On Good and Bad Schools
Here it goes again — another party where everybody discusses schools with a concerned look on their faces! The hosts are a couple in their early forties, with a three-year-old daughter. They are currently happy with their Montessori school. Yet in a few years their daughter will be starting a public school, and they even consider selling their light and spacious house to move to a nearby town with …. good schools. I am surprised: they bought the house just a couple of years ago and want to sell it again! Why go into all this trouble?
I’ve lived in our town for nine years now and I am surprised how little this story of “bad schools” has changed, even though the town itself has changed a lot. We have had new parks and theaters open, we have a Zagat-quality restaurant scene, our beach has grown into a vibrant public space. Yet, I have a feeling that nobody wants to hear about it — when something good happens here, at best people would say, “Even in Norwalk” — as if nothing good can ever come out of a town that, unlike its neighbors, doesn’t have a $200,000 median household income.
I used to argue a lot about this. My kids go to a bi-lingual school where they spend half a day speaking English and half a day — Spanish. At the age of 8, they are able to read and write short stories in Spanish (and neither me nor my husband are Spanish speakers). Their classmates come from different countries — and what a better way to get a sense for the entire world! And as a bonus we have a great playground behind the school that is surrounded by pine and oak trees and a creek where the kids explore wildlife during a recess. But my arguments usually fall on flat ears, “Just take a look at the school ratings, and you’ll see the difference!”
Of course, the ratings… Everyone trusts this mysterious benchmark that drives so many people away from our town, that makes them buy $700,000 600-square ft houses — so old that when you rip up the walls, you discover that the entire house stands on nothing but rot and mold. But this seems to be the only way they can purchase their way to a town with good (or shall I say, white?) schools.
If I had taken the ratings into consideration, my kids would have never gone to our school because at the moment it was ranked at pathetic 3 (with 10 being the highest score). But as my twins inched towards their 5th birthday, I went to see several different schools first-hand. I visited a couple of so-called “good” schools and, to be fully honest, I didn’t expect much from our school, knowing about its ratings. Yet what I found completely blew my mind! I found a principal who was talking about the school with so much passion that it felt contagious. She had a well-developed plan to turn the school into a magnet school, hire new teachers, improve the curriculum based on the recent learning science findings (all of which has been accomplished). I looked around and found a number of parents in the audience who were equally driven by what they heard. I toured the school and listened to the stories about the active parent-teacher organization that was fundraising money to renovate the library. I liked that they were so proud of it — and that they put so much weight into helping the kids learn to appreciate reading (and the library placed at the very heart of the school felt so cozy).
I can’t argue about the futility of the school ratings any more. To me, one thing that actually truly matters is whether a school has a community around it. Instead of judging the school only on whether its kids perform well on reading or math — things that may be defined largely by their upbringing or, in other words, by their sheer luck — the ratings should pay attention to this hard to measure thing — community. If you are a parent looking at new schools, check what events are held at a school, ask about how active its PTO is, and notice the passion to improve the school on the part of the administration and other parents. And yes, do look for that playground in the middle of the pinewoods and oak trees — for a place to meet and chat with other parents after the school is over. I trusted my gut that a school that has so many caring people behind it won’t let me down. I decided to give it a try — and never regretted it!
