What We’re Reading

Selections this week from Sara Ivry, a single mom facing the whole public school application beast. She’s also a journalist and the host of Vox Tablet, a weekly podcast.

It’d be a challenge to be a middle-class professional person in New York City and not absorb some of the free-floating anxiety regarding education in this highly competitive town. Yet until three years ago, when I had a child of my own, I had succeeded more or less in tuning all schooling worries out. After all, who cares about the demerits of standardized testing if you don’t have a kid who has to endure it.

This year, my child entered nursery school, a private one, since there are only private (and often costly) options for such programs. The application was fairly straightforward and admittance was offered on a first-come first serve basis. Fortunately that’s a test I can ace. Yet elsewhere we were waitlisted and I was left briefly aggrieved over seeming rejection and the lack of options at my disposal.

What opportunities was Isaiah already being denied? Were those other programs “better” somehow? Where had my “admissions essay” such as it was (a few sentences arguing what makes your two or three-year-old unique is pretty much, please lets all agree, going to be bunk, which means other factors — connections, for instance, are what get you in so often) gone awry? How would his development — his future! — be impaired by the course we’ve now set upon?

To a large extent these are histrionics; recall, we’re talking about a three-year-old, who’s doing great, I’m delighted to say, in the terrific program he attends. My first foray into school the parent’s viewpoint is a reminder to me to be grateful for what it’s in front of me — and to forget about what’s behind closed doors. Yet these questions, and others, form the basis of the collective anxiety over education so many parents I know share, and they may well set up camp in some recess of my imagination and stay until my child graduates high school. Certainly they’ll make an appearance this spring and next fall as I tunnel through applications for Universal Pre-K (free!) and then kindergarten.

And their presence has made me increasingly attuned to stories of education — to stories of achievement gaps, of moves toward or away from charters, of challenges to the Common Core and how teachers go about approaching it.

Here are a handful I liked from this past week.

Here Come the Public-School Consultants

By Alissa Quart, in The Atlantic

Joyce Szuflita, a Brooklyn mother of twins (now out of college), consults with upper-middle class Brooklyn parents concerned with getting their kids into good public schools. They can cough up to $550 for a session with her, though she also holds group talks, like one I attended earlier this fall, for a mere 25 bucks. I trust the info is the same — nuggets of advice like go on school tours; consider if you’d want to work for a particular principal, bearing in mind that if she’s affable, her staff is probably happy and a happy staff means a better-run school; apply to everything you can because it’s all about giving your child options.

“That consultants for public schools exist at all is a testament to a bewildering system, increasingly divided by race and class, that can hold not just obvious inequalities, but hidden ones too,” observes Alissa Quart astutely.

Is Szuflita an opportunist? Maybe. She acknowledges that she’s helping the upper-middle class but that in so doing she’s also helping maintain economic diversity within the public system. After all, there’s always the chance that without her hand — holding, some families would surely go the private route leaving public good behind.

Before Minecraft, The Blocks Were Made of Wood

By Eric Westervelt, NPR

At a lab school at Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, children in pre-k and kindergarten are encouraged to forgo educational apps in favor of good, old-fashioned wood blocks. They help them learn to problem-solve and collaborate, and researchers point out the link between playing with blocks and language and cognition skills.

I haven’t been dogmatic in my avoidance of technology — certainly Isaiah knows how to swipe a cell phone and watches his fair share of cartoons — but I also have never downloaded an educational app. It’s not philosophical avoidance — it’s more a combo of laziness and confidence that reading to and taking with him alongside traditional toys, like — you got it! — blocks, are sufficiently stimulating to his young mind, body, and spirit.

I am hereby affirmed.

Gowanus Principal at the Forefront of Making City Schools More Diverse

By Leslie Albrecht in DNAInfo

Some weeks back, I read that some of the local schools I’ll likely apply to for my boy, when kindergarten application time rolls around, will be part of a pilot program aimed at achieving greater diversity in the classroom. That is: there’ll be a portion of class seats set aside for kids in the child welfare system and kids who are English Language Learners. Yes, I’m for diversity. Also yes, I’m ambivalent about programs that might jeopardize *my* kid’s opportunity to avail himself of the best opportunities around (there they are again — those pesky anxieties!)

Arthur Mattia, aka “Mr Artie” to his students, is one of the principals who’s part of this pilot. He left the world of finance to work as a phys ed teacher in East New York, a rough and poor neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I was given a broken hula hoop and a deflated ball and a [small] room, and they said, ‘Teach P.E. to emotionally handicapped students.’”

I don’t know Mr. Artie, his school isn’t in my district and so it’s unlikely I’ll ever meet him, but his commitment to his students and the affection some of his former students (I know a few) have for the school, are a testament to his work and good judgment. If we participate in a public system, then we should be willing to defer to the general public good so long as it’s determined by people like Mr. Artie.

If You Build Affordable Housing for Teachers, Will They Come?

By Jess Clark, on NPR’s All Things Considered

What’s striking about this story is not so much the novelty that a district in Northeastern North Carolina built apartments to entice teachers to take jobs in that rural area, but that these teachers, at least new ones, make $36,000 a year. Peanuts, really.

Educators are endowed with such tremendous responsibilities — to safeguard our children and to mold them into clear thinkers and responsible individuals. Yet what we pay them for this works suggests how little we really value it — or, perhaps — how little we value our children, our future.

How Mass Shootings Are Changing America’s Schools

By Elizabeth Skoski in The Washington Post

A former teacher distinguishes two eras from her classroom days: life before the shootings at Sandy Hook and life after. She recalls asking her students, residents of Brooklyn’s more violent neighborhoods, to write letters of support to people in the Connecticut town after that massacre.

“They sit over their desks in silence, scratching out the personal misfortunes they have experienced… They ask me to read their letters, to check and see if they’re okay. I read their words filled with unimaginable understanding from their 15 short years of life. They write of understanding the feeling of emptiness after a friend’s death. They write about their anger over a parent’s death. They write about the guns they see tucked into waistbands and the firecracker pops in the night outside their windows. They write with an intimate knowledge of gun violence. They write with such an understanding of viciousness and heartbreak that I almost can’t believe the amount of compassion that pours through.”

I dare you not to cry.

Thanks for reading,

Sara Ivry