Re: Public School And Economic Segregation

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No, but it's another of those issues where people's feelings are deeply ingrained, where people are afraid of making mistakes, where there is enormous atmospheric pressure on otherwise distracted and busy people.

Another issue is what you grew up with, and you in this case is the person most involved in making these series of decisions. Like it or not, and whatever the fact means, in my experience this is predominantly the mother. And the decision of what feels right will be based in the usual case on what the decision maker grew up with. Very, very few of the people whom I know who themselves attended parochial school are happy sending their children to a public, although many end up doing so after concluding it's the best alternative. It just seems to feel wrong and like a kind of failure, like you're not making the special effort for your children that was made for you.

I think in a more generalized way, this also applies to city vs. suburban environment. Several of my older neighbors were genuinely amazed we would not sell and move to the suburbs when are kids were born. Many of my acquaintences have done exactly that, as a matter of course, over the years.

We have no conflict in my house over this: my wife grew up living in an apartment and attending public schools. So our committment to them "feels natural."
So did I, although the actual environment I grew up in was more like suburban. I want and like the big-city neighborhood school experience my children have had, but I didn't have to fight at home for it. I feel I can't judge people who do. And very large numbers of American middle-class parents grew up in an environment that means they'd have to work to send their kids to an urban public school without guilt or anxiety.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 12:33 PM
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Yup yup yup.

Alas, b/c we were in a hurry, PK ended up in a school that's 70% anglo and about 3% free school lunches when there's another school in the same district that's less than 50% anglo and something like 30% free school lunches--and has almost the same test scores. I forget the percentages of English learners at each school, but they were similarly marked.

Obviously not only is the browner school better (since its students, especially with the English learners and free lunches, presumably have more catching up to do), but it also better reflects the kind of values I want in a school. Plus the wealthier, Anglo school has the most insane PTA; I'm terrified of the apparent level of extreme involvement that seems to be expected. Oh well, it's only for a year.

But yeah, what you said.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 12:38 PM
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I'm pretty sympathetic to the parents, though I don't doubt that you're right. I think IDP captures it.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 12:40 PM
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There is also an issue of genuine ignorance, such that "urban schools" can get lumped in together, indiscriminately, by people who have no firsthand experience. There are huge differences among schools even within a school district.

I know I would never send a child I loved to the urban elementary school where I tutored. It was emotionally tiring enough just to have to worry about the kids I was tutoring, and I wasn't even related to/responsible for them.

So some of the resistence has to be a visceral "No WAY am I going to subject my kid to that level of violence and harassment." Or at least, that's part of my own response. Hallways reeking of urine, abusive teachers screaming insults (at eight-year-olds!), children with developmental disabilities having to survive on Ritalin rather than any kind of personal attention...yeah, no. I don't want any child in the world to be faced with that, much less my own.


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 12:51 PM
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Oh, I'm sympathetic to the parents. I know my kids' school is really very good, but I still I get all weird about whether I'm sacrificing them on the altar of my political views -- however well they're learning to read, they'd be better off somehow in a richer school. This is stupid, but I still feel this way. And I went to an NYC public school, so it's easier for me to get over it, because it's how I grew up.

I just wish it was easier to sell economically integrated schools to people.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 12:52 PM
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I'm not that sympathetic, actually. Because the way schools got integrated was by black parents sending their kids to schools where the kids really were in grave danger.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 12:55 PM
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Well, sure. And people are dying in Baghdad this very moment. I still sympathize with people who are irrational about wanting to protect their children from harm.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:02 PM
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6: I gotta say that I really, really don't understand this attitude, B. What those parents (and kids) did was very courageous, but it isn't reasonable to expect every parent to put their children in potentially dangerous situations because some earlier ones did half a century ago. (Disclosure: I say this as someone who spent three shitty years getting beaten up in an inner-city elementary school.)


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:04 PM
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I love the Apostropher.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:05 PM
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So some of the resistence has to be a visceral "No WAY am I going to subject my kid to that level of violence and harassment." Or at least, that's part of my own response. Hallways reeking of urine, abusive teachers screaming insults (at eight-year-olds!), children with developmental disabilities having to survive on Ritalin rather than any kind of personal attention...yeah, no. I don't want any child in the world to be faced with that, much less my own.

Yeah. Half the problem is that there's no excuse in the world for schools to be like this -- there may be real problems with teaching kids who are less well prepared for school, but if there's violence and unsanitary conditions in an elementary school, we just aren't trying. And the other half the problem is that too many middle-class parents assume that all schools with a perceptible poor or minority population are going to be like this, which is just false.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:10 PM
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But aren't we a bit off track here. I am sure that there are dangerous inner city schools, but I know that most schools in New York City (and I suspect that most schools in other big cities) really are not that dangerous. I say this notwithstanding that it generates even less sympathy for people like me who moved to the suburbs for the schools.

On the other hand, I am not as inclined as some would have me be to feel ashamed of moving so that my kids could go to public schools which are much better than the public schools where we lived before. Particularly for my kids, who have a raft of problems, the schools here in bridge and tunnel land are much better places for them to go to school. I can afford (barely) to live here and provide them that opportunity. I know that not everyone can move here. But I am not sure why I should let any guilt I may feel about making more money than most people stop me from getting my kids something that will make their lives better.


Posted by: Idealist | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:15 PM
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I'm very sympathetic to a parent that misguidedly attempts to do what's best for their kid, and moving to the suburbs is not the same as segregation. Also for this: it smacks of a bit of I know not what but something not good when people (be clear: no one here) say, Oh, it doesn't really matter about the quality of the school, because it's the parents that make all the difference, and little EmmaJacob will have private tutoring in violins, a private soccer club, and regular trips to the museum, theatre, ballet, and opera. And then go onto say: such ignorant people, wanting a school that provides chemistry classes & activities and has funding. Must be racist because they're not deigning to mix with the little people like I and mine. School isn't for learning, it's for proving you're a good liberal.

With all those extras, indeed, the importance of the school declines. But trust me, I'm glad my parents didn't send me to the Pittsburgh City Schools. Probably would have done just fine but I sure as hell wouldn't be where I am now.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:16 PM
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Has anyone else read Jonathan Kozol's latest, Shame of the Nation? It's about this very issue.

And Idealist, I don't know if the schools are dangerous or not, but the New York City public school system is statistically the most racially segregated in the country, according to Kozol.


Posted by: Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:18 PM
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But trust me, I'm glad my parents didn't send me to the Pittsburgh City Schools. Probably would have done just fine but I sure as hell wouldn't be where I am now.

The thing is, mine did (NYC) and I am. (Oh, I shouldn't poormouth, I went to a public but very very good magnet high school. But grade school was the plain-vanilla neighborhood school, and it was fine.) I think people really significantly overrate the problems in most urban public schools.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:21 PM
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statistically the most racially segregated in the country

For some definitions of segreataged, I am sure that must be true. And so what follows from this? As the parent of children who most whites identify as Asian, am I obligated to find a school with with few Asians to up their statistics, regardless of what that school has to offer my kids?


Posted by: Idealist | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:23 PM
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I think people really significantly overrate the problems in most urban public school

I think this is true, particularly people who have never had kids in them.


Posted by: Idealist | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:25 PM
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Particularly for my kids, who have a raft of problems, the schools here in bridge and tunnel land are much better places for them to go to school. I can afford (barely) to live here and provide them that opportunity. I know that not everyone can move here. But I am not sure why I should let any guilt I may feel about making more money than most people stop me from getting my kids something that will make their lives better.

Not speaking to your particular kids and their particular educational issues, and you should obviously doing whatever is best for them, and not feeling guilty about it.

But. I think educational segregation (economic as well as ethnic) is a really bad thing for society, and for the kids who have to attend the segregated schools and I think parents systematically overestimate the benefits to their children from attending a school with a richer student body.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:25 PM
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13: No, but I heard Kozol speak a few years back. It was an odd mixture of deeply moving and really disheartening.

Moving because he was -- like the best of the teachers in the school where I tutored -- genuinely committed to helping young people from difficult backgrounds get a toehold in the educational system. And disheartening because the whole speech could have been delivered not in ca. 2002, but in 1982, or 1962, or 1932, or 1902....


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:25 PM
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I know my kids' school is really very good.

LB, you said this both in the post and in the comments, and I'm wondering how you know. In part because I'm just curious, and in part because if people could easily be made to be confident that inner city immigrant schools were very good then it might solve a lot of this problem. So are you saying it's very good at an absolute level (you have some idea of what Sally should have learned by the start of 2nd grade, she has in fact learned those things) or relative (I don't feel any need to spell out what relative goodness would be).

Also, my parents moved out of the city a good number of years before I was born, though presumably in large part because they were planning to have kids eventually.


Posted by: washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:27 PM
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I'm with Ideal, I think. Parents will do what they think is best for their children, and that seems like a very good default rule to support. The problem is that, as Cala suggests, you famously don't have to have a strong desire for segregation to end up with a very segregated school system.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:28 PM
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We're not talking a magnet school; I don't think Pittsburgh's schools are organized that way. You go to high school that's nearest. The City schools keep slashing funding for activities and installing metal detectors. Kind of a problem given that getting A's is easy, proving you're doing the right dances to get into universities is a lot harder without top level classes and things to be President or Officer of.

Some schools are just bad. My fiancé's little brother was at a school where their formula is pretty much boy = Ritalin prescription. They could have kept him there out of solidarity, I suppose, but moving him to a smaller public school where there are three students per teacher/aide seems to be smart to me.

I'll grant, though, that there is a strong tendency to conflate 'minority' with 'dangerous school', and that's shitty. But it's not the case that all school districts are organized like NYC where kids compete to get into public high schools.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:28 PM
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So are you saying it's very good at an absolute level (you have some idea of what Sally should have learned by the start of 2nd grade, she has in fact learned those things)

Combination of this, test scores, and subjective impression of the classroom environment.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:29 PM
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Keegan is in a public school here in Durham, which has the largest black population of any decently-sized city in North Carolina, and probably the largest Hispanic population as well. All the school meetings (curriculum, PTA, orientation, etc.) are done in English and Spanish, because so many of the parents don't speak English either at all or well enough to follow. It's a great school and I've got nothing but good feelings toward it. However, I bought my house where I did (inside the city limits, fwiw) specifically because of the elementary school that he'd attend. Not because it's whiter (it's not, particularly), but because it's a high-performing public school. There were certain districts that I simply wasn't going to move him into, despite the fact that the magnet program is helping.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:31 PM
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For some definitions of segreataged, I am sure that must be true. And so what follows from this? As the parent of children who most whites identify as Asian, am I obligated to find a school with with few Asians to up their statistics, regardless of what that school has to offer my kids?

This is the tough nut to crack. I don't know, and neither does Kozol or anyone else. Inequality in education is now generally accepted as a fact of life; millions of kids get told every day in word and deed that society doesn't give a fuck about them. Other than more spending on schools, higher pay for teachers in problematic school districts, and a more equitable redrawing of school district lines (these lines are totally gerrymandered politically, favoring more and more racial segregation), I'm not sure if there's a big easy fix. It really is the shame of the nation, though. Kozol speaks about one little girl who states matter-of-factly that white America would almost certainly rather that she and her schoolmates simply vanished, so they wouldn't be a problem to be dealt with anymore.


Posted by: Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:32 PM
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21: I don't know a darn thing about them, but Pittsburgh does seem to have magnet schools.

23: Oh, I'm not saying that you're a bad person unless you send your kids to the closest possible poorest schools. I'm saying that I see people in my social circle being wildly overfearful of sending their kids to schools that aren't segregated upper-middleclass havens, and that that's a problem.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:37 PM
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21: Maybe it's my EmmaJacobness, but a lot of people did very well academically out of my neighborhood Pittsburgh public school. It's not exclusively a rich neighborhood school either, Greenfield feeds into it (and kids from I think Lincoln Place and East Hills, or maybe Homewood-Brushton, get bussed in). It may be that in the 8-9 years between when we went to school the city slashed the budget enough that nobody but EmmaJacob could get into Cala U. out of Pittsburgh public schools, or it may be that it's only EmmaJacobs all along. But if the first is true, it's the result of policy decisions (partly the GOP state government screwing the cities, I'd wager), not the way things have to be.

(Also, I went to a magnet middle school; I think elementary schools have now gone back to a neighborhood school model from busing, which means more or less deliberate resegregation. On preview for 25, it's not really a major factor at the high-school level. Pittsburgh certainly doesn't have anything like NYC's big three academic magnets.)

20 and 17 are both true. That's the hell of it.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:40 PM
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Let me take this opportunity to note that The Wire is about the educational system in Baltimore this time around. I read an interview with one of the producers. After a career as a cop, he taught public school for seven or eight years. IIRC, he said by the time the kids are in fourth grade, you can tell whether or not they're just done, and more or less fucked for life. It's pretty heartbreaking. Somewhere out there is a similarly depressing article by Jonathan Rauch that reports that more and more people think that the family structure/neighborhood structure a kid is brought up in simply can't be overcome. Some of the people with this view are African-American social scientists who have been committed to education and social justice since prior to the sixties. Unbelievably depressing.

This has been your Inspirational Message of the Day.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:40 PM
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I think I agree with everything in 26 except that I don't know what EmmaJacobs means.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:42 PM
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From comment 12. I basically take it to mean, upper-middle class kid from seriously academically inclined liberal family in urban public school.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:44 PM
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12: The thing about this, now that I've thought about it for a bit, is that if you have the resources and social capital to move yourself into the 'good' school district or send your kids to private school, your kids are EmmaJacobs -- those same resources, spent differently, will keep the somewhat less well-funded neighborhood schools from doing them any harm.

It doesn't make sense to say that the snobbish elite (EmmaJacob's parents) can cushion the effects of a less than perfect local school, but that regular folks need to flee. If you've got the resources to flee, you've got the resources to cushion the effects.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:51 PM
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Our neighborhood school is safe, well led and staffed, and extremely diverse. My daughter went through 8th, and then to the most Hispanic and artsy — no necessary relation — of Chicago's five "Selectives," that is, academic magnet schools. My son's been in a less-but-still-somewhat diverse middle school magnet, but this is in a neighborhood where the richness of the parents, to be fair contributed often to the school, has numerous distorting effects. He's benefited, and he'll go next year to one of the academic magnets, probably (it's up to him) the one his sister goes to, and I'll be glad he'll be out of the environment he's in now.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:54 PM
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30: I don't think it's quite so straightforward. Part of what makes EmmaJacobs so successful is her socialization through her friendships with EmmaSmith and EmmaMartin and EmmaJames. If a couple of those people leave, her friendships change, her influences change, and the way she's socialized changes. I think.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 1:54 PM
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32: Sure -- middle-class flight is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If none of the Emmas are in the school, odds are the teachers are going to have a harder row to hoe. On the other hand, if all of the Emmas' parents would chill out about their fears of an economically integrated school, there'd be a bunch of Emmas in the school. Not all Emmas, but a bunch.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:00 PM
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This is one where my actions don't necessarily line up all that well with my beliefs, but I'm not particularly apologetic. My son spent a year in the neighborhood public elementary, which was mediocre but tolerable, and then we got the opportunity to put him into a very good private school and grabbed it. He'd do fine in public schools. He'd have to be a lot more driven to accomplish what's pretty easy where he is, there'd be a whole lot fewer resources available, and middle school would suck far more even than it naturally has to, but he'd be fine. But I can do something for my kid that makes his childhood nicer than mine was and that will probably do nice things for his adulthood as well, and it's just very hard to say no to that.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:01 PM
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Some portion of the blame for this has to be placed on the emphasis on standardized testing. I don't really blame the standardized tests themselves--they do what they're designed to do, which is to determine which students haven't learned the material and really need remedial attention. What this means, though, is that the tests are good at distinguishing performance at the low end, but do very little to distinguish performance at the high end. This becomes a problem when one starts calculating school-wide averages (which one should not do). The average is determined very little by the performance of the high-achieving students, and very much by the number of low-achieving students. The result is that the most effective way of improving school averages is to get rid of low-achieving students, and the schools with the best scores are those that have managed to do the best job of excluding them. Parents then end up thinking that the schools with better average test scores are better, not really understanding that the scores don't say much about how good a job the school does at educating the students, but a great deal about the homogeneity of the student population.


