yeah, except that’s not how it works, or rather, that’s not how it has to be.
The school system we live in should be a model for the rest of the U.S. This is a public school system in central Indiana that boasts high test scores, a 98% graduation rate, and is a completely public school. Students in my graduating class attended state and Ivy league schools at about a 50/50 ratio, and many of them are so wildly successful it’s vomit-inducing. The only more successful school in the state is a private parochial school in Indy. My son is a student in fourth grade here now, and it’s the primary reason we live in this area of town. The school is so fucking good.
The school system has funding issues, but so does every other school system in Indiana (the largest fund was recently switched from property to sales tax revenue, so we’ll see how that plays out). Their formula is pretty easy: 1) they draw the lines for the school in a way to maximize the number of students from a small but racially and economically diverse section of town; 2) class sizes are kept as small as possible; 3) only the best teachers work there; 4) they allow tons of field trips, embrace classroom technology, and really look for innovative ways of meeting and exceeding the state educational guidelines in a meaningful way; 5) they encourage teacher activism and REALLY encourage parental involvement. You want to grade papers for the teacher? Have lunch with your kid? Organize groups for that damned leaf collection? The doors are wide open for you. If you can’t? Whatever, just make sure you’re there for class meetings and that your kid is finishing her homework every night. The other big one: The students are given a lot of trust and responsibility from a young age by the administration (for example, being able to walk home or to McD’s for lunch), and the students really appreciate the value in that.
Regarding activism: Take, for example, the most recent funding issue. When the new budget was handed to the admins, who scrambled to figure how to make ends meet, it was realized they were going to have to let go of three teachers. Some parent in marketing caught wind and made a huge stink to the local press, and organized a public fundraiser complete with Facebook pages, yard signs, mailers, email action alerts, etc., and enough money was raised to renew the teachers’ contracts for the next year. Class sizes are still larger than we would like — 25 kids instead of 18-20, say — but they are operating with a full staff. Another parent with old contacts with NY publishers is trying to get this publicized with a national news magazine.
The support for classroom innovation is a major component of the school’s success. I’m a huge proponent of mixed-age classrooms and team teaching like my son was in all through elementary school, which (getting back to the pull-quote) allowed the teachers to teach to a wide variety of skill levels without stigmatizing any group of students. The point being that the teachers are treated like professionals, the students are treated like valuable members of the community, the parents are allowed to use their resources to make the school better, and the overall expectation is that the school will exceed whatever state guidelines are put forth because it’s the right thing to do.
I’ve had my issues with the school, and I’ve been very vocal about what it was like as a single parent trying to navigate this web, but ultimately I wouldn’t have it any other way. Having been involved in the overall educational system locally for some years, the primary difference I see between this school and others in the area is that our school has a philosophy that extends far into the student’s future, whereas the others are just trying to meet the standards for that particular year. Why should we make them scramble like that?
Sorry about the above tome. One other thing on “neighborhood schools.”
The other advantage to our school is graduating class size. My graduating class, despite being a city school, was under 150 kids. So is my son’s. We all know each others business, know where everyone else lives, and we’re on a first-name basis with all the other kids and their parents. If I don’t know I can find out real quick. The real advantage to this growing up is that you aren’t able to get away with any bullshit, and the advantage of that is that being an unsuccessful, lazy student is considered uncool by the school community at large, and it creates a vacuum in which every student strives to be successful, in part, because every other student is doing the same.
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