“What we’re going to do for our kids’ education” might be the single most common discussion I have had in my social life as a parent.
Like many parents in NYC and across the country, I was captivated by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay in the New York Times. Parents are constantly asking themselves, “Have I done right by my kid” when it comes to education.
Every single parent I have ever spoken to with the means to choose has agonized over this decision. Most parents from NYC that I know go one of three ways: try and get their kid into a gifted and talented program, send their kid to private school, or move to the suburbs.
We didn’t want to do that with our son. Both of us wanted to find a school that would reflect the diversity of NYC. We wanted our son to have a diverse group of friends who lived in our neighborhood as part of a community. This was our fundamental value and guided our process as we sought out a local public school.
We were a little concerned about the academic rigor, but we figured that we wouldn’t get everything we wanted. In our eyes, the diversity and cohesiveness of the community of the school were more important than anything. “We can figure out how to make up for whatever he is missing,” we figured. Then middle school hit.
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In sixth grade, my son got straight A’s. But he could barely write a single page or do more than ten math problems without suffering from academic exhaustion. We loved our son’s school, particularly how strong it was at offering a sense of community even through Covid. But as he got older, I needed more for him. We decided to explore the idea of moving our son to a charter school.
I was deeply against this. I’ve taught in public and private schools, and my strongest feelings of antipathy were towards charter schools. My feeling was that charter schools recruit inexperienced young teachers and work them to the bone for a few years while “skimming the cream” of the students who could be in a local public school.
My stance had to evolve when I begrudgingly visited one and saw a diverse group of students reading books in the library.
My belief that charter schools take advantage of young teachers couldn’t survive meeting teachers at a school who were in their tenth year teaching and seemed to love what they were doing.
It couldn’t survive when I heard the principal talk about how students compete to become part of the “million words club,” where they take tests after reading books and are credited with the number of words towards the goal of reading a million words. After seeing my son not finish a single book in his first year of middle school and now competing to read multiple books in a month, my preconceptions could not survive.
What I thought was a matter of principle against school choice was actually an untested assumption. I still have these concerns about charter schools as a whole, but the evidence in front of me showed me that my image of charter schools wasn’t universal.
I decided that the best way for me to give my son what he needs and maintain my values was to send my son to a charter school but to still maintain my relationship with my son’s former school. I had served as PTA co-president for two years. Now I serve on the newly formed school grant-writing committee. I continue to work to improve a school that served my son so well but no longer could meet his needs.
I am gratified that I am able to play a small part in helping other kids experience the same thing that brought all of us together as a community.
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In a social media post written in June of 2024, Hannah-Jones wrote, “Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice” when referring to their choice of school for their daughter. Her recent essay suggests concerns that weren’t publicly shared. Some critics have argued that this is hypocritical, but I don’t have a problem with her changing her mind. Parents make decisions for our children, and we change our minds when we need to. It seems perfectly reasonable to love a school and be sure that you made the right decision at one point and then when something as significant as the pressures of high school come, to decide that what you have is not enough.
I’ve stopped thinking about where my son attends school as a matter of moral principle. My commitment to community and diversity remains but where that occurs is no longer held as sacred. My educational philosophy is now closer to being a deeply believed, but lightly held, hypothesis. I strongly believe in the values that made us choose our school. But I think I am humble enough to say that priorities have to shift even as you maintain your convictions.
I decided that even if my son needed to leave, I could stay and continue to serve the community that served us so well. We can continue to find ways to help a school even when we aren’t immediately getting a benefit from the school.
My son needed to leave. I did not.
