I disagree with Nikole Hannah-Jones about a lot of issues, but I thought her recent piece about her regrets over sending her daughter to her poor-performing local public school rather than acting like most parents and deploying her financial means to maximize school quality was extremely well-written, emotionally affecting, and honest.
I’m also a little sad to say that among acquaintances of mine, especially non-parents, the main takeaway from the story seems to be that the threads of idealism were completely misguided and every parent has an absolute obligation to do everything in their power to optimize for their own kid.
Reading the story, I had some uncomfortable moments because Kate and I have made structurally similar choices with our son’s education. From pre-K (which starts at age three in D.C.) through fifth grade, he went to our local public elementary school, a Title I school that is 47 percent Black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 22 percent English language learners; it was even less white when he started.
He now goes to our locally zoned middle school, which has similar demographics.
Since he’s only been at the middle school for a few weeks, I can’t speak to the experience in detail. But our experience being the affluent family at a mostly low-income majority-minority elementary school was fine — good, even. Not without difficulty or downside, of course, but even from a purely selfish viewpoint, I’d say the difficulties and downsides were minor compared with the price of private school tuition or the annoyance of moving to the suburbs.
What’s more, not only do I think it’s been a fine decision on a selfish family level, I think that it has accomplished some of our broader goals. The school primarily serves low-income families and many of the kids do have difficult home lives and discipline problems at school. But the school was still a well-run, happy place for our child, who learned to navigate a much broader range of social interactions than if we’d sent him to school only with other affluent children, and the presence of a critical mass of affluent, educated, engaged parents I think made a real difference in the lives of the teachers and the students.
I’m not here to quibble with Hannah-Jones’s take on her experience, and our situations are certainly not identical.
Instead, I’m writing to those who reacted to her piece with blanket skepticism about inner-city schools or with hostility to the idea of considering the needs of other children when deciding what to do for your own, because it would be a shame if every affluent urban parent of a toddler decides they need to flee to the suburbs.
Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. But the actual details of schools that serve high-need populations vary quite a lot, and it’s worth both engaging with the specifics of your local situation and thinking about the general policy questions.