Politics and Public Schools: A Friday Chat
ESTER: Hallo! What a surreal news week.
NICOLE: I know. (Wait, which surreal news are you thinking about?)
ESTER: Ha, well, most recently there’s the media bombshell that Gawker has essentially put itself on eBay.
Gawker Declaring Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
But this is also the week Hillary Clinton clinched the nomination to become the first woman to head a major party’s ticket. That was surreal in a better way.
NICOLE: That was real! And something a lot of people have predicted would happen for months! I wasn’t surprised at all. Delighted, a little sad for Bernie, but not surprised.
ESTER: I guess I didn’t let myself believe it would actually happen until it did. I cried a little after I voted for her in the primary, partly because of who she is — progressive women rarely rise to the top in politics; if the ladies are ever voted in, they’re almost always tough-as-nails conservative types like Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir — but also because of what she represents. It’s a big fucking deal.
NICOLE: It is a HUGE fucking deal, for sure. It is going to be an exciting/interesting/strange/bizarre election season.
ESTER: On a more Billfold-y topic, did you read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ piece about school segregation?
Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City
It’s really important, and I think it makes clear that we, as a society, have failed when it comes to public education for all. Since institutions have functionally given up on integration, what we’ve ended up doing is leaving the responsibility with certain individuals to try to make things right because they prioritize diversity, and that’s absurd. How many parents will really not choose the “best possible school” for their own kids? Joshua Michtom, okay. Nikole Hannah-Jones. But these people, who will value an abstract good (justice, fairness) over a concrete one (the better education for their own children), are 1 in a 1000.
We can’t wait on individuals to solve this problem; we need to decouple public school funding from property taxes so that all schools have a chance to be good, and not just a select handful in rich neighborhoods. Or something! How does Finland do it? How do other countries fund public education so that it isn’t just wealthy kids who can manage to get proper educations?
NICOLE: I did read Hannah-Jones’ piece, and yeah, there are a lot of “this should be different” feelings in there. Both in the school part and in the underlying poverty/economics-at-home part. Like:
“There were kids in the school that were really high-risk kids, kids who were homeless, living in temporary shelters, you know, poverty can be really brutal,” Goldsmith says. “The school was really committed to helping all children, but we had white middle-class parents saying, ‘I don’t want my child in the same class with the kid who has emotional issues.’ ”
“Solving” public education almost requires solving economic inequality at its core. Do you think?
ESTER: Yes, and it’s self-reinforcing, too, because we perpetuate economic inequality by giving poor kids such lackluster schools.
NICOLE: There was also that Slate article from this week:
We live in a country where minorities frequently face worse outcomes than their white counterparts and where racial fault lines cut deeply through our public life. Right now, schools and school systems across the country are confronting a question that our society at large will need to answer in the coming years: Do Americans have the will and understanding to build a more inclusive, and less deeply segregated, nation? In many parts of America — urban, rural, and suburban — that will require a radical upending of the status quo.
It’s more of a bird’s-eye view than Hannah-Jones’ story, but it’s asking many of the same questions.
ESTER: Another intense but important piece, absolutely. It reports that public schools are now apparently 52 percent students of color. Also:
More than 50 percent of public school students are now low-income. One out of 5 speaks a language other than English at home. And nearly one quarter are foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent.
Is this going to be a tipping point? Has the tipping point already been reached? Hannah-Jones is pretty scathing about the politicians currently in charge of NYC’s school system and the way they haven’t made integration a priority, but I also kind of understand it: from their point of view, they only have some white families willing to stay in the public school system at all, and they want to keep as many of them as possible and at the same time attract more. The NYC school system is only 11–15 percent white kids right now, according to the stats I’ve seen. They’re clustered in the best schools, and that’s patently unfair to everyone else. But if they leave and then the quality of the schools they’ve left goes down, that’s bad for everyone too, right?
NICOLE: I don’t think you can put the quality of a school on the kids, unless I’m misreading that. If Child A leaves a school and Child B enters, the quality of the education should stay roughly the same? Understanding that children in themselves are different and they may have different resources at home.
ESTER: I think it’s more that, a school with more white kids is more likely to draw resources and attention. The parents tend to have more time and money to devote. Better teachers come teach there. This is from what I recall from that great This American Life series on public education, anyway, also featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones.
562: The Problem We All Live With
NICOLE: And the “parents with time and money” issue brings up the whole “public education is kind of designed for families with a lot of disposable income and one full-time-stay-at-home parent” thing which … ha, nope, that is not a thing anymore. Not for a lot of families.
ESTER: Ugh, yeah. The pre-K program we chose for BG is an integrated / diverse neighborhood school, one that by all accounts is vibrant and well-led. I liked it when I toured it, I’m impressed by the principal, and I’m excited to have BG attend; she’ll have a much less homogenous educational experience than I had from the get go, and that’s great. But part of the reason I put it first when I had to rank my options is that the other two public schools offering pre-K programs in my district, both of which would be more convenient (because they’re closer to where Baby Boy will go to daycare), don’t offer after-school programming of any kind. And the day ends at 2:15.
NICOLE: That is, like, NOW.
ESTER: Right! Like, excuse me, I’ve got to blow off half my work day because my kid’s out of class and there’s no alternative except paying a babysitter $17 an hour to look after her for 3–4 hours every afternoon? That’s nuts. So instead I’ll probably end up paying a babysitter or someone to pick her up at least some days when her afterschool program ends, around 6:00, because I’ll need to pick up the baby in a completely different direction at the same time and Ben can’t leave work that early every day and … I’m basically passing out just thinking about the logistics. And the cost.
Still: universal pre-K is a great first step, and I’m hoping it does keep more middle-class and white families in the public school system. I think as many of us as possible do need to buy in and make things better all around. More importantly, though, we need more institutional solutions, like this one.
School Integration Is Making a Comeback
These are large-scale problems. They require more than individual tweaks.
NICOLE: Now I need to re-familiarize myself with Hillary Clinton’s education plan.
Hillary Clinton on K-12 education
ESTER: What’s Trump’s official platform, I wonder. Here’s something from the Washington Post.
Donald Trump on education: Wrong, wrong and wrong
Oh and here’s something from Ed Week:
Envisioning Education Policy Under a President Donald Trump
Over the course of his public life, Trump has addressed education issues with differing degrees of specificity. For example, in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, Trump expressed skepticism about the influence of teachers’ unions on public schools, as well as support for a variety of school choice programs.
“Education reformers call this school choice, charter schools, vouchers, even opportunity scholarships. I call it competition — the American way,” Trump wrote.
NICOLE: There does not appear to be an education plan on the official Trump website.
ESTER: Shocker.
Support The Billfold
The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.
Comments