Posted by: y | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:01 PM
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35: That is an excellent point. I'd drag out the fruit basket as a welcome, but I can't remember how to find it, and it's kind of nasty anyway.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:06 PM
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30 strikes me as theorizing wholly out of touch with reality. It's a *lot* cheaper in most areas to move into a better school district (or even pony up for a moderately priced private school) than it is to outfit your kids with the sort of expensive upper-middle class accoutrements necessary to keep them intellectually and culturally blossoming in spite of their crappy schools. The second is in many cases--depending on school quality--really quite an undertaking.

Probably cheaper both in terms of time and money.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:06 PM
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30: I'm pretty sure that wasn't true of Cala's family and suburb.

35: Maybe that's part of what happened. When I was in high school the school was clearly putting a disproportionate amount of resources into the top-tracked students, due in part to state mandates for gifted education. Standardized testing may have discouraged that. I'm not sure what the ideal approach is. (I've also heard that that EmmaJacobs' parents put a lot of resources into that particular school.)


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:09 PM
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It's a *lot* cheaper in most areas to move into a better school district (or even pony up for a moderately priced private school) than it is to outfit your kids with the sort of expensive upper-middle class accoutrements necessary to keep them intellectually and culturally blossoming in spite of their crappy schools.

Really? What are we talking about -- piano lessons, museum trips, buying books at home... I'm not seeing the enrichment expenses that are going to compare to private school. It's the sort of stuff that's hard to do if you're not the educated middle class, but I'm not seeing what significantly pricey things you'd do for your kids to keep them flourishing despite being in an economically integrated school.

Now I'm feeling guilty that there's something I should be spending money on that I'm not.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:10 PM
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Disagree with this entirely. Unless school has changed a remarkable amount in the last couple of decades, upper-middle class kids are pissing away their time talking to friends and playing video games. "Intellectual and cultural blossoming"--I have no idea what that could mean. The importance of access to violin instruction for a successful life is vastly overstated.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:12 PM
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30, 38: Right, I'm remembering Calahistory now which makes the 'better' school having been significantly more important for her in her situation than it might have been in a different family situation -- I'd forgotten that. Globally, though, I think my point works.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:13 PM
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36: Yahoo! site search on "fruit basket" should do ya.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:16 PM
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See my final clause.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:17 PM
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Thing is, the cultural enrichments: house full of books and talk about them, music and instruments, cultural memberships, educational travel, are not things we do for our kids out of some sense of obligation, which we otherwise wouldn't do. They're things we do for ourselves by-and-large and the kids get the benefits. And the example.

So the spending either/or is complicated by that.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:18 PM
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37 came out completely wrong, and I'm not sure how. I think I must be sleep-working. Anyway, the difference is mostly time -- not money. But a lot of two-income families don't have that kind of time (unless they really *are* wealthy and time can be bought -- nannies to drive the kids around and such), is what I was trying to say. In other words, *you* have to provide your kids with a lot of what your school isn't, and that's quite an undertaking.

I was raised without any of this stuff, or anything even potentially intellectually or culturally enlightening, however -- a house basically devoid of books, a bad school, no music lessons of any sort, no health care or nutritious food, etc., and I turned out reasonably well (I think). So I'm not trying to overrate the importance of all this stuff to the overall human experience. BUT: a lot of upper-middle class parents really do think this stuff is very important, and not without reason.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:23 PM
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I think I must be sleep-working.

Colic. Don't expect yourself to make much sense for a few months. (And remember that this, too, shall pass.)

You're right about the time commitment, but this is largely stuff two-income UMC families do anyway -- buy books, go to museums. As IDP says, if you think this stuff is important, it's your lifestyle.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:26 PM
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The country is obviously incredibly conflicted about what it wants from its educational system. LizardBreath's theory of criminal justice theory ("strict standards but nothing bad happens to nice people") applies in spades, everyone uses it as a playground for their oddball political theories (from "Intelligent Design" to bilingual education).

Of course, all of this happens for very good reasons at the micro level, which makes it all the more depressing. I really like the idea of broadening the funding base for primary education to the state if not the national level, but to say that there would be opposition to this idea is putting it mildly.

And the points about spending time w/ kids is absolutely spot-on, but those who don't have time to pay attention to their kids and take them down to the library twice a week probably don't have time to post comments in blogs about the state of primary education in the US.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:27 PM
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Sorry if this is common knowledge, but is Cala still in Pittsburgh? Because her comments seem unrelated ot the city I've lived in for 10+ years. Aside from having had a magnet program for well over a decade, Pgh Public Schools - as a whole - are among the best city schools in the country. There are certainly failing schools, and a (very) few dangerous schools, but it's nothing like Cleveland, Philly, DC... basically any city schools that ever make the papers. And a number of the schools are top-notch by any standard.

Furthermore, within the county, the city school system is middle of the pack. Which means that unless you move to a wealthy suburb, or a couple middling burbs with exceptional schools, you don't do any better for your kids. Yet we still see people moving "for the schools." And this is exactly what LB's post is about.

[On preview, I see there's some Cala-specific back story I don't know. So ignore that aspect, and focus on the spirited defense of the school system my girl will be entering in a year]


Posted by: JRoth | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:30 PM
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My Kid went to both private and public school here in LA; the private one turned out to be the worst of the lot. I did transfer him to a different middle school than he would have normally attended for two reasons: It was three blocks from my law office, and the school he would have attended had a major black v. Korean gang problem. I didn't want him killed. [A subsequent principal refused to put up with the status quo, and the school no longer has daily playground knifings.] I never considered moving to the suburbs, but I did learn that parents at urban schools need to be activists. Hard-nosed, loud, persistent activists.

However, despite all the oh, look, this school is diverse, isn't it great optimism some parents feel, the surface image sometimes belies the reality. Santa Monica High prides itself on being "diverse" [SM is a politically correct city], yet friends of my son who went there say that there are exit doors "reserved" for certain groups - pity the naif who tries to use the wrong one - and blocks of tables in the cafeteria and segregated areas on the lawn. The dividing lines are both racial and cultural and are perpetuated by the kids themselves.

Frankly, between the training-to-take-tests model adopted by many poorly-performing schools and the less-than-stellar-faculties boasted by public schools these days, I'm surprised anyone gets out of school able to read. When California discovered a disproportionate number of "minorities" [read "blacks"] couldn't pass the California Basic Educational Skills Test - the one would-be teachers take - the first suggested solution was to dumb-down the test, which, of course, would allow the less-than-qualified of all races to teach. Downward spiral, anyone?


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:33 PM
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this is largely stuff two-income UMC families do anyway

My brother-in-laws family, which is 2-incom and UMC, does not do this stuff. Or does only a subset of it. They live in Idealist's suburb, where my nieces went to extravagantly well-funded public schools, did not read books at home but did take music lessons, and came out of it roughly where I think they would have done going to less fancy schools.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:35 PM
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Setting aside Pittsburgh, this topic is one my wife & I have always disagreed on - not so much the city vs. suburb thing as the how critical is school thing. While I never attended a cash-poor school, I always attended schools with poor people in them, and my HS was supposed to be sub-par. Yet I know for a fact that I got a better education, with better opportunities, than I would have at the neighboring HS with a statewide rep for quality. This has always led me to vast suspicion of peoples' decision-making on this topic: even if you do the research, you don't necessarily know what you're talking about.

The way I look at it is: if your kids are smart, if you're smart, and you keep engaged with their lives & educations, your kids will succeed and be happy in any halfway-decent school. So yeah, if your kids have issues, if you're a single parent or one parent travels, if the only available schools have piss halls and screaming teachers, then you need to look elsewhere. But that's not most families.

I think that this situation is like peoples' false perception of wealth, or their own driving ability. We all think we're special, and that we deserve exceptional treatment. Bullshit. Public schools are for the public - and we're all members of the public [cue defensive, "I really am special" comments].


Posted by: JRoth | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:38 PM
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I'm not! I'm just like everyone else! </Life of Brian>


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:40 PM
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Left in 1997. No magnet program then, IIRC.

If you've got the resources to flee, you've got the resources to cushion the effects.

Not necessarily. What sort of resources to flee? Cheaper housing, cheaper land, cheaper education, lower taxes. To have the sort of place my parents had in the suburbs, I think they would have had to roughly quadruple their income. You need a car in the suburbs. You need a car in Pittsburgh anyway.

And it's little stuff. Calculus? Foreign language program? Chemistry lab with working equipment? Guidance counselor with a head not up her ass? (This isn't saying that the suburbs help that; mine told me not to apply to the school I graduated from because I wouldn't get in.) My cousin's school -- one of the excellent Allegheny Co. public schools went through calc III, I think. I'm pretty sure this helped the kids that took those courses.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:43 PM
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Also, on the if your kids are smart thing. Bright kids will do well anywhere if not totally bored to death, but I wonder about the impact of a school on a B-C student.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:47 PM
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Or, to make 54 make sense: Bright kid in bad school district with a few magnet spots, does fine. Goes to preppy magnet high. B-C student can't get in. If they're sisters, they probably do better overall in the suburbs, where at least the B-C student isn't stuck in a poorly performing district.

This, of course, can be solved by not bearing dumb children.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:49 PM
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Re: This has always led me to vast suspicion of peoples' decision-making on this topic: even if you do the research, you don't necessarily know what you're talking about.
and:
The way I look at it is: if your kids are smart, if you're smart, and you keep engaged with their lives & educations, your kids will succeed and be happy in any halfway-decent school.

I realize this makes me sound like a terrible cynic, but I don't think all parents are looking for the same thing in their kids' education. Some want their children to be engaged and interested and learning, and they (rightly) assume that achievement/success will tend to flow from that. But IME, a subset of others are specifically looking for a name-brand school. To them, it's a kind of shorthand that (regardless of the student's actual engagement or learning) will lead to success.

If you believe in the name-brand ideology, then it makes sense to focus intensely on sending your kids to Well-Known Suburban School X, because you honestly think this is his/her best shot at getting into a "good" college and generally succeeding in life.

(N.b. this is not to suggest that all of the other factors being eloquently outlined here aren't hugely significant. This is a relatively smaller, but still existing, problem.)


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:54 PM
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tThis


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:56 PM
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I think that this situation is like peoples' false perception of wealth, or their own driving ability. We all think we're special, and that we deserve exceptional treatment. Bullshit. Public schools are for the public - and we're all members of the public [cue defensive, "I really am special" comments].

I don't necessarily agree with this, but I think that a lot of urban public districts circumvent the one-size-fits-all problem by having decent magnet school and the such.

Otherwise, I'd pretty much agree wtih what has been said in this thread. It's a terrible problem, but a very understandable one given the current method of administering and funding schools in the US. I would support a more nationalized funding system and better primary/pre-school education to iron out a lot of the gross inequalities.


Posted by: JAC | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 2:56 PM
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Thanks for the mention.

I thought Shame of the Nation was a really interesting (as well as terribly depressing) book, but I actually think it may be counterproductive -- because it makes people think that all majority-minority schools are like the ones he describes. And I can't imagine any parent who has the ability to provide an alternative would willingly send their children to such schools.

I was very relieved to hear that D's school "achieved yearly progress" last year, and so is no longer failing under NCLB. Not because I think average test scores tell you much about the quality of teaching, but because low scores consume so much of the administrators' energy and attention. And they scare off ambitious parents.


Posted by: Elizabeth | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:01 PM
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And it's little stuff. Calculus? Foreign language program? Chemistry lab with working equipment? Guidance counselor with a head not up her ass?

The thing is that not all, but lots, of regular integrated city schools have those things. I've got friends with kids who went through the non-magnet city high schools in the last decade, and they took calculus and learned to speak French. The school I'm thinking of was in shamefully poor shape -- I'd have wanted my kids to go to a better one -- but they did fine.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:03 PM
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Class offerings and guidance counselors mentioned in 53 really make a difference. I was shocked at all the AP credits people had when I entered college; my h.s. offered almost none. My guidance counselor told me just to go to State U. (which I did). His advice was basically "with you standardized test scores you should have no trouble at all getting in!", not "you know, you could apply to and maybe even get scholarships at other, much better colleges." All this stuff matters -- although admittedly, if I had properly engaged UMC parents it would have mediated some of this.

And in kids I've observed, 54 is completely right -- bright enough kids do well anywhere, but there kids that I've seen struggling in bad pubilc schools that I've seen completely transformed when placed in much better private schools.


My middle paragraph raises a question I'd like to see addressed -- if public schools are just fine and dandy for UMC kids ("because they're really not that bad!"), would you be willing to extend that same reasoning to colleges? Why pony up the money for Elite Liberal Arts U. when your kids can get a perfectly acceptable (and much more egalitarian and genuinely diverse) education from State U? (And if you live in VA or CA or MI you aren't allowed to answer this question. State U. has to be genuinely mediocre for the hypothetical to work.) What's the difference in the two scenarios, if any?


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:04 PM
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My middle paragraph raises a question I'd like to see addressed -- if public schools are just fine and dandy for UMC kids ("because they're really not that bad!"), would you be willing to extend that same reasoning to colleges?

I would have a hell of a time doing it, but I think it does make sense. My college education was about as elite as it gets (MIT, then U Chicago), but I don't think it's opened a whole lot of different doors than my husband's Penn State degree.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:09 PM
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59: Hey! You have a cool blog.

I think you're right about the counterproductiveness of over-emphasizing the burned-out horror of the urban public schools: while the ones that are that bad are shameful, most aren't that bad.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:09 PM
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I think that this situation is like peoples' false perception of wealth, or their own driving ability. We all think we're special, and that we deserve exceptional treatment. Bullshit. Public schools are for the public - and we're all members of the public [cue defensive, "I really am special" comments].

Damn right. England is particularly absurd for this at the moment with middle-class parents going to insane lengths to get their kids into the 'right' school. Fuck 'em. They are actively making poorer people's lives miserable. And their own, for that matter.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:10 PM
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Except for a very select few, the value of Elite Liberal Arts U is in the getting of the certificate of participation, and the entree it allows, and not what is actually taught.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:10 PM
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I'm afraid even to start on this. It's been my major concern--the intersection, or union, of two concerns, justice for African Americans and education--for my whole adult life, and I still don't have an answer. In one way this is just a tragedy of the commons. Vaccination of most of the population will prevent an epidemic of a disease. Given a very small chance that vaccination will damage a child, will you permit your child to be vaccinated, or hope (the best outcome, statistically if not morally) that everyone else's child is vaccinated and not yours? **Basically I think the right answer is to change the way schools are financed, make that more equitable. And to improve teachers' lots, not so much by raising salaries, but by improving working conditions and supplying assistance in the classroom. And to supply guidelines to every parent, guardian, doctor, crossing guard, etc., on how to tell if a school is good.** Back in the 60s many NY liberal/radicals touted "local control" (power to the people) but I think that wound up being power to the local controllers. Janitors and teachers did well financially but I think the children suffered. **Now the No Child Left Behind Act, very unpopular with teachers and middle-class parents, is an attempt to level the playing field (some would say by privatizing schools), but it's unfunded, implementation is difficult, it can be fiddled with, and it tends to squeeze the arts and "enrichment" out of the curriculum.**But what do YOU do with your child? You have a special "duty of care." I think you ought not send your child into a dangerous situation, but you ought not assume that children of a different race, or language, or culture, are inherently dangerous.**I would like to hear from my kids about this, if they remember.**Here's what we did. Thirty-plus years ago, when the Pittsburgh school board asked for white families to volunteer to have their children bused to an elementary school that otherwise would have been almost 100% African-American, my husband and I sent our kindergartener, and later our second child. The school was never majority white; at most about a third. It was especially asymmetrical because the A-A kids were there because it was their neighborhood school and the white kids were there because their parents decided to send them. Those parents tended to be professionals and highly conscious of their kids' status. I volunteered in the classrooms and for after-school actvities and served as a parent rep and a recruiter. After this school, both kids went to public schools, one to a huge and chaotic middle school and the other to a magnet school that people were fighting to get into, where each child was a volunteer and the students admitted were half A-A and half white. (Pittsburgh had relatively few Latinos or Asians.)**Results: In terms of cognitive and academic achievement: both our kids were high-achieving, got into great colleges, and have PhDs. I think they might well have felt much more entitled and Lords of the Earth if they'd gone to a private/prep school, and maybe more comfortable in a cuddly alternative school. If they had gone to our local, relatively homogeneous school, I kept telling myself, they might have felt like freaks. Remember, you-all aren't just middle-class or upper-middle-class--you're outliers--folks who spend time debating things, rather than just acquiring things. So diversity gives your kids some protection from what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences," which in my experience is the unkindest: the girls wearing school uniforms find a way to differentiate themselves, you can bet. (There's a very good anthropological article on social stratification in a high school: Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks & Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. Teacher College Press: New York.) BUT I think they had a fair number of uncomfortable experiences, and I think kids need to be helped to work together comfortably with each other. And that stereotyping is rife among teachers and all races. **A little further background: I've been a learning researcher, co-wrote the first Trial Urban District Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and edited various NAEP reports on charter, public, and private schools. Some of our urban schools are a disgrace. In particular, we should be ashamed of the showing of the DC schools.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:16 PM
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My college education was about as elite as it gets (MIT, then U Chicago), but I don't think it's opened a whole lot of different doors than my husband's Penn State degree.

