Yesterday, Salon.com published an interview with Sandra Tsing Loh, author of Mother On Fire, about the public school system. Loh, who works in public broadcasting, came to the realization after having her children that she couldn't afford to send them to private schools. So she looked into the public schools and was surprised by what she found there. She likens them to Costco, where nothing is fancy, but you can find some amazing things there.
This is a topic that I have rather irresponsibly ignored in my discussions of the pros and cons of urbia. Public schools can be either. But most people are afraid of city schools. They have terrible reputations, which is one reason why so many parents are avoiding them, either by moving out of the city or by never going there in the first place. I've often thought that as much as I love city living, I don't think I would have chosen to live here when my children were small. And in fact, I didn't. We moved into a school district outside of the city limits where my children were able to walk to school and live in the same neighborhood as all of their friends.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. The problem was, it wasn't a top school district. My children did okay (one of my daughters was a National Merit Scholar), but they didn't have the prestige of a private school or better school district to put on their college applications. Would a city school system have made a difference? I honestly don't know because I don't know enough about ours (which is in Columbus, Ohio).
Years ago, I read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, a book about our American school system. While the book got me on fire about the inequitable way that we fund schools, it also made me deathly afraid of city schools. The conditions he described were appalling. This has been an age-old problem and not just since busing was instituted in the 70's. But it has a lot to do with how we fund school districts, an issue Loh only indirectly refers to in the interview. Where property values are high, school districts are better funded. Usually. But city school districts pool all the property assets from the entire city. This includes areas where young professionals live and where houses start in the $200,000 range. Counterbalanced by the poorer areas, like where I live, the money gets spread thin. And yet this still adds up to a lot of money.
I confess that I don't know that much about our city school district. I do know that there was enough money to build a state-of-the-art elementary school across the street from me and that that was just one of six or seven that was built or is being built recently. I've been in a couple of the high schools. They were older and had some graffiti but I had no reason to think that they weren't good schools.
Loh makes a good point at the end of her interview. She said that it is time for us to start thinking communally instead of competitively. Our schools shouldn't be about which one is the newest or has the most amenities. Education is more about good teachers and good programs. And involved parents. Any school can be a good school if enough people put the time into finding out what is going on and are willing to do what they can do to make it better. We don't have to settle for bad schools, but it will take effort on our part to improve them.
