More on public education

Earlier, I posted,

I really believe that