One problem is that American ideas of what it means to be a “good school” start from places of racism and deficit.
In my first year of teaching, teachers shared tales of the district superintendent ripping down bulletin boards and tossing notebooks. The dean would call a “Code Blue” on the loudspeaker to mark his appearance for every adult. His slovenly appearance belied his desire to impose his will on schools from Harlem to Inwood. He believed his tough and belligerent demeanor would push adults to improve educational outcomes for students.
Getting to know him over the course of eight years, my opinion of him didn’t change. My opinion of a system that created the permission structure for him did. How can the evangelists of a school system that promotes kindness, empathy, and higher learning simultaneously act so heartless and detached? I could say “I don’t know,” but I do.
This was just one part of trying to make my school great again in my early years. My school withstood a dwindling student population, mass retirements, neoliberal education reforms, and gentrification. After doing some research, I found out my school reflected much of the violence occurring in the neighborhood in the 1980’s and 90’s. The school in which I taught changed principals at least seven times over 15 years. My school may have been good or bad depending on who you asked and their relationship to it. Also, my school was not immune to the centuries-long idea that it must be a bad school simply due to its student racial composition.
Few of my colleagues would call our school a bad school, but we were told it wasn’t a good school, either.
Fast-forward and I’ve witnessed the promise and peril of dozens of classrooms in multiple school systems. I’ve visited dozens of schools across the country. Every time I visited a classroom, I’d thank the teacher, sit in one of the students’ seats, and then make mental notes of this tapestry of relationships. These micro-interactions create the foundation for great learning experiences, for sure.
I always have plenty of different questions, but the one that’s usually asked of me: where is the inequity?
We can always pull up data from a public website. States have their data website. Cities and towns typically do, too (if not, a really big digital spreadsheet). The federal government has some data up to a point (get it while you can). Some nonprofits and real estate companies offer school reviews that compile both online comments and other data sources. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have had to step into a building before getting an impression or concocting a theory about the way schools work.
But this all felt super frustrating. I believe in assessment, but snapshot standardized testing at the end of the year doesn’t explain it all. Neither does asking one or two people, though I tend to prioritize students’ perceptions of their experiences. Luckily, I ran into Jennifer J. Holme’s critical work in which she theorizes how a school’s reputation is set even before they matriculate their children by virtue of the neighborhood the school is in.
Virtue. And underneath that, values.
Over the last quarter-century, we’ve ingested narratives about our children and the schools they attend based on a handful of rich, powerful people. Their rationale sampled civil rights language to turn over public institutions to the highest bidders. It isn’t just the proliferation of charter schools, but also how policymakers imbued public schools with corporate reasoning. Bosses kept trying to extract as much labor from educators with moral imperative but still under-resourcing and over-regimenting these schools. It’s always “Don’t you care about the kids?” Rarely is it “We do, too.”
In parallel, society exempted private independent schools from the narrative. But in my experience, some of those classrooms also are bereft of the type of education they deserve. For instance, what good is an academically rigorous program that doesn’t help students sympathize with their peers? If the hidden curriculum (customs, ways of being, etc.) only help students build gates and walls from people not like them, why is that considered excellent?
I have solutions that may move New York City and perhaps the country. But in the event that I don’t, I have a relatively clear eye on the games society plays. I wish more folks would do the same.
When I first started writing about this, some would remark “Well, Jose, you’re not a parent, so you’re only thinking about this like a teacher.” They ignored that I’ve been organizing with transformational parent groups since at least my second year of teaching. But now, as a parent, I can more confidently say that the idea of “choice” is trash. More specifically, parents shouldn’t have to feel like their choice of school is a matter of life and death for their child’s prospects.
Every school should be a good school. Period.
Unfortunately, as Nikole Hannah-Jones describes, there have been losses. As a parent, I’ve had to navigate three “school choice” processes: Pre-K, middle school, and high school. It’s easy to say that, as a well-regarded educator, I had the insight to make good choices for my child. But I don’t often share the hours-long meetings with education organizers from across the city. I rarely speak on the deluge of advocacy hours spent in front of policymakers including at least three schools chancellors. Our friends and family know that my wife and I decided from Day 1 that, whenever we had a complaint about our son’s school, we would make it about every child in the school, not just ours.
Unfortunately, that’s still not enough for me. While we’re making every effort to improve our child’s outcome, our child’s parents are still situated in the work of public education. What does it mean to bring value to us as workers when our systems don’t value our contributions as people?
What do we care about? Who does this all benefit? I’m not sure, but, thinking back to the school I taught in, a lot of students got a good education and many of them will say as much. It’s not just the ones that passed through my classes, either. Ultimately, a “good school” sits in a set of values, customs, and aspirations that every community must consistently remind itself. As we argue about resources and relationships, I also implore us to think about the young humans in our collective care.
Our kids shouldn’t just get an education when we have enough. They have the right to an education because they are enough.
Jose
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