I did a little of both as an undergraduate. I have no major regrets about leaving an elite school for a state school, and I don't think it affected my prospects in any way that I care about, but I do think that people who make good use of a good school can get a significant head start on understanding something about how the world works.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:18 PM
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Except for a very select few, the value of Elite Liberal Arts U is in the getting of the certificate of participation, and the entree it allows, and not what is actually taught.

I agree that this is a major component of the value, but it really is far from all of it. I wonder how many people here went to non-top-tier state schools? I had some really, really bad teachers in college -- and I don't mean "bad" as in "not an engaging teacher", I mean "bad" as in lacking substantive knowledge about the subject matter being taught, or sufficient cognitive capabilities for effective teaching. Those just aren't the sorts of problems one encounters in better schools (I'm both told from friends, and experienced firsthand in a much better graduate program).


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:19 PM
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At college level, the teaching I received at Glasgow was, with a few rare exceptions, uniformly excellent. I certainly don't think the teaching at Oxford, for the majority of students, is better. In fact, I suspect, for lower achieving pupils or pupils who aren't strongly self-motivated, Glasgow is better.

On the other hand, at graduate school level and for those undergraduates likely to continue on to graduate school, there's no doubt that some of what Oxford offers is significantly better. Both in terms of stretching the more able students, getting more time with staff, and most crucially, for grad students, getting to spend a lot of time in an 'elite' peer-group who are really good at what they do.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:24 PM
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68: Two other complicating factors: Libraries, and topic specialization. The price of academic journals and other electronic databases is so astoundingly high that my local Ivy won't give alumni access to them -- period. Not even if the alums shell out $275/year for a university library card. There's just no way that smaller schools can afford all of these research resources, even for current students.

Re: topic specialization. It's a lot easier for me to understand how mid-level college can match Elite U in the humanities. It's darned difficult to imagine how my brother, the engineering/robotics/AI whiz, could get anywhere near the level of exposure to research opportunities, mentors, grant information, etc.

I dunno -- my knowledge of this is a handful of data points. I've never done any reading in the field. Does anyone know what the research says? (I expect my humanities/science split is ridiculously sloppy.)


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:26 PM
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62- do you think it more important to send your kids to a public primary/secondary school than to a public college? (I assume the answer is yes, but why?)

I'm not trying to be aggressive here. From past conversations I know Mrs. Landers is going to be inclined to push for just the opposite -- very good early schooling and then a cheap state college. She thinks early education is just too important in lots of little ways to take any chances with, and believes public schools are often pretty shitty (having been through them herself). She's all for giving them a taste of egalitarianism and diversity in college, once their brains are well developed from all that wonderful early schooling. (She's a psychologist with a minor-focus on development, so I have comparatively little traction in these arguments.*)

*And yes, we argue, because I'm a big fan of public schools in general. I think they're shitty, but my attitude is yeah, life's shitty, suck it up.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:28 PM
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I'm heavily against any form of selective school admission, as I've said before. Fully comprehensive state education where kids go to the local school, full stop.

Once they get to 18, I'm less troubled by the fact that universities select but I'd be extremely careful that any admissions regime didn't end up being de facto selection by class: which is often the case.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:33 PM
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Pittsburgh had magnet middle schools in the early 80s. It has had magnet high schools as well; I'm not sure for how long.


Posted by: Matt's mom | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 3:46 PM
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Hi mom! But the magnet high schools don't make much impact I think, or maybe just not in our neighborhood. Like Schenley isn't (wasn't?) primarily an international Baccalaureate magnet, that was just a small part of the school I think.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:13 PM
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We send our kids to the local primary school, where they seem to be doing fine. We know parents who went to some lengths to get their children into "desirable" schools - including in one case making a hefty donation to the gym fund - and then were disappointed with the outcome. One drawback with popular schools is that for obvious reasons they tend to be bigger, and a school with 200 pupils has a very different atmosphere from one with 500. Our children make up more than one percent of the school's roll, and if we were unhappy the principal would want to talk to us about it!

On the other hand we had three local schools to choose from, and we went with the one that had the whitest population (not all that white - about thirty percent). We could cope with multiculturalism, but not with our children being in a tiny minority. I think that decision owed more to our preconceptions than to any real knowledge of what the schools were like. Talking to other parents about why we make the decisions we do - and it's a very common topic of conversation, especially with high school on the horizon - it's clear that most of us don't have much of a clue.


Posted by: Basil Valentine | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:23 PM
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54 - Mrs. R (ABD in educational policy) and I think it's likely that rilkekind will be bright, and would do ok in pretty much any safe school - but I at least was bored to headaches as an elementary student and got by ok with mostly zero effort in high school, not the best preparation for college and grad school. (Hey, LB, were you at the UofC in the mid 90s? Not that I spent any time around the law school.) We hope that rilkekind will be able to find classmates who will challenge and stimulate him, and suspect that a school where many parents have the resources and inclination to encourage and help their kids to excel is likely the best place for that. High test scores and other measures are important for us not so much as an indication of a good school per se but as an indication of a good pool of competition and enrichment.


Posted by: rilkefan | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:29 PM
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it isn't reasonable to expect every parent to put their children in potentially dangerous situations

My point is that very few schools anywhere are "potentially dangerous." What this boils down to, and has boiled down to historically, is the distinction between "good enough" and "the best for my child." I know I am a hardass about this, but I'm just as hard on myself: children are part of the larger society. They belong in the public sphere, not in some Disneyfied pretense of the public sphere. I think about how shocked the nation was by the Lower Ninth, and that kind of thing is the result of collective white fear of the great unwashed and the refusal to accept "good enough."

I understand the temptation to spoil our kids, god knows. But spoiling isn't good for them. And insulating them from the things *we* fear, especially when our fears are irrational, is a form of spoiling. I hate what standardized testing is doing to public education in a lot of places but I also know that a small group of pushy parents can make a huge difference in an individual school or even a larger school district. And it bugs me that, as a nation, we seem to have opted for working longer hours to afford "better" neighborhoods with higher mortgages rather than working normal hours and spending that extra ten hours a week or whatever getting our butts down to the school yard.

I'm stressing over this at the moment b/c, being in a hurry to find a place in the greater LA area in less than a week, Mr. B. found a place that's close to "the best school in Ventura," and PK is enrolled there--and when I get online and start poking around I find out that there's another school in the same district that's way more economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse and that's doing very nearly as well in terms of academics and test scores. Fewer "extra" curriculars. And the school PK's going to now (70% white umc) has a fiercely active PTA that raises shitloads of money for the school and volunteers astonishing amounts of time and energy. Which is awesome. And that's why the school has extracurriculars as well as solid basics. But I'm thinking, fuck: why don't they raise that money for the district as a whole rather than for "my" kid's school, when their kids are the ones that already have a lot of advantages? And why do people move into that school's neighborhood on purpose (as apparently they do) to give their kids the "best" when there's another school that's obviously in a cheaper neighborhood since about 40% of its students are on free lunch that is very nearly as good (better, if you think about the probable disadvantages they're dealing with simply in terms of English fluency) and that would surely be as good or better with an infusion of the same energy and parental discretionary income that's being concentrated in this one school for what amounts, in the end, to a fairly minor benefit?

Anyway. The move and school decision had to get made quick, and it's fine for a year, but next year I'm thinking, different school, even if we're in the same district. And it bothers me that this is what we're doing even for a short while.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:40 PM
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Still thinking about 66. In the meantime, 48 accords with my experience, and as to 53 and 61 my school had calculus, foreign languages, chemistry II, and buckets of APs. But it was exceptional within the public school system.

There may have been a spike in in-school violence in the earlyish 90s. I looked up the Irish Lynch Mob to check my impression and found this article which looks possibly interesting but I don't seem to have online access.

Which makes a nice transition to... Brock, what counts as not top-tier? I was under the impression that you went to University of Landersia, not Landersia State, and I'd say University of Landersia is a pretty damn good public university; but I don't know if you'd be comfortable with my posting my reasons for this impression. I've taught at a couple of schools that would not be considered the best schools in their state system [second best after A&M, Smasher], but on the other hand there's probably a big gap between these research schools and Two Directions State.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:40 PM
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a taste of egalitarianism and diversity in college, once their brains are well developed from all that wonderful early schooling

The problem with this plan, imho, is that the early schooling sets a lot of unconscious social norms as well as a lot of intellectual ones. Kids who have early experiences being friends with kids from different income brackets and ethnic backgrounds will grow up, I believe, more comfortable around a broader range of people, so that egalitarianism and diversity aren't just something to taste but are part of the wider social fabric. That stuff develops the brain, too, and I really think it's harder for the educated white middle class to access than advanced mathematics and so on.

Personally, given a choice, I would rather get the gut comfort with "others" down first and supplement the academics later (if that were the choice that had to be made, which I don't really think it is, actually) than the other way 'round, because I actually think that irl the former ends up being more valuable than the latter.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:46 PM
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I dunno, B. I think I believe exactly the opposite of you. In many ways, I wonder if we aren't hurting kids from poorer otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds by not shunting them away from their wider world and into more specialized schools where their peer groups are determined by something like ability. Also, the two educators I know both say exactly what Ms. Landers says: spend your available dollar early, if you're going to spend it.

But I know only what I read in general interest magazines and papers, and what I hear from friends with kids.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 4:52 PM
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I agree wholeheartedly with LB's post.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:00 PM
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I'm with BPhD on this one.

I'd be inclined to use less congenial language too.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:06 PM
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This is a topic that I have really strong opinions about. Not a week goes by where I don't reflect on how I'd probably be fucked if I had been raised in the US.

My father was illiterate and my mother has a grade nine education. We were poor before they split up; after that we were on welfare and had to move to shitty welfare housing in the crappiest part of town. I am where I am today because schools in my hometown are pretty much all the same, so I got more or less the same education as the kids in the nice parts of town. We moved a number of times when I was a kid too so I sampled a few different elementary schools; they were remarkably uniform in quality.

When it was time to apply for university, you just wrote your three choices in order of preference on a form, and the guidance counselor sent it off along with your transcript. No SATs, no personal statement, no interest in whether you were on the debating team or in the band or anything. (Malcolm Gladwell, who went to school in Canada as well, wrote something on this in the New Yorker a while back).

"Equality of opportunity" means next to nothing if kids don't have equal access to good education.


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:06 PM
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I think I mostly agree with 79, even though my kid is in a nasty elitist private school. When I think about it, school stuff here is enough different from many other places in the country that our experience and decisions really have precious little to do with the kind of thing B (and LB) are talking about. OTOH, I do think there's an enormous amount of variation in how school systems work, so I think you have to be careful not to overgeneralize in B's or LB's direction either.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:08 PM
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About 66, which was by my mom, in elementary school I got picked on/beat up by both black and white kids sometimes. More per capita by the white kids, there weren't many of them and I tended to be around them more. This makes me think that whatever problems I had didn't come from being in an integrated school.

I distinctly remember one day in the playground, a bunch of kids (probably all boys) were throwing a ball around and the only way it would get from black kids to white kids was through Mar/vin. Other black kids would throw the ball to him, he would throw it to white kids, and vice versa. I remember noticing this at the time. He could have been doing it on purpose which seems remarkable in a little kid.

diversity gives your kids some protection from what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences,"

This seems pretty accurate. I don't know if I've said this here before (a little, here), but one thing about my high school was that it was balkanized into a bunch of different groups so that no one group could make the others miserable. When Columbine happened, it was depicted as a school where everyone lived in fear of the jocks and cheerleaders. Someone asked me if my high school (was like that (it was particularly prominent that I'd gone to an urban public high school because most of my grad school classmates lived near that very school). I was like, "Are you crazy? Who cared about the jocks and cheerleaders?" If you were an outcast in your natural affinity group that could be bad, but that wasn't me by high school.

Every diverse school I went to was pretty segregated within the school. But I still think it was healthy to be around other people more, and it taught me more about the racial issues that persist after Jim Crow.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:08 PM
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... we were on welfare and had to move to shitty welfare housing in the crappiest part of town. I am where I am today because schools in my hometown are pretty much all the same, so I got more or less the same education as the kids in the nice parts of town

This was mostly my experience too. I grew up on welfare in shitty welfare housing in one of the crappiest parts of my town and went to high-school during the shittiest part of the Thatcher era. However, the school I went to was pretty decent because everyone went to the same school. The scarily hard kids from the former mining villages, the kids from the council schemes (i.e. welfare housing), and the kids who came from 5 bedroom Victorian villas in the leafy suburban bits of out town were all educated together. Which is as it should be.

Every time the middle classes start coming up with specious justification for their own cowardice and selfishness it tends to annoy. That cowardice and selfishness actively hurts other people and makes our societies worse rather than better places to live.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:12 PM
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I wonder if we aren't hurting kids from poorer otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds by not shunting them away from their wider world and into more specialized schools where their peer groups are determined by something like ability.

What we really have in this country is a poverty problem rathe than an educational one. Shunting them off can help, but even in those situations the disadvantaged kids have lower successs rate than the richer kids. Address the economic issues, and the education improvements will follow.

And I think the "dangerous" thing looks different to the men. Physical intimidation in school is a factor for the guys in ways it isn't for the women.


Posted by: gswift | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:15 PM
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Every time the middle classes start coming up with specious justification for their own cowardice and selfishness it tends to annoy. That cowardice and selfishness actively hurts other people and makes our societies worse rather than better places to live.

But McG, in the US, even when most people would prefer a situation like yours, each individual decision is about what to do for one's own child, with no guarantee that doing the socially conscious thing will have any social benefit, and a risk that the child will be deprived of an advantage, if not harmed. And it's worth noting, in case someone hasn't said it, that even this discussion, about people trying to do the right thing, has nothing whatsoever to do with the worst schools, which no one with a choice would dream of sending their kid to. This is about trying not to increase separation between the middle class (and even the upper middle class) and the elites.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:18 PM
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Ogged, what? The "worst" schools really aren't as common as the public thinks they are. The discussion isn't about middle class v. elites; it's about educational elites v. the working and lower-middle class. I think.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:27 PM
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This is about trying not to increase separation between the middle class (and even the upper middle class) and the elites.

That just seems false, to me. It's certainly not what I am talking about. All of the kids in my extended family go to the local comprehensive school where they live. None of them go to schools in middle-class areas and none of them live middle class lives. Every member of my family except for me lives in state owned social housing, i.e. council houses.

So when I talk about my concerns about segregation in education increases social stratification, I don't just have in mind the 'gulf' between the middle and classes and the upper middle classes. I'm emphatically concerned with the difference between working class people's lives and everyone elses.

And again, I strongly disagree with each individual decision is about what to do for one's own child. That's the whole point. That people who base their decision solely on what do for their child's benefit, are acting selfishly and there's no point denying it. That selfishness is perfectly understandable. The motivation is perfectly understandable. But I still disagree.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:28 PM
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Do you have much choice as to what school you can send your children to? In New Zealand if a school gets too popular the Ministry of Education creates a geographic zone for it, and if you don't live in the zone you can't get in. So you get parents renting a flat in the zone at the start of the school year and then moving out as soon as little Johnny is safely enrolled - and schools responding to that by hiring people to go around checking that children are really living where they're claiming.

Near us there's a high school that was a notorious hellhole a few years ago but that with inner-city gentrification has turned into a yuppie magnet, and which we're excluded from by a few streets. Not that we would be going to choose it anyway, probably, but it hurts not to be wanted....


Posted by: Basil Valentine | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:31 PM
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What we really have in this country is a poverty problem rathe than an educational one.

I agree that poverty is huge problem in the US. But a solution isn't on the horizon, and in the meantime, the poor are getting shafted by not having access to what everyone else has access to. One way to avoid the formation of a permanent underclass is to give everyone the same quality of education.


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:32 PM
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91: in my hometown, you went to whatever school was closest, period. If you wanted to go somewhere else, you had to have a compelling reason and jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops besides.


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:34 PM
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Surely the elites are sending their kids to fancy private schools, no matter how nice the schools are where they live?

The idea of forcing government officials to send their kids to public school has a certain charm to it, and if the comparative niceness of the DC Metro and the SF Muni are any indication, having people in power use the same system everyone else does can have highly beneficial effects.

Not sure how you get around the issue of someone who's house has a $250k premium attached for being in the "good school district" being upset that you're going to take that away from them.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:38 PM
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OH yeah, and:

And I think the "dangerous" thing looks different to the men. Physical intimidation in school is a factor for the guys in ways it isn't for the women.

is so wrong it's barely worth even bothering about. Violence among teenagers is almost exclusively about guys. Almost all of the victims of violence in the school environment are guys. The overwhelming majority of victims of violent crime are young guys. If it's the relative 'danger' of a school that's an issue, those are the ones it's an issue for.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of fights that happened between girls in my school during my entire school education.

Claimng that girls need protecting from violent schools and that this somehow justifies making certain education choices is just wrong.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:39 PM
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The "worst" schools really aren't as common as the public thinks they are.

That just seems false, to me.

In every major US city, there are a few or several schools that are truly horrid. All I'm saying is that those are invisible even in this discussion by well-meaning people. Another way to echo what DA already said: if you, McG, had grown up in the US, you would have been fucked, and even if every middle-class parent did the right thing, there would still be schools here where you'd be totally fucked. In short: for some people, it's really bad here.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:40 PM
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Shit, I completely misread that sentence!

I am so pwned. Carry on.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:40 PM
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We may be headed back to Hirshman-land here. The existing situation sucks. Making a personal choice to fight that at some cost to your family's well-being may be laudable, but saying that there's a strong duty for all of us to do so seems to me to take it a step too far.

We seem to be spending a lot of time lately working through all sorts of places where making things better and living in the world as we find it pull in different directions. Kind of like life.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:41 PM
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Re 95: I think you and gswift actually agree. But maybe I'm the one misreading gswift....


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:41 PM
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In short: for some people, it's really bad here.

Funnily enough, it's like that here. However, having a fully comprehensive education system that operates in ways that mitigate against social stratification helps.

And:

nd even if every middle-class parent did the right thing seems like a pretty strong factual claim to make. Really?


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:42 PM
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GcM, I have a lot of sympathy for your point of view, and I certainly agree with the descriptive parts of 90, but I think the passage you quoted in 95 is making the same point you're making in 95, not the opposite one.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:43 PM
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re: 99

No, you're right. I was the one misreading gswift and thus being an idiot. In my defence, it's late!


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:44 PM
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re: 101

See 102


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:44 PM
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now I'm pwned.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:45 PM
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seems like a pretty strong factual claim to make. Really?

I'm not sure, obviously. What I'm really trying to say is that the bottom tier here seems almost irretrievably lost (which isn't to say, "forget about it," I'm just trying to point out how bad the situation in the US is).


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:45 PM
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105: That does seem like a very strong claim to make, since we've pretty much done nothing as a country to try to retrieve them.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:47 PM
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now I'm pwned.

You were third to that one. What is that, the double-Weiner-pwn?


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:47 PM
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re: 105

Well, the very worst parts of the inner cities of the UK are probably up there. Minus the guns, obviously, and even that is on a downward slide.

I'd still want to defend the view that the education system is going to be one of the primary tools for reversing that situation. Obviously, managing schools in a way that reduces social exclusion and stratification isn't a magic bullet. There's a lot more that needs fixed but it's going to help.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:48 PM
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94: Oh no, there are definitely public schools where the elite send their children. Around Chicago there's a suburban school named New Trier that's well-known for this, mostly because it pulls from three of the richest suburbs of Chicago, which are among the three richest towns in the entire US. Needless to say, it's always highlighted by Newsweek and Time in their bullshit "20 Best High Schools in America" features, and they always send a number of kids each year to each of the Ivys despite lacking any particularly grand academic accomplishments.

I think this ties in with the "name brand ideology" that Witt talks about in 56. There's definite advantages to the well-known high schools and well-known colleges far beyond the education. They are often seen as "reliable" sources of students or workers by the top universities, the top grad schools, and the top firms/companies. If you go to a top school and do well, you're probably seen as less of a risk than someone who did stellar at an unknown school. This is once again unfortunate, but somewhat understandable, behaviour by risk-averse universities and companies that just feeds into the unfortunate, but understandable, demand for name-brand schools by parents.


Posted by: JAC | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:50 PM
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The original sin here is probably the post-Brown failure to desegregate with any speed, and the decision that busing couldn't be mandated across municipal lines. Maybe. Or I could ask someone who's done some research.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:50 PM
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One way to avoid the formation of a permanent underclass is to give everyone the same quality of education.

Well, that's not really happening. But what I'm saying is, even from the point of view of "what's best for my child," I think people who focus exclusively on academics and enrichment and all that are missing something that this country really fails to value, but that's extremely valuable. It is worth a lot to be able to hang with people you don't, given the way class issues play out in this country, run into on the job or in the grocery store or across the street. It is worth a lot to me to feel comfortable and at home in working-class Latino neighborhoods, around rednecks, in public housing areas populated largely by southeast Asian immigrants. I think it's worth more to me in my day-to-day life to see those parts of town as open to me and to have friends there who I visit and hang out with than it would be if I were better at reading music or had a sounder grasp of basic physics. I think it's more useful to me to be able to speak a little street Spanish along with my schoolbook Spanish than it would be to know Latin. Those decisions *do* possibly foreclose some advantages (though I think that a lot of the academic things one gives up can be acquired later), but they open up other things that are a lot harder to get if you don't get them when you're young.

I'm not talking about putting a kid in a situation of genuine educational deprivation. I don't think that the children of people who think about these decisions, by and large, are at any risk of educational or intellectual deprivation. They are at risk of socio-cultural deprivation, though, and I really think that that's a risk that we'd do well to think more seriously about.

And notice that I'm not talking about "the good it does the poor to have middle-class and professional-class kids in their schools"--though that's certainly true. I'm talking right now exclusively about the good that it does the children of the middle and professional classes to be able to hang out with poor kids without feeling all awkward and self-conscious about it.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:51 PM
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Sorry to belatedly leap on the tangential Pittsburgh Public Schools thing, but (a) My parents started me out in a supposedly excellent private elementary school, with funding from my grandparents, and I was utterly wretched and miserable. Then, at last, in middle school they pulled me out and sent me off to public school, where I was approximately a thousand times happier, and I say this as a small, scrawny, pale, socially backward, smartypants nerdling. (The middle school was Reizenstein, by the way, which at least back then was considered fairly dicey and violent.) I haven't the slightest doubt that I am far better off for having been in the Pgh public school system. (b) You most certainly do not need a car to live in Pittsburgh, though I'm sure it varies depending on where in the city you're talking about. We didn't have one when we were growing up, and my mother doesn't have one now.


Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:52 PM
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107: And a meta-weiner-pwn at 103/104. Shameful.

now off to watch Charlie Batch work his magic.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:53 PM
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re: 110

In an analogous process, the decision in the 80s in the UK to sell off social housing and to transform council estates which had previously had somewhat mixed social demographics into sinks into which mostly the desperate poor were dropped, has had equally pernicious effects.

Partly because those who bought and then sold at a profit could afford to move but also because the lack of housing stock now means that councils have no choice but to allocate them to the most needy. Which inevitably means those on benefits. There are still council houses available to people in less difficult financial circumstances but the waiting lists are often years long and you need to be pretty motivated to i) want to wait and ii) be prepared to live in areas that are considerably less than nice.

This process results in schools that mostly service council estates being seen as less desirable for the middle classes and the aspirational working classes and over time the stratification gets magnified. Rinse. Repeat.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:56 PM
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The original sin here is probably the post-Brown failure to desegregate with any speed, and the decision that busing couldn't be mandated across municipal lines. Maybe. Or I could ask someone who's done some research.

But I believe that's rooted in the district-based funding of public schools in America. That's why it's not really fair to bus someone into another school district, since they're not paying for it. More federal funding would allow a greater equalization of the schools, since at the moment each individual district must rely on their local tax base to provide the funding, and that's just a recipe for screwing over the poor.


Posted by: JAC | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:56 PM
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112: Reizenstein is the non-magnet middle school Mom mentions in 66; the one I didn't go to, because of its diceyness. That is, because of the stories I'd heard from my brother and friends.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:57 PM
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I'm also largely in agreement with I'm talking right now exclusively about the good that it does the children of the middle and professional classes to be able to hang out with poor kids without feeling all awkward and self-conscious about it.

If and when I have kids I'd rather they weren't prissy isolated members of a narrow social class.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:58 PM
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I should clarify that I'm largely in agreement with LB here, and I hope that when I have little calakids, there will be good public schools to send them to, and I think more diverse is better, all else being equal. I just wanted to make the more narrow point that not everyone who moves to the suburbs is doing so because they are scared of darker colored people or of poor people; you do get more bang for your buck in a lot of places, and if you're not an EmmaJacob (shorthand for all the well-off people I know from college, btw, because all of their kids are Ella, Emma, Jacob, or Jack) or a brilliant Calaspawn, a magnet school or the ability to go to museum isn't a great answer because if you don't get into the magnet school or have the upper class income, you're rather fuxx0red.

Except for a very select few, the value of Elite Liberal Arts U is in the getting of the certificate of participation, and the entree it allows, and not what is actually taught.

Absolutely true, but don't knock the entree. The Harvard kids have an easier time interviewing than the Penn State kids, plus, a middling-bright but well-prepped Harvard grad is going to do better than a middling-bright PSU grad. The Branding is important. It shouldn't be, but liberal arts majors from Harvard and Yale can walk into investment banking jobs but not so much if you went to Robert Morris.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:59 PM
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96: I'm not sure it's true that *every* major American city has a school or schools that are truly dangerous and horrible, but it's also true that my sense of what constitutes "major" American cities is probably broader than yours. Yes, Chicago, NY, LA, probably Dallas, certainly New Orleans (pre-flood), etc. have a few really bad schools. But as you said upthread, no one will send their kids to those if they can avoid it. When we're talking about "where to send my kids" (which I thought we mostly were), the choice often seems to be between "okay, ish" public schools and the "best" public schools in a given area (or private schools). And I'm trying to make a case that "okay, ish" really is okay.

The problem of the chronic underfunding and overcrowding of genuinely poor schools is a much broader issue, I think.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 5:59 PM
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Ogged's comment made me realize that I really am thinking of schools in the bad part of town, and these may not be the same schools that other people are talking about. Two friends who taught public school told me the following: there were good parts and bad parts, but neither would teach above a specific grade, because each wanted to be sure he could physically take his students if/when necessary. One was a guy, one was a woman.

Maybe that's a normal thing these days, but I was astonished. Maybe each happenned to be in a particularly bad school.

Also, I'll see if I can find the Rauch article, which was short but astonishing.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:01 PM
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I don't think that the children of people who think about these decisions, by and large, are at any risk of educational or intellectual deprivation.

I think that's probably mostly true as to humanities/social studies stuff and basic math, but I'm not at all sure it's true for more serious math and science.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:02 PM
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109: I see.
110: Bingo. Even state-level financing vs. federal would do much better than local. I remember an article about some tony Marin beach hamlet full of weathly ostensibly liberal types who were voting down school bond measures right and left because hey, they didn't have kids, much less ones in public school. How to get there, though?


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:03 PM
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Brock, what counts as not top-tier? I was under the impression that you went to University of Landersia, not Landersia State, and I'd say University of Landersia is a pretty damn good public university; but I don't know if you'd be comfortable with my posting my reasons for this impression.

Okay, Weiner, you are really weirding me out. I'm both deeply uncomfortable with you posting whatever you know and desparately curious what you think you know and how you think you know it. As a matter of fact, I did go to U. of Landersia, not Landersia State, but I don't know many people that would characterize that as a "pretty damn good public university". It's nothing to be ashamed of, and I'm certainly not in the least, but I think you'd have a difficult time coming up with a definition of "top-tier" into which it fit. It's not anything in CA, or Michigan, or VA, or Wisconsin, or TX, or UNC. In fact, it's not anywhere on this list. If you still think either that it's "top tier" or that you know where it is (where I'm from), let me know.

I wish someone would address the substance of my post. I know B did, indirectly, but I need more.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:04 PM
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b) You most certainly do not need a car to live in Pittsburgh,

If you say so. Getting from the South Side to the universities though is pretty much a shoot-me-now enterprise, especially if you require the buses to drive. But around Shadyside you don't and it's a great little community. I lived south of the city and getting anywhere is a royal pain because it involves crossing two bridges and Route 51.

But I will acknowleged being less than informed than Matt's mom. Still -- my baby sis wouldn't get into a magnet program. We're better off in our suburban school -- even if it has a heroin problem (which tickles me pink, wrongly, in so many ways, because I get a sick thrill out of seeing middle class parents in horror over the fact their kids' school has a drug problem AND THEY'RE WHITE..) for her, I think. And I'm not sure how many people know their kids will be magnet-bound when they're buying a house. Babies are pretty dumb human beings, when you think about it.

The question to ask, maybe, is 'would you move if you knew your kid had to go to the local high school?'


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:08 PM
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Oh, also, I am 100% in agreement with 111.


Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:10 PM
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Even state-level financing vs. federal would do much better than local.

It doesn't really work that way here. We have a single, state-wide public school system, and it ranges from poorly-funded mediocrity to pretty bad. There are a lot of weird things about Hawaii that contribute to that, including a stronger history of private schooling than most parts of the country, but it's not very satisfactory. OTOH, it's a pretty egalitarian place in a lot of ways, and Lord knows there's no shortage of ethnic diversity.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:10 PM
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What makes me uncomfortable, B, about your 111 is that you're minimizing the fact that there's a trade-off in choosing the "good enough" school. On the positive side, your kid is more likely to be comfortable with people of other races and classes, but the really good schools open doors that are much harder for kids from good enough schools to walk through--partly because of branding, partly because they're just better. And for some careers, like ibanker or political pundit, for example, those open doors can make all the difference. This doesn't tell us which choice is correct, but insofar as you're tending toward "you can have it all," I think that's false.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:17 PM
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124: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of when I said that I was sure it varied depending on where in the city one was talking about. The South Side is pretty fucked, while it's fantastically easy to get by on public transit in the East End (though actually I always thought Shadyside was one of the more annoying areas to try to access by bus, I always figured because the people there were rich and didn't need it themselves, and were sufficiently overrun with day-shoppers as it was). Getting from Point Breeze or Homewood, though, to the universities or downtown, was simplicity itself.


Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:20 PM
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I enjoy tense shifts.


Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:21 PM
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And for some careers, like ibanker or political pundit, for example, those open doors can make all the difference.

I find it impossible to believe that this is true at a high school-or-below level.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:24 PM
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Brock: I think school gives you both education and socialization. In elementary school, it's probably mostly socialization, which is why homeschooled kids are as weird as they are. An okay public school might do a somewhat worse job of teaching your kid how to add and multiply, but probably does a much better job of teaching him how to interact with other kids per BPhDs comments above. The higher up the educational chain you go, education/training/instruction becomes a bigger and bigger part of what you get out of school, and "better" schools become more important. Or at least it can.

At my undergrad school, I could understand paying a lot of money for a technical education that was much better than you could get down the street. I couldn't understand paying $30k for an education in a department that seemed decent but no better than the one in said school down the street, which probably cost 20% as much.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:26 PM
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The path to i-banking begins in preschool, Tim.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:27 PM
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The path to i-banking begins in preschool, Tim.

You kid, but competition for Manhattan preschool spots is insane, is it not? Partly that's due to...insanity, but partly it's because if you want your kid to be part of a certain class, there's a track to be followed.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:30 PM
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On Brock's point: Many middle-class white people people do in fact make exactly that calculation and decide to send their children to the local state university rather than shell out the money for a fancy elite school. Many if not most of the people I knew in high school ended up at the local U. because of this, with mixed results.

Is this different from the K12 level? I don't know; I know I'm extremely happy with my experience at a big-name college, and I'm pretty sure I would have hated the alternative, but this definitely isn't true for everyone. Obviously I don't feel the same emotional attachment to public colleges that I do to public schools, since I don't go to one, but I do kind of feel like the issues are different at the level of higher education; it seems like there really are important things that one might miss out on by going to a state university rather than an elite one, depending on who one is and what one wants out of college. But like I say, I don't know.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:30 PM
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What ogged says in 127 is true, but isn't that a problem in and of itself?


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:32 PM
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126: but "poorly-funded mediocrity to pretty bad" seems to be much better than the rest of the country which is "patches of brilliance, lots of mediocrity, and patches of utter shit", isn't it?

132: who the hell wants to be an i-banker, though?


Posted by: jake | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:32 PM
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I think I fundamentally disagree with what 131 thinks elementary schools are supposed to do. Adding and subtracting are the least of it, but socialization isn't everything. There's a general appreciation for learning, habits of thinking, expressions of creativity that kids all learn in those years or have a very hard time picking up later. (But I'm not saying I disagree with your overall assessment -- as I said, I'm really for public school all the way. I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here.)

By the way, are most people talking just about elementary school? I've been taking about k-12, the whole enchilada. If you feel differently about one vs. the other, why?


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:34 PM
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I dunno, Tim. I'm quite certain that the reason I didn't get into a certain Ivy League school is due to the fact that I wasn't 'right', by which I hadn't spent summers in Honduras teaching flamenco dancing in French to indigenous children, or something. Certainly wasn't due to academic inaptitude, 'cause I've seen those kids' scores. To the extent that high school is a gateway to colleges, it matters.



Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:35 PM
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You kid, but competition for Manhattan preschool spots is insane, is it not? Partly that's due to...insanity, but partly it's because if you want your kid to be part of a certain class, there's a track to be followed.

As I understand it, there is a significant amount of ambiguity about what is driving these connections. The standard conservative trope is that underlying ability is driving placement in school and later success. I'm pretty sure that's not entirely true. But I also know enough successful people from enough varied backgrounds that I believe pre-school/middle school/high school isn't determinative. I think "crazy" is motivating a lot more of this than you think. I think "capital" is driving a lot of it, too.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:38 PM
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Teofilo- 134 expressed a preference but really articulated no reasons in support.

Ogged, who said I was kidding? I mean, I was, in the sense that I think it's absurd, but I wasn't, in the sense that, as you pointed out, a disturbing number of people seem to think this is true, or at least behave as if it were.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:38 PM
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136: Depends on what you're focused on, I suppose. Having no patches of brilliance at all seems like a problem to me, and poorly-funded mediocrity really is both quite poorly funded and quite mediocre. I don't think there's anything in Hawaii as violently dysfunctional as the very worst public schools elsewhere, but that's very faint praise indeed; our "pretty bad" really is pretty bad. It really is a major problem when you have a system in which the facilities are falling apart, underpaid teachers are pretty much on their own to do as much or as little as they care to, and the greatest imperative appears to be "don't rock the boat."


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:41 PM
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To clarify 136: I-banking is a job where you can work crazy hours and make crazy money. It's far from the only job like that (I think that "lawyer" and "professional athlete" are reasonably comparable), and differs mainly in the perception of how much the old-boys-network affects your chances of getting hired. Increased difficulty of getting an I-banking (or political punditry) job seems like a trivial problem next to not being able to get a good engineering job because you never learned calculus. Or not being able to get a good middle-management job because you didn't learn how to write coherently.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:42 PM
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But I also know enough successful people from enough varied backgrounds that I believe pre-school/middle school/high school isn't determinative.

Me too. OTOH, if you're decent but not spectacular, having the right background can count for a lot. The 99th percentile kids can do well regardless; for the 85th percentile kids (or whatever), the brand names on the resume make more of a difference, IMO.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:48 PM
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138: Isn't that sort of thing based on upper-middle-classness rather than where one goes to school? Because I went to public school in the upper-middley burbs, and I can guarantee you that there were people doing that. Whereas meeting a fraternity (or, better yet, eating club) brother whose dad is a partner at Jones Day or Goldman Sachs and can totally hook you up seems much more likely at Ivy U than at State Tech.


Posted by: Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 6:51 PM
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134 expressed a preference but really articulated no reasons in support.

True.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:02 PM
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In all honesty, do we really care that much about the Ivy league imprimatur or the Goldman Sachs job (say) as opposed to Good State U or Regionally Important Lawfirm type job? It strikes me (and maybe I'm naive or unambitious) that this is kind of like the NYT Style Section article: "everyone" cares about where one vacations--only actually, no, everyone doesn't. Only a few people who make a lot of noise actually care, and the vast majority of the rest of us are doing quite fine without the name branding.

I realize, of course, that this seems like the opposite of the argument I was making during the Hirschman debates, and that yes, if you are really dedicated to (say) a research career in physics, then being at the top of the national/worldwide heap matters. But surely we all realize that it's possible to be economically and professionally comfortable and (if you desire) even politically and socially influential without having gone to Harvard or worked for the World Bank, right?

Or am I losing track of the thread?


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:03 PM
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146: For myself, I completely agree. But I feel some duty to do what I can, within reason, to bring my kid up in such a way that he could, if he turned out to be smart enough and motivated enough, decide that he wanted to be, say, a physics professor at a top school. What "within reason" means is endlessly debatable, of course.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:11 PM
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147: But is there any doubt that he could do that if he were smart and motivated enough, really?


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:13 PM
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Sure, B., but this was specifically in the context of getting a job in i-banking. Obviously in the real world, an education that provides a number of people with entree to White Collar Job at Fortune 500 Company or Regionally Important Law Firm is more important, but i-banking is the Vows column of industry*.

* Brookyln small-press magazine editing is excluded by virtue of not making any money.


Posted by: Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:13 PM
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if you are really dedicated to (say) a research career in physics, then being at the top of the national/worldwide heap matters.

Interestingly, in quite a lot of the sciences like chem, medical, biochem, etc., Ivy league isn't necessary at all. A lot of the best programs are the publics.


Posted by: gswift | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:15 PM
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147: But is there any doubt that he could do that if he were smart and motivated enough, really?

I'd say there's good reason to doubt. I have yet to have a professor who wasn't educated at a top 25 school (or the UK equivalents in the top 8 or so). And that's just for undergrad. They all came from incredibly elite graduate schools.


Posted by: JAC | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:16 PM
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I mean, let's talk about ME. My parents did with me what I'm advocating more folks should do with their kids: average public schooling, for the most part. They did send me to a Catholic high school, but it was hardly prep central; just the local unimportant regional city Catholic High, not really any better academically than most decent high schools. I was accepted to an Ivy and a couple of the little Ivies, but I went to a solid but not name-brand private university in the midwest, state universities for graduate school and here I am. If I'd gone to Brown or Swarthmore I might have a better academic pedigree; but if I cared an awful lot about academic pedigree, I probably would have gone to Brown or Swarthmore instead of my safety school (which I picked b/c they offered more financial aid). I don't see that going to averageish public schools hurt my education or professional chances, really.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:18 PM
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148: On some level that's true, but getting and staying motivated is a lot easier if you're not bored out of your skull.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:22 PM
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they all came from incredibly elite graduate schools.

Right, but the question is really, "Where did they go to high school?"


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:22 PM
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Or shorter 153: I want my kid to make his own damn mistakes instead of repeating mine.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:23 PM
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That's not really that much shorter, Dave.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:25 PM
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152 to 151. The choice of college matters to graduate schools; but I don't think that public schooling makes a whole hell of a lot of difference to a smart, motivated kid's chance of getting into a top research or liberal arts college (i.e., grad school feeder school) somewhere. It may not be Harvard or Yale, but going to Berkeley or Northwestern or UT Austin or Oberlin is not going to prevent anyone from getting into a top graduate program.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:25 PM
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I like 146's self-awareness about elite qualifications. I've always had the same opinion, but in a way I can afford it. A law school classmate once pointed out to me that since I had gone to one of the most famous and prestigious universities in the world, as a grad student, I was free as he was not of the gnawing sense of inadequacy, that somewhere else there were people who might as well have been a different species. He knew intellectually that was nonsense, but felt that I would always have an advantage in confidence, that I had taken the measure of the best. I'm not saying I entirely agree, although there is something to it, but it interested me that this was not my opinion, but his.

My children's combination of cultural support, from us and their schools and social ease because their classmates come from a wide mix of classes and backgrounds has been a proud accomplishment of ours. But we've invested time and energy on our local schools, which we think benefits everyone but in a sense makes us insiders. And we are educationally sophisticated and self-confident, able to judge and supplement and steer. That's a class-based form of luxury too, whatever our tax returns say, and many people don't have it.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:27 PM
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55: This, of course, can be solved by not bearing dumb children.

How do you do this? I'm somewhat petrified about the possibility of having dumb children... All you parents out there, is there like this nerve-wracking first few years where you hold your breath and hope that they turn out to be smart and interesting? How do you deal with this?


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:27 PM
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156:We're all about small differences here.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:28 PM
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Now we really are talking about a different issue....


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:28 PM
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Maybe for the plebs, but for genetically superior people like myself we just accept our children's awesomeness as the expected outcome.


Posted by: gswift | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:31 PM
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158 is, I think, exactly right. Most of us *can* afford to worry a lot less about this kind of thing that we're told we need to. In fact, I think that surely professional class folks who are worried about getting their kids into the "best" preschools or prep schools or high schools or colleges really might do their kids more favors by being locally influential in their public school district than by thinking that name-branding their kids is the ticket to easy street.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:32 PM
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162 gets it exactly right. And if they're not quite naturally brilliant enough, our superior parental skills will carry them through.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:33 PM
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159: No. Your own children are, of course, geniuses. Unless they have a developmental disability, in which case they are, like Berube's Jaimie, geniuses anyway.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:36 PM
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147: No matter where you go to highschool you can get into the top colleges and gradschools if you're smart enough, but what exactly "enough" means depends on your prior situation. If you're an Intel Talent Search semifinalist, or any number of other comparable things, then you'll get into top top colleges no matter where you went.

My impression at Harvard was that about half the students came from highschools that put half a dozen people into Harvard every year, and the other half were the only person from their school to get in that decade.


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:37 PM
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166: Okay, so you don't get into Harvard, but you get into Northwestern. Cry me a river.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:40 PM
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name-branding their kids is the ticket to easy street

I have a mild objection to the tone of that line. I think it describes a real phenomenon, but not the only thing that's in play when people decide where to send their kids to school. These aren't easy decisions. If you're lucky enough to be choosing between two good public schools that differ primarily in the affluence and diversity of their student bodies, you're luckier than many of us. The system sucks, but I don't think there's one right answer as to what to do about it.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:43 PM
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168: My point was that if a kid is really exceptional (a la the "what if they want to be a top physicist" question) then they'll make it anyway. And if they're just great, then yeah Northwestern would be just fine.


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:47 PM
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Oops, 169 to 167.


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:53 PM
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168: I'm honestly not trying to be a snot, I'm just saying that I think we worry about this stuff more than we need to.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 7:54 PM
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I have yet to have a professor who wasn't educated at a top 25 school (or the UK equivalents in the top 8 or so). And that's just for undergrad. They all came from incredibly elite graduate schools.

This is what I've seen, too. And here's the thing: it may not be rational, but no one wants to be the mother responsible for her kid being talented enough to run the world but settling for middle management because mom didn't think ahead. It's a worry that certainly motivated my parents. I'm not going to argue that it's sane or proper, but I do think it's pretty common to think that if your kids don't get into Harvard or whatever the dream is for you, it's not going to be due to a lack of opportunity.

It may not be Harvard or Yale, but going to Berkeley or Northwestern or UT Austin or Oberlin is not going to prevent anyone from getting into a top graduate program.

It does often depend on your undergrad professors having worked with someone at a top grad program, though. Quite certain I'm in my program on my recommedation letters not my (impressive) transcript.

And again, the 99th percentile kid is probably going to go anywhere she wants; but the 85th percentile kid might go to Harvard if daddy's rich enough, or to Pitt if those SAT Prep courses and extra courses aren't offered by her high school, 'cause she might not stand out enough to get noticed among the 20,000 applicants, and then might not stand out enough to get aid.

I'm wandering afield a bit, but this is where I think school quality and/or reputation makes a difference at high school. At least there has to be an explanation for the Ivy League idiots I've run into.

If you're an Intel Talent Search semifinalist, or any number of other comparable things, then you'll get into top top colleges no matter where you went.

The difference, fwiw, is about 10 places in class rank and 200 points on the SAT between 'good enough' and 'Duquesne is a good choice for you, really, sweetie.'

And outside of Unfogged, there's a lot more 75-90%, 'cause it's percentiles, you see.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:06 PM
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171: I understand and I think you're absolutely right. OTOH I think there can be non-obnoxious reasons for choosing not to send your kid to the local public school, depending on the school, the kid, etc.

And I'm probably also just a mite defensive about where I send my kid to school. OTOH, I'd prefer to avoid the biggest names when it comes time to send him to college, and we actively work at downplaying elitist bullshit*, so I don't feel like a total asshole about it.

* The parents at my son's school kind of remind me of my law school class: a lot of nice people and a lot of really scary status monsters. We try to just say no to the status monsters.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:08 PM
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So as long as everyone ensures their kids score in the 99th percentile we'll all be okay.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:08 PM
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But Duquesne is a good choice for a lot of people, is it not? Surely not everyone, but not everyone could go to Harvard even if there were no discrepancies in high school quality.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:11 PM
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173: Don't worry, we're not saying it's necessarily a terrible thing to send your kid to a private school; each situation is different, and there are always a lot of factors involved that outsiders can't really judge. We are saying, though, that one of the main reasons people send their kids to private schools is that they see urban public schools as uniformly horrific, and this just isn't the case. The relevance of this to your specific situation is probably pretty low, actually.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:14 PM
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I'm wondering if anyone in the 'toss them in the public school!" crowd has ever seen a kid transformed after moving from a worse school to a better one? And if so, what do you make of these situations?

Good schooling really can (does?) make a huge difference, even at the early level. I'm certainly not trying to say that public=bad or city=bad or anything like that, but the truth is the local public school option is really not great in a lot of places.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:14 PM
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And here's the thing: it may not be rational, but no one wants to be the mother responsible for her kid being talented enough to run the world but settling for middle management because mom didn't think ahead.

This is exactly right (or would be if it threw fathers in too) and does a much better job than I did of capturing something I was trying to express earlier.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:15 PM
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one of the main reasons people send their kids to private schools is that they see urban public schools as uniformly horrific

Is this really the only claim? I'm not at all convinced it's true, as an empirical matter.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:16 PM
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Sure, but I, at least, think it would suck to be talented enough at mathematics for M.I.T. but not get in for no other reason than your high school wasn't competitive enough in math so you didn't have enough classes.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:17 PM
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176: I'm not worried, and I do understand that, but I think the caveats are pretty important. Education in this country is not one big problem, it's a whole shitload of small and medium-sized problems.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:17 PM
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no one wants to be the mother responsible for her kid being talented enough to run the world but settling for middle management because mom didn't think ahead

But I wonder if that's really a healthy way--from the kid's point of view--to look at it. I think a lot of really bright people grow up neurotic as hell because we feel guilty that we're not running the world. It might be a lot better to be the mother responsible for raising a kid who is talented enough to run the world but is actually happy running, say, the local public school district really, really well.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:18 PM
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177: Absolutely. It can do wonders. And for kids like that, private school (or a magnet school or a small, personal suburban public school or whatever) often truly is the best choice for the parents to make. Not all kids are like that though; many (perhaps most) are resilient enough to thrive in pretty much any school environment provided they have adequate support at home. That is, for your average kid who isn't having serious trouble at school there's no particular reason to automatically choose private school over public, and the fact that people do that anyway is a major problem with our educational system.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:19 PM
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I'm wandering afield a bit, but this is where I think school quality and/or reputation makes a difference at high school. At least there has to be an explanation for the Ivy League idiots I've run into.

This may be your mistake. I've a friend who worked in Admissions at an Ivy for a while, and my sense from him is that "an explanation" is not the best way to understand the admission decision. There are a series of obvious admits, there are a series of obvious cuts, and then it gets weird.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:20 PM
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Better to go on letting the people barely talented enough for middle-management run the world...


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:20 PM
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179: Not the only claim, but one of them. And I do think it's true, though I grant that I'm basing that mostly on my own experience.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:21 PM
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182: But there's a big difference between raising your kid to want to run the world and raising a kid who could do a really great job if they ended up running the world.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:22 PM
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177: Well, PK hated his preschool and I was really worried that he was already getting to hate school because he'd argue about going, that it was "boring," bitch when I brought him home, and all of that. I think it had a lot to do with ridiculous class size (26 kids in preschool with one teacher?) and a schedule of alternate days. He needed, at this point, smaller classes and a more regular schedule.

So for kindergarten I pulled him out of that school and decided not to send him to French immersion, despite my wanting him to learn a language, because it too had really big classes, and I put him in the nearby public school with small classes. The kindergarten teacher was older and quite experienced, the kids in his class were a mix of working and middle class, one had some kind of developmental or behavioral disability, but there were less than ten kids in the afternoon kindergarten program, and the teacher had an aide whose primary responsibility was helping with the behavioral disability kid.

PK absolutely loved it. And yeah, some of his gender questions and issues in the last year have come, probably, from being around kids whose parents are less educated and less inclined to feminism than I am, and he is working through some of his feelings about liking some of the tougher, more aggressive boys but then finding out that they would bully him a little (e.g., turn chase games into knock-you-down-and-steal-your-shoes games), but he seems really okay, because the primary thing (for him) was individual attention from the teacher. He's a confident kid who is quite comfortable saying, "Alex is bullying me, and I am not inviting him to the park this weekend," partly because the adult attention helps him not stress out too much about problems with peers.

And I really don't think it's bad for him to figure out how to negotiate social situations where your admiration for someone is something they use to hassle you a little bit.

And this might all change. But I feel proud, to be honest, that the working class kids + disabled kid thing didn't freak me out and make me decide that he wasn't going to be challenged enough, or whatever.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:30 PM
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I misread your quotation mark at first and thought PK came home and said preschool was "boring, bitch." Which was hilarious.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:34 PM
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I'm not sure what the point of 188 is, other than "yeah, B is so tolerant." Which is hardly a surprise. And also I guess that you are lucky to have such a good public school option. My only point is that it would be a mistake to generalize and assume that everyone therefore has such good options.

I really don't think staying away from the poor kids and minorities is a primary concern for most people, and certainly probably not for anyone arguing here. It really is about finding a place where your kids can thrive. If you can do that in the local public school, great, but that's very different from comments upthread suggesting this was somehow unimportant.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:40 PM
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(And I'm still playing devil's advocate, but dammit, you people need to do a better job convincing me I'm wrong here.)


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:41 PM
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My only point is that it would be a mistake to generalize and assume that everyone therefore has such good options.

Sure, but it's equally a mistake to assume that all urban public schools are like the ones Witt describes upthread, and I really do think there are people who believe this. I mean, what do you think people mean when they say they're moving to the suburbs for the schools?


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:42 PM
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188: good for you, and him. You may remember I worried about that, and have come to feel I benefited more than was hurt by my experiences, so I feel that you've been justified in that so far. No long hair in the late fifties, but hair the color of a ripe tomato must have had some of the same effect.

Going to be driving cross-country in a week or so, or having it transported?


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:42 PM
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what do you think people mean when they say they're moving to the suburbs for the schools?

That their public schools are like the ones Witt describes upthread?


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:44 PM
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I really don't think staying away from the poor kids and minorities is a primary concern for most people, and certainly probably not for anyone arguing here. It really is about finding a place where your kids can thrive.

I guess what I'm saying is that people who are worried about whether their kids will thrive should chill out a little; most likely they'll thrive in the local public school, and if you try that and they don't, fine, you can enroll them somewhere else. But there's no reason to reject your local school out of hand unless you know for sure that it really is part of the very lowest tier.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:45 PM
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194: Exactly. But there aren't very many schools like that, and yet lots of people move to the suburbs for the schools.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:46 PM
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195 and I are in comity.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:47 PM
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189: OMG, we were at the doc's a while back and I was playing a rhyme game with him to keep him entertained while I had a pap (motherhood: so dignified), and I asked him for a word that rhymes with "fish" and he said "bitch," clear as day. Bless the doctor for not even blinking.

190: Yeah, I realize that was a really self-aggrandizing comment. But what I was trying to point out is that it *would* have been easy for me to think that French immersion was really important b/c of starting languages early, and so on, which really does matter to me academically speaking. I was a bit worried about the decision, to tell the truth. And I *do* think that we worry about social class when we worry about public schools; the bullying thing is something ppl have said pretty clearly is a concern.

But beside from saying that I'm a fabulous mother and perfect human being, though those are also true, what I was trying to say is that the bullying thing which *would* worry me, turned out to be a non issue b/c the thing *he* needed, i.e. attention from the teacher, was more important to *him*. And there were a couple of social class awkwardnesses: desire for toys that I hate, more gun play than I wish he were into, sexism. These things are important to me.

But they don't seem to be massively worrying to PK; he seems able to think through them all right. And I think that's partly b/c of the whole talking-to-grownups thing, which is partly about the small class size priority.

I guess I'm saying that tradeoffs aren't necessarily a bad thing. It's probably good that PK doesn't get all prissy over gun play, socially speaking, even though I could totally imagine someone with my sensibilities wanting to put a kid into a private Waldorfy kind of school, say, in order to keep them away from that sort of thing.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:50 PM
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159: One collects recipes for braised toddler and if one's child is not reciting Shakespeare and solving the Hodge Conjecture by age two, one dices a few carrots, breaks out the burgundy and starts cooking.


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:52 PM
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I agree with 195; I don't think there's much disagreement here, generally, except that I'm not sure how much I value diversity in a classroom over academics.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:54 PM
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I think 195 and 196 are exactly right.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 8:54 PM
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But there's no reason to reject your local school out of hand unless you know for sure that it really is part of the very lowest tier.

That's quite a bit stronger than I'll buy. The very lowest tier is very low indeed. There is a real problem in many places with people thinking their public schools are worse than they actually are, but there is also a real problem with public schools in many places not being very good, and there are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to send your kid to a good school. And while I basically buy the idea that the world would be better if everyone sent their kids to the local public school, that doesn't mean that the world would be better if any given person sends their kid to the local public school. It may be a tragedy of the commons type of problem, and at the margins it's certainly better for parents with a decent, diverse, local public school to send their kids there, but there's also a very real need for a lot of schools to improve enough for people with a choice to be willing to send their kids there.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:00 PM
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195: most likely they'll thrive in the local public school, and if you try that and they don't, fine, you can enroll them somewhere else.

That's not as easy as it sounds - it's not as if moving house is a snap or that finding a place in a private school/other public school can be done on a whim [or on due consideration]. I probably would have put the Kid into a school with smaller classes and help for his learning disability if I had been able to - but the secular private $chool$ have few spaces and church-affiliated schools were not an option.


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:03 PM
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But what Teo's saying, and I like it b/c it's such a sensible middle ground that I think I'll swipe it in future discussions of this type, is not to reject the local public school out of hand. Try the "not very good" school and see if maybe it's better for your kid, with his unique personality, than you think it might be from the outside looking in.

I think it makes sense to say that at least trying, initially, could go a long way. If nothing else, it might make local parents more aware of the *specific* problems in their local school--inexperienced teachers, class size, not enough ESL instruction, whatever--that make it "not very good." And that could really have an impact on local public policy.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:05 PM
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203: True, re. moving. But don't most school districts now let parents at least express a preference for schools within that district?


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:07 PM
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198: Dr B - You should have been shocked. "Bitch" doesn't rhyme with "fish". Failing to correct that might have a deleterious effect on PK's future as a songwriter...


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:08 PM
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I feel as though we're talking about three different issues here, and B. is slowly convincing me on #2.

#1 is poor urban schools. I remain firmly convinced that these are a huge problem, bigger than just a handful of schools in three or four big cities. When I say huge, I mean I estimate that 20% of Philadelphia public school students are attending schools that are IMO actively dangerous. This is based on personal experience (work, not my own education), not research, so I may be wrong. I don't know what we do to fix those schools, but I don't think all the money in the world nor the most involved yuppie parents are going to help. (Well, except to flip the school and push the poor kids somewhere else.)

#2 is the vast swath in the middle -- schools that are neither the 20% at the bottom nor the 10-20% at the very top. I am hearing B's argument better now and I am shifting my thinking. It's true that if a middling school gets a handful of assertive, smart, dedicated parents (who also have time to devote to activism), it can make a big difference. And I agree that close interaction with people from different backgrounds can give one an interpersonal fluency that is very valuable.

On #3 I think I am entirely with Cala (and others). The folks in this top 10% strata are getting almost everywhere on connections. The naturally smart (or fill-in-the-blank positive quality) ones would have done fine anyway; the ordinary rest often become the "Ivy League idiots." I sat in at a convocation recently that left me speechless over the endless stream of "You are the best of the best" gushing from the president, deans, etc. Really? How about "Congratulations, you won the birth lottery. Make sure you pay back in"?


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:08 PM
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Téo is reasonable, except that the purchase of a house may come several years before the kid goes off to school. If I have to bet between the decent public school and the district with the superior magnet program but crappy regular program, I'm probably going to settle in the place with the decent school, even if EmmaJacob turns out to be a genius who would thrive with just a dictionary and a slate.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:10 PM
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I pretty much agree with 204. We did have our kid in public school for a year, and we'd have been OK with keeping him there through elementary school. But 203 is also true: it's not necessarily so easy to change. In our case, the complicating factor was that the nearby, very good private school can be difficult to get into, we had an admission in hand, and we didn't want to count on being able to get in later.

BTW, if you keep being so damned nice we're going to make you change your handle.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:14 PM
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I mean, what do you think people mean when they say they're moving to the suburbs for the schools?

1. That the schools near them are dangerous.

2. That the schools near them look dangerous. Which, to a lot of white/UMC/etc. folks means majority-minority. Or even "more than 20% minority." Or even "same ethnic background but lower class than I want my kids to be absorbing their language/mores from."

Sometimes (often?) these reasons coexist. B, I think, is commenting on #2 only.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:21 PM
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210 was me.


Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:23 PM
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For college, there are public options (at least in some places) that are just as good as all but the really top-tier private schools. I went to this place for a while, where you get all the benefits of a fancy private liberal arts school (among many other benefits, my biggest class there had 26 people, and the biggest class offered at the school, intro Biology, had 50), but at a third of the tuition.

Also, I think I've mentioned this before, but going to a diverse high school doesn't mean you'll be getting a diverse educational experience. My school was very integrated overall, but almost all of my classes were made up of the same 75 students (out of 450 in the whole grade), 2 of whom were black. It doesn't really count when the only time you see most of the other students is in gym class or something.


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:24 PM
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207: Your #1 is certainly true, but I really do think it's a separate issue from what we're mostly discussing; the sort of people who are agonizing over whether to send their kids to public school almost certainly don't live in areas where the schools are that bad. They live instead in places that fall into your #2, which is the vast majority of urban public schools, and barring special circumstances those schools are generally fine for most kids.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:25 PM
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Also, I think I've mentioned this before, but going to a diverse high school doesn't mean you'll be getting a diverse educational experience.

True, and this is another problem. I still think it's preferable to a lily-white private school, though.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:26 PM
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Teo, heads up: I blogged your "chill out" comment and linked to your blog, so you'll get a few extra hits tomorrow.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:27 PM
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Thanks, b. Maybe I should put up a post about it.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:33 PM
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205: Some LA schools have "open enrollment", but the ones with the best reputations never do. Work transfers are sometimes available, but even those are doled out parsimoniously when the school in question is a preferred one.

Even open enrollment isn't truly open - one of the Kid's black friends wanted to go to the same high school, but was initially rejected because they were looking for Anglo kids. [He refiled the application, stating his race as "non-Hispanic white" and got in, his rationale being that there was a lot of race-mixing in the past, ergo, he had "white" blood and could opt to be known as that.] I wanted the Kid in the high school he went to because it was close to my work and had a good reputation. When the Kid came out at age 15, it turned out to have been the best choice, if only for the largely supportive environment for gay kids. [Which is not to say there was no homophobia; there was, but the administration was solidly on the side of gay rights.] However, I probably would not have got him into that school had I not been working nearby and had him in the feeder middle school.

I have a fairly jaundiced view of LA Unified, despite the fact that the Kid made it through in one piece, went on to college and graduated with honours. I was "lucky" in that I became ill, had to leave work and stay at home for most of his high school years, because he very likely would have imploded without the time I was able to devote to tutoring him - LA Unified offered no substantive help for his learning disability whatsoever. I got involved in a task force haranguing LAUSD about providing for disabled kids [both learning and physically] primarily because I a) had the time and b) recognised that my child was damned lucky that I was a highly educated, legally savvy and just plain tenacious bitch, because I hit roadblock after roadblock. Imagine what a non-English speaking parent without knowledge of her child's legal rights faced if her kid needed help.


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:36 PM
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214: Genuine ignorance here: are most private schools lily-white? That's obviously not a factor in these parts.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:37 PM
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I just read b's post. I appreciate the kind words, but I'm not sure what I said was really all that profound. Also, my moniker has an l in it.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:38 PM
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206: I taught PK what slant rhyme is when he was three years old, baby.

The folks in this top 10% strata are getting almost everywhere on connections.

No, no, no. Really, it's more like the top 1-2%.

207.1: I honestly believe that truly irredeemable urban public schols are relatively rare, and that, in fact, money and a few involved parents would make an enormous difference in most schools serving primarily poor kids. Of course, money in and of itself isn't a solution, but what it can buy is: smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, lighter teaching loads to prevent burnout, enrichment programs, on-site school counsellors, excellent administrators, school-based social services, safe clean and welcoming school buildings, on-site school nurses and public health programs, better school lunches, after-school programs, and on and on and on.

The problem is that even when poor people vote to tax the hell out of themselves to try to provide this stuff, the revenue base doesn't support it, while the wealthy district five miles away might pay much lower taxes and still be able to afford the best teachers and administrators, not to mention arts programs and all the rest of it.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:39 PM
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218: The fancy ones are. There are some parochial schools that aren't, though.


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:39 PM
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218: Not so obviously, actually. In New Mexico, which is demographically diverse in a way similar to Hawaii, they are indeed very close to lily-white.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:40 PM
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219 - There's no l in Ted.


Posted by: Becks | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:41 PM
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Parochial schools are a different matter; I'm just talking about secular private schools.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:42 PM
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Thanks, b.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:45 PM
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I got involved in a task force haranguing LAUSD about providing for disabled kids [both learning and physically] primarily because I a) had the time and b) recognised that my child was damned lucky that I was a highly educated, legally savvy and just plain tenacious bitch, because I hit roadblock after roadblock. Imagine what a non-English speaking parent without knowledge of her child's legal rights faced if her kid needed help.

Yeah, which is why I think the highly educated tenacious bitches among us should stay in public schools.

218: I think that actually varies a lot. Catholic schools are often really diverse, actually, ethnically and economically. Private schools often do offer scholarships and so forth to poorer kids--although of course the experience of being a poor kid in a wealthy school can be a tough one. But I'd cautiously say that my problem with private schools, though I do think they feed white flight, isn't necessarily about race or even class--it's the way that they can siphon off the most motivated or savvy parents from the public system, where they could do a lot of good.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:45 PM
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Teo, typo corrected, with apologies.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:46 PM
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218: They aren't in LA. I checked out a lot of secular private schools when the Kid was heading for kindergarten and most of them were far from lily-white. However, economic status was another thing entirely. The "name" schools were all very expensive and had very few scholarship [non-UMC] students. The "alternative" schools were a tad more mixed socio-economically.


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:47 PM
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222: If New Mexico has lily-white private schools, it's not demographically diverse in a way similar to Hawaii.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:48 PM
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But I'd cautiously say that my problem with private schools, though I do think they feed white flight, isn't necessarily about race or even class--it's the way that they can siphon off the most motivated or savvy parents from the public system, where they could do a lot of good.

I think that's a significant part of what's wrong with public schools in Hawaii. OTOH, the educational bureaucracy seems to be carefully designed to absorb parental pressure until the troublemakers decide that it's easier to give up and put their kids in private school, so it's not just a parent problem. And it's pretty disheartening when a significant number of public school teachers are sending their own kids to private school.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:55 PM
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220: But, B, think of the expression on the face of the doc if you'd said 'Actually, dear, "bitch" rhymes better with "itch".'

When the Kid [age 4] came to the OB/Gyn with me, he solemnly told the doctor 'My mother does not have a penis, but don't worry, girls aren't supposed to.' I'd never seen the guy so nonplussed.


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:56 PM
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229: They're the only two states in which white people aren't a majority (or were a few years ago). I've never been to Hawaii, so I don't know how diversity plays out on the ground there, but in NM race is highly correlated with class and educational level in spite of the diversity.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:57 PM
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220: I wish I could remember where I saw this, but a couple of months ago I read something about a statistical researcher who looked at the data, and found that bumping up funding of schools (beyond a certain point where the roof isn't caving in anymore) doesn't have a huge impact on performance. The family & cultural situations have a big impact, and won't be overcome by having new textbooks and internet access in each classroom, he was saying. I need to find that article...


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:57 PM
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233: I've heard thiat too.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:59 PM
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that, that is


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 9:59 PM
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Looks like California's now in the club, along with DC.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 10:04 PM
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in NM race is highly correlated with class and educational level in spite of the diversity.

Hawaii isn't much like that. It's not diversity nirvana, but it's pretty good. The better private schools are more haole, Chinese, and Japanese and less Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Filipino, and Southeast Asian than the general population (and lots of kids are mixtures of various sorts), but still majority non-white.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 10:08 PM
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I actually thought DC was higher than that.


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 10:08 PM
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!@#%$#^% software just ate a long post and gave me its Forbidden Zone error message.

226: Short version of lost post: In theory, good, in practice, very painful. Having a child come home from school in despair on a daily basis, unable to cope with the too-large, chaotic classroom or with the teacher who doesn't believe in learning disabilities ['Just work harder, don't be lazy'] or the nurse who refuses to give him his inhaler because 'asthma is an imaginary disease' [her, I got fired] is the harsh reality. Yes, the task-force made a difference and there are better resources for future kids with problems, but the child who once loved going to school became a child who went reluctantly.

He says I made the right choice, because he loves his friends, he got through, he did well in college. But he doesn't remember sobbing that he was stupid, that he was never going to get it right, that I should send him back to Korea and get a better son. I do.


Posted by: DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 10:21 PM
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233: Sure, not internet access and a lot of the bells and whistles. The main thing is more experienced teachers, smaller classes, and good administrators. And, if poverty is a real problem, social support services. Good teachers can teach without laptops in the classroom, but students can't learn if they don't eat or if they're not getting enough sleep or if they're so stressed out that they can't focus.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 10:29 PM
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237: Interesting. You also said above that private education is a big deal there, which isn't really true for NM (aside from the Church), so I can see how private schools that take in a large portion of the population would reflect the diversity of it. Do you have a sense of the proportion of kids in each kind of school?

238: I would've thought so too. I blame Saiselgy.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 10:47 PM
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123: Sorry, Brock, didn't mean to weird you out. It will probably make you feel better to know that my reasons for thinking that were wrong, because what I thought was U. of Landersia is on the list you linked.

As is where I went to grad school, but not any of the universities I've taught at. Which makes me want to say, you can go to a public university that's not on those list and still get instructors who aren't brain-dead. I hope.

If you're still curious as to why I thought what I thought, you can e-mail me or something, or arrange for some other way for me to communicate it. I can't really say what in public without being mildly indiscreet. I have a funny mildly indiscreet joke about it though.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 11:47 PM
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Also: woot! Charlie Batch!


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 7-06 11:49 PM
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241: I think it's somewhere between 15% and 20%.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:12 AM
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I have to say that some of the heirarchical stuff about colleges doesn't really ring true to me. Is it really true that where you went as an undergrad is that important that going to, say, a decent state school rather than an Ivy League will seriously jeopardize your chances of entry to the graduate program of your choice? Assuming, obviously, that you are pretty good.

I'm happy to accept that my intuitions on this are a bit broken given that I'm in the UK.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:29 AM
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If you look at the list posted earlier, I can authoritatively state that going to a top 10-ish state school does not prevent you from getting into a top 10-ish graduate program. How that maps onto "decent state school" and "graduate program of your choice" is unclear.

Going to the University of Arizona (50th on the list) may require you to be much better to make it into NYU's Philosophy program (Brian Leiter, blowhard though he be, claims it's the best) than, say, going to Harvard would.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:02 AM
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Er, "authoritatively state" should be "have direct knowledge that". I'm not trying to be a jackass.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:08 AM
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I hesitate to come in here, having no kids of my own, but it seems to me that there are two conversations happening which are maybe confusing each other a little. In the first, which is all about "good enough" schools and that kids should attend them, Teo and b have said it. The second one is about people's expectations for their children and how far they should go (geographically if necessary) to help them attain them.

Now it seems to be an unspoken assumption that success at school is all about academic achievement and getting to high flying colleges. I realise that everybody here is probably hugely qualified, so that's a natural assumption to make, but I suggest, on the experience of a couple of teenaged friends of mine, that it ain't necessarily so. If the school is doing a good job growing the person, it's not the end of the world if they don't end up with a bunch of letters after their name. They won't go to work as ibankers, but plumbers don't starve, indeed probably earn more than school teachers.

One lad I know was getting into a bit of trouble, and his school actually advised his mother (BA, media career) that he should leave at 16. Pause while Americans throw up their hands in horror. He got apprenticed to a plasterer, and he's doing fine. Totally got his shit together, and by the time he's 25 he'll be earning more than me with a master's degree. Failure? Not in my book. Bad school? No, they gave the right guidance to the individual kid.

Another lad I know has just done GCSEs (16yo exams). His results were well above average, but the parents who've moved to get into the magnet schools would be appalled. His parents (teacher, engineer) sent him to the neighbourhood comprehensive knowing perfectly well it wasn't a great academic school. It's under resourced, a third of the students don't have English as their first language, but in its own way it thrives. It wasn't a magnet school that spent the year fundraising to send a bunch of 16 year olds to South Africa this summer. My friend had the experience of a lifetime, and he's got good enough results as well.

Quite likely neither of these kids will have a conventionally middle class life. But I really admire their conventionally middle class parents for thinking that maybe doesn't matter so much. Perhaps I'm a hopeless idealist. Perhaps they're completely irresponsible. I don't know. I have to go to work now.


Posted by: OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:50 AM
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Reflecting a bit on this thread, I really haven't been where I think I belong on the broader social/political issues involved. I am a huge believer in "good enough" on a lot of things, I hate status consciousness and status games, and I think kids are generally pretty resilient little critters. I guess what it comes down to for me is that my kid reminds me of me and I think that I would have profited quite a bit from better schools at the middle and high school level (and mine weren't at all bad, they just didn't push me much most of the time). But that's just me and my kid. We're not typical of much of anything, and I don't think making things work better for people like us needs to be a major goal of U.S. educational policy.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 2:27 AM
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239 is just as real an experience as mine, and jives with the experiences of close friends of mine, parents and children. For us, good enough has really been good enough. For some of our closest friends, it hasn't. Not for imaginary deficiencies and cruelties, for real ones.

In my book, everyone who has tried their local public, and had an experience like DominEditrix's, and to be honest, this includes a substantial portion of my closest friends, maybe as many as a third, gets full points.

When I think about it, this fact, that most of my friends have at least tried their local public schools, even though many have suffered, is a good reply to the notion my generation of liberals is too selfish to commit or sacrifice to what we believe in.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 6:29 AM
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In Hawaii rich/poor doesn't correlate with white/non-white, whereas in New Mexico most of the Latinos and Native Americans are poor.

I think that a lot of the paranoia about top schools comes from the most striving parents, the ones who want their kids to go to the very, very top. People for whom being a family practice physician would be failure. I think that they're probably right. Being a more thoughful or aware person is not helpful in the career world.

There was another study, which I can't find either, showing that at every level, the students from the better schools did better. IE, students from better middle schools did better in HS, students from better undergrad schools did better in grad school.

A freind of mine was a grad student from a mediocre undergrad school at a top grad school, and he felt that the profs very quickly figured out which students they were going to like. There's an old-boy network out there.

Of course, it may simply have been that the students from the better schools were sharper. My friend didn't believe it, though. Not too long ago I read a non-satirical piece explaining how important it was to know how to buy good wine if you were going to go anywhere in academia. Profs are just "more comfortable with" certain people, the way that men in all-white men's clubs are more comfortable with white men.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 7:50 AM
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#1 is poor urban schools. I remain firmly convinced that these are a huge problem, bigger than just a handful of schools in three or four big cities. When I say huge, I mean I estimate that 20% of Philadelphia public school students are attending schools that are IMO actively dangerous. This is based on personal experience (work, not my own education), not research, so I may be wrong. I don't know what we do to fix those schools, but I don't think all the money in the world nor the most involved yuppie parents are going to help. (Well, except to flip the school and push the poor kids somewhere else.)

A couple of things on this. First, it's basically true -- I've had friends working in the NYC high schools and some, not all but a fair percentage, are genuinely scary. But that's a high school level problem. At the elementary school level, while there may be some scary schools, there are far, far fewer.

Second, I think it's a concentration of poverty problem, and so the 'most involved yuppie parents' would actually help if there were enough of them. A school that's 90% poor is going to be at risk of being violent in a way that a school that's only 50% isn't even if the same kids that were causing the problem in the first school are also in the second school. It's exactly the same thing as McGrattan was talking about with council housing.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 7:52 AM
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Let me just add before I forget that the commitment to public education among my circle, despite about 30% experiencing failure and some what may be irretrievable disaster, means we are using a "citizenship," not a "consumer" standard for our actions. If we were using a consumer standard, which I believe many people are, that rate of failure would be intolerable, and would never be risked. And I'm proud of our commitment to citizenship.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:01 AM
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242- okay, Weiner, you certainly know how to pique a man's curiosity. How could I resist? What's your email?


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:04 AM
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190: My only point is that it would be a mistake to generalize and assume that everyone therefore has such good options.

I really don't think staying away from the poor kids and minorities is a primary concern for most people, and certainly probably not for anyone arguing here. It really is about finding a place where your kids can thrive. If you can do that in the local public school, great, but that's very different from comments upthread suggesting this was somehow unimportant.

The thing is, I think that lots and lots and lots of people think they're just trying to find a place for their kids to thrive, but are using 'staying away from poor people and minorities' as a strong proxy for that out of irrational fear rather than malice. I'm talking about people I know -- the parents of Sally's preschool friends.

Our neighborhood is funny -- there's a large Domincan immigrant population, and a large highly-educated-but-not-all-that-well-off gentrifying population. The housing stock is pretty segregated between the two groups (and saying two groups is a wild oversimplification, but it's good enough to go on with) but the segregation is on a small enough geographical scale that neighborhood schools are mixed -- there's no school that catches mostly from the gentrified bit of the neighborhood.

The kids Sally played with in preschool whose parents I know and who fall into the gentrifiers category are overwhelmingly likely to be going to school out of the neighborhood -- private, or white-neighborhood-gifted-program, or something -- despite the fact that there are neighborhood options that are really, really fine. Not just tolerable because you want to make a point about your liberalism and don't mind your kids suffering for it, but really fine.

And so I look at those parents, and all I can think is, not that they don't want their kids associating with poor or minority students, but that they look at a school with a large poor and minority population, and take it as a given that it's not a school where their kids could thrive. I don't think they're bad people, but I think they're systematically wrong in a harmful way.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:16 AM
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I disagree with nothing in 255.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:20 AM
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And so I look at those parents, and all I can think is, not that they don't want their kids associating with poor or minority students, but that they look at a school with a large poor and minority population, and take it as a given that it's not a school where their kids could thrive.

I agree with LizardBreath that, particularly in New York City, people often do this.


Posted by: Idealist | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:28 AM
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Well, I don't have kids, so I really don't have the experience to speak to a parental mindset, but when I avoid poor peole, it's out of malice and deep and abiding wickedness.

The problem with arguments like this, or more so, B's, is that the last thirty years (at least) have made clear that it is usually smarter to avoid all risks and fix any apparent lack of moral courage or whatever thirty years later in post-production. Cripes, our foremost war leaders are both draft-dodgers who are widely considered morally courageous, and somehow have gained the patina of physical courage.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:40 AM
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the patina of physical courage.

They get it through long sessions of buffing themselves with the blood of torture victims.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:46 AM
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240: Good teachers can teach without laptops in the classroom, but students can't learn if they don't eat or if they're not getting enough sleep or if they're so stressed out that they can't focus.

Yeah, this was the guy's main point, although he was also talking about factors less acute than things like chronic malnourishment, such as being unsupervised after school because you have a single parent who works a lot. It was all to say that you can't improve school performance just by increasing school funding--it's a more systemic problem.

This is why performance can be so widely divergent even within a particular school system. Just comparing my old school (33% black & hispanic) with another one in the county (73% black & hispanic), there's a 20 to 30 percentage-point difference in proficiency levels on assessment tests across the board, despite the lower-performing school actually having a slightly higher level of funding per student. And these two aren't even the best or (I'm pretty sure) the worst schools, respectively, in the county.


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:53 AM
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259: To be fair, the Clintons are pretty much the ur-example when thinking about this specific issue. But that's because there really isnt anything ideologically inconsistent with a Republican saying, "I want to avoid minorities and the poor."


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 9:02 AM
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Draft-dodger, sure (at the level where I would have considered him inconsistent had he supported the war), but hardly with a reputation for physical courage.

But that's because there really isn't anything ideologically inconsistent with a Republican saying, "I want to avoid minorities and the poor."

I suppose I can't say that's overly mean given what I just said. But we do have Republicans who comment here.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 9:23 AM
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262: I wasn't thinking of the draft-dodging issue, but the public school issue. Chelsea, IIRC, went to Sidwell.

As to the Republican thing, I didn't mean it as mean. I meant it as accurate: the point of success is to get yourself away from bad cultures, and minorities (poor African-Americans) and poor people have identifiably bad cultures. I should be clear that this isn't meant to imply anything like explicit racism or classism. You don't have to dislike black people to believe that poor black neighborhoods are inhabited by a significant number of people who are effectively fucked from birth because of a lack of social capital; as I understand it, this is an increasingly widespread view among people who study the issue. Avoiding the possible effects of such bad culture doesn't imply racism or classism; it implies a belief that one should avoid risks. The problem for Dems/liberals is that the standard argument in the other direction is more like B's and less like yours: you should be willing to take certain risks for the cause. (That's not quite fair, as your argument and B's argument are much closer together than that, but, deep down, I DFC.)


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 9:40 AM
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254: matt at matt weiner dot net (The story's rather boring I fear.)

245/246: My sense is it does make a difference. If you're coming out of Famous U. your application is guaranteed to get a look, but even if you have good grades coming out of Obscure State you might need something extra to get in, especially enthusiastic letters of recommendation or something.

I should add that this isn't based on firsthand knowledge at all; I've never been involved in PhD admissions, and a big part of MA programs like the one I teach at is to help people get into PhD programs, so we aren't focused on applicants from Famous U.

But the University of Arizona thing probably doesn't work quite that way; Arizona has an excellent philosophy department so a top-notch undergrad there will have good letters from some big-shot philosophers, which probably would help her get into top PhD programs. Swap in a university just off that list without a prominent philosophy program and I think the point does hold.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 9:41 AM
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Chelsea, IIRC, went to Sidwell.

Yes, but I believe they intend to atone for that by throwing acid in her face.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 9:50 AM
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I would just like to point out that, for all I was carping on about "name-brand" schools, B's 157 is entirely correct. Too many parents think that a named school means their precious child can only go to Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford (or Yale if they want to be a lawyer, MIT if they want to be an engineer). I think it's very short-sighted since there are a lot of incredibly good state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges that are still very well-respected at the graduate level. Berkeley is easily seen as a school on par with the top Ivys, especially in the more geeky subjects. University of Illinois even has fantastic engineering and comp. sci. programs. Countless smaller colleges like Oberlin, Williams, Amherst, DePauw, etc. send kids to top liberal arts grad programs. If you're really into journalism or business, you might even be able to slum it at Northwestern's Madill School or UPenn's Wharton. But these places are still well-known universities, and easily a tier or two above the sort of bog-standard State U or mediocre-but-still-exhorbitant Private College that some people were talking about.

As for this thread's actual subject: I like what I've heard about funding pre-school and after-school programs. They seem like they would help moderate some of the "social capital" problems from not having a parent around or anyone engaged in a poorer child's learning.


Posted by: JAC | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 9:59 AM
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Boy, leave for 20 hours, and a lot of things get said....

On the college issue, my wife an I swap positions - she went to UVA, I went to CMU, and she's a lot more OK with public (and big) universities than I am (acknowledging, of course, that UVA is top-tier). For me, it has nothing to do with social networking, but has to do with my fanatical belief in education qua education - in my (limited) experience, there's no comparison between the actual classroom experience at elite vs. big, non-elite schools. I mean, sure, maybe the 300-level seminars are fine, but I think you'd have to work pretty hard to get a consistently excellent education (in non-specialty fields - of course, most schools have one or two strong depts.) at Generic State. I took some classes at Pitt, and I was literally shocked at the low quality of 2 of them (1 other was good, and 1, a 400-level, was outstanding).

The thing, is, the academic ceiling at college level is so much higher than K-12. I mean, we're all pretty stupid into the teen years, right? Primitive critical thinking skills, a weakness for Ayn Rand or Khalil Ghibrain.... Why spend a bunch of cash for less-tattered copies of A Separate Peace, when that same cash (wisely invested) will buy access to actual experts and brilliant people?


Posted by: JRoth | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 10:05 AM
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The thing, is, the academic ceiling at college level is so much higher than K-12.

I don't think that's necessarily true, but the problem can be helped a lot by magnet schools. The big issue here though is that a lot of people are just failed by the public school system, since there are too many urban and rural schools that just don't allow their students a usable education. I think part of it is a matter of funding, and especially of selecting the correct things to fund.

When it comes to bringing up the worst of the worst, I think the money is best spent early on preschool development programs and after-school programs for children with no one to go home to. When it comes to helping the best of the best, the money is best spent in high school, when they're capable of working at a college level and interacting with other academically top kids has a number of great advantages.

I think the especially intractable problem in the longer run is more likely to be the rural schools than the urban schools. Already, a number of kids in a poor inner-city area have access to a good magnet school (some of my friends were bussed to other parts of Chicago as early as 3rd and 4th grade). If the funding were to arrive, there are enough young, educated people in a city to produce a good source of teachers (it would help if they put less emphasis on teaching degrees, and more on subject-knowledge and teaching ability). The critical mass of people also makes it easier to run efficient pre-schools and after-school programs. The great difficulty lies in those rural school districts currently receiving the least amount of money per student and trying to serve three large sparsely-populated counties. How will they find qualified teachers? How will they deal with the few younger kids who live an hour away and whose parents work late? And there's no real escape for the bright in magnet schools, unless they're state-wide (which still only happens in high school, often late high school).


Posted by: JAC | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 10:22 AM
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I should say that I have some sympathy with the "Don't stress out about your kid getting into Top U." point of view, but I also feel it would be hypocritical for me to say that. If I hadn't gone to Harvard, I might well not have got into grad school, and then I wouldn't be an academic, and while not everyone has to be an academic that probably would be a case of "It's too bad he didn't get to do this just because of where he went to college." [Bracketing the fact that if I had gone to Big Local U. it would've been Pittsburgh, which might've helped me get into grad school because of the famous philosopher effect in 264.]

And then I did go to urban public schools, though I had a very upper-middle class public school experience. So, go figure.

(I don't know shit about good wine, though. There surely are a lot of class issues in academia -- as well as race and gender issues and more -- but I'm not sure the good wine thing from 251 captures it.)


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 10:34 AM
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My wife's friend's daughters's second grade teacher has said that this year is not a "move ahead year". They are pretty much just going to go over what they learned in first grade.

Teachers focus their classes to the median student ability level. This means that parents are not foolish to select schools based on the student population.


Posted by: joeo | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 10:39 AM
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the especially intractable problem in the longer run is more likely to be the rural schools than the urban schools

This is so, so, so true.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 10:39 AM
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264: My friend from No-name U going to Name-brand grad school felt that the discrimination was after admission to grad school. Students from top schools just networked more effectively.

Don't underestimate money. Minnesota has a state school-equalization program of some kind ($$$) and it's really helped where I am, which is very rural. They've also instituted choice within the public school system, and schools are motivated to improve.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 10:54 AM
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Wow, lots of interesting posts. I totally agree with 255, and think there's a lot of that going on in my area as well.

In terms of the HS-college connection, I went to an elite HS (Stuyvesant -- public, but you have to test in) and I think it actually hurt the college admission chances of a lot of my classmates. They would have been stars in their neighborhood schools, but were second or third tier at Stuy. They got into good schools, but not the brand name ones.


Posted by: Elizabeth | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:18 AM
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272: That's definitely possible, I'm not sure about how the networking works out. I'd think you'd get at least as much discrimination in admissions though.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:27 AM
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In terms of the HS-college connection, I went to an elite HS (Stuyvesant -- public, but you have to test in) and I think it actually hurt the college admission chances of a lot of my classmates.

I've heard this said before -- I don't know that I agree with it. I went to Hunter (same deal as Stuyvesant -- a lot smaller, but roughly the same caliber) and we sent a ridiculous number of students to the Ivies, to the point where I can't imagine that if you scattered the same 200 kids among various Podunk high schools, as many of them would have gotten in. My sense was that Hunter acted as a plus -- brandnaming a kid whose numbers might have looked the same as someone from an unknown school as guaranteed to be really really smart.

Maybe that was a particularly Hunter thing, though -- something about it being a smaller school so that the gross numbers didn't get ridiculous.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:30 AM
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It depends a lot on the admission committee; I'm not on one either obviously, but I bother the people who do. Writing sample & letters seem to be most of it, and I know I got in because one of my letter writers knew the department chair personally.

I agree about rural schools often being more problematic, if only because there isn't usually an easy option if the school isn't working out.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:31 AM
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269/264: Yeah, one of the biggest issues I was thinking of with Local U was that in order to get into good grad programs (as I understand it) you need letters of recommendation from someone the people in the department you are applying to have heard of. And in order to get a job as a professor, you need to make it into a top ten department.


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:31 AM
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248: Yeah, but one of the major problems with the States is that the O-levels option, which is what you're talking about, is weaker and weaker here. Because of shit like health insurance and, admittedly, a much more fucked-up sense of class difference (look at how the politics of it work out--the Rs have convinced America that Americans hate college professors and that Ds are all college professors who hate plumbers), good blue-collar jobs really are disappearing and it's pretty fucking hard to make it without a highschool diploma (or, increasingly, a college degree).

Part of this, I think, besides the health insurance issue, is that we don't even *have* an O-level option. We insist that everyone stay in school until 18, which gets back to the treating-17-year-olds-like-children issue.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:38 AM
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The first college I went to (Reed) was first-rank, but I actually graduated from Portland State U.

I ended up concluding that a PSU MA was worth a Reed BA. The best people I knew at PSU were as smart as the best at Reed, but their careers were about 10 years behind schedule, since they had to get the MA to get into a good school, and because they had to work their way through school.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:43 AM
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It depends a lot on the admission committee; I'm not on one either obviously, but I bother the people who do. Writing sample & letters seem to be most of it, and I know I got in because one of my letter writers knew the department chair personally.

I agree about rural schools often being more problematic, if only because there isn't usually an easy option if the school isn't working out.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:46 AM
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Oh, and I meant also to say that LB is entirely right about her neighborhood. I love it where she lives, but there is a kind of New Yorkian belief that somehow it's dangerous or a backwater or that the local schools are awful or something, and that simply isn't true (my best friend used to live there). Ditto East Orange NJ, actually, though I can't speak to the schools. But supposedly it's all dangerous and crime-ridden, and I never got bad vibes walking around there.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:49 AM
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East Orange crime statistics. Violent crime looks high as compared to national averages. Sometimes people have reasons for believing what they believe.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 11:56 AM
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a PSU MA was worth a Reed BA

That could be kind of optimistic. The point of the philosophy MA programs is basically to give people the leg up into PhD programs that they'd have with a BA from a first-rank school. Or maybe not even a first-rank school. (Also sometimes people who didn't major in philosophy, or people who did go to a first-rank school but need more tuning up. I don't remember where the students at the other MA program I taught at came from.)

Jake: It doesn't seem to be true that you need to go to a top-ten program to become a professor anywhere, but it sure helps, especially in getting research-oriented jobs.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:09 PM
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268 is very good. I wonder, though, if people see a big difference on the your kid/all kids axis between sending your kid to a magnet school and sending them to private school, and if so, why? Both are pulling the strongest, most motivated students out of the general public school population, and I'd be curious as to whether the poor-but-motivated set is dramatically better represented in the magnets than the private schools. But I don't know much about how magnet programs work in practice.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:28 PM
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My high school had a vo-tech program; I think I actually caused my guidance counselor some difficulty when I filled out the form of what I wanted to take in the next four years and auto shop figured prominently.

But the European style of O-Levels or such definitely has its downsides. You see how much people bitch about the SAT being high stress and unrepresentative and too over-weighted; how do you think American parents would feel if their thirteen year old son had to take a standardized test which could result in the state saying in effect "sorry, your son is too dumb to go to college, we're sending him to auto mechanic school."

I mean, I'm sure they'd be in favor of other people's children having the opportunity to put their skills to good use instead of spending time and money finishing out high school and dropping out after two years of college, but Johnny? "He's a genius, he just hasn't calmed down yet, he's only 13 for god's sake, of course he's going to college!"


Posted by: Jake | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:30 PM
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284: Here's my sister's take on that question.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:33 PM
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Doesn't it depends on how much your public school "equalizes"? Some schools ACTUALLY provide each student with the best personal education they can get. More schools claim that philosphy, but do not actually do so.

The schools must always make a choice with what resources they have. Some adopt the 'give the worst the most help" model. This raises the mean of the school (good) and helps prevent kids being "left behind." But it also means that the top students are going to get fewer resources and are thus less likely to have an education which is actually a "fit" for them.

It's just the old truism: Everybody likes educational tracking until their kid doesn't get into the honors class. But if your kid SHOULD be in the honors class, whatcha going to do if there is none?


Posted by: Sailorman | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:49 PM
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B, your sister's definately right about the importance of the principal. Much of what was good about my high school was directly related to the incredibly dedicated principal we had (who unfortunately just retired this spring, at the end of the school year). He'd be there from 6 in the morning until 9 at night every day, attended nearly every school event (plays, sports matches, etc.), and his two daughters attended the school while he was there, so he had a personal stake as well. He'd also get to know the students, and wouldn't just hole up in his office. And he would hire teachers of a similar character. I'm not sure how common it is to have a really good person in charge of the place, I think I lucked out in that regard.


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:51 PM
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I don't think it's rare to the point of vanishing. PK's principal last year was fabulous, and the principals I had in elementary school were, too.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 12:53 PM
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B, your sister's comments are interesting and make perfect sense, but I'm not sure they're responsive to my question.

Her comments on principals strike me as right on. One of the factors that contributed to our decision to go ahead and send our kid to private school was a really discouraging interaction with the vice-principal in his public school, who became the principal the next year.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:00 PM
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Oh, I just meant her saying that magnet schools in and of themselves don't mean much.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:04 PM
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I thought she was saying that magnet is not necessarily good and that reputation often doesn't match reality, not that there aren't good magnets. And for that matter, even if the magnets suck they're still pulling kids away from neighborhood schools, yes?

I really, really struggle with this stuff. I believe very strongly that every kid is entitled to a good, public (or at least publicly-financed) education, but I also believe that there are structural/organizational culture issues in American public education (career track stuff and curriculum politics, primarily) that are tough to deal with and that liberal sorts tend to downplay too much. That's in large part a legitimate reaction to rightist efforts to play such issues up too much, but the conflict itself makes it harder to improve the schools.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:40 PM
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And for that matter, even if the magnets suck they're still pulling kids away from neighborhood schools, yes?

I think this is a genuine issue, and the only answer is that it depends on the magnets and how they work. NYC seems to have a whole bunch of magnet programs that your kid is probably 'gifted' enough to get into if you're upper middle class, and that's how UMC people keep their kids from going to school with poorer, minoritier kids. (This is a sweeping generalization, not true of every NYC program. I'm just saying that those are the kinds of programs that Sally's preschool friends mostly went to, and I disapprove of how that dynamic worked.)

On the other hand, if the magnet program is really integrated, and provides options for poorer kids who can benefit rather than just siphoning off the rich kids, I could see how that could be a good thing.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 1:45 PM
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Ok, I come from India so I don't have much experience in this whole private school-leading-to-Ivy-League-leading-to-eternal-success-in-life thing but I think people born and living in the US are lucky - you really do have several chances to improve your lot in life. If you don't go to a good private school, you can still get into a great university. If you don't get into a great university, you can still get into a great grad school. And even if you don't get into a great grad school, you can still get a great job (maybe not initially but down the line). At every step even if you weren't born with the advantages, you can acquire them. Its an immensely forgiving, second-chance culture.

In India, the segregation starts from private school. if you don't go to an elite English-medium private school you cannot, simply cannot, unless you are superlatively bright, get into one of the few decent colleges for undergrad. Consequently if you get into a non-decent college (and remember, the difference is really really stark - we're talking like maybe 20-30 colleges for millions of people and a host of ridiculously bad schools after that) you don't hav e ashot at grad school. In India or the US or anywhere else. And without a brand name school you don't even get a job. Blue collar jobs pay very very little thanks to the large supply of labour. So you have to be very elite to start with.

Having seen that (its scary, how much your chances in life depend on where you are born), I wouldn't worry as much if I were in the US, knowing that each decision is not death. I would agree with teophilo: try out the public schools. Its not life or death.

n!


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 4:39 PM
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Dave,
Do you think a parent has a social obligation that transcends their parental obligation? Should they take every chance they have to improve their child's education, or do you think they have an obligatio to take other childrens' needs into account?

Whether you're poor or not, magnets will often skim the best and brightest. Is that the basis behind your argument?


Posted by: Sailorman | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 4:50 PM
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295: Why don't we start with your thoughts on the topic rather than your questions about mine. I'm not at all sure where you're coming from with those questions or how they fit with what I've said on this thread.


Posted by: DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 4:58 PM
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294 is a good point.


Posted by: joe o | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 4:59 PM
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264- email sent.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 7:37 PM
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292: Yes, I agree re. structural problems and liberal pieties, actually.

I think the point re. magnets is that, just like other schools, they can be good and bad. And yet ppl treat them as if they're virtually always better, simply by virtue of being magnets.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 7:44 PM
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300!


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 8-06 8:17 PM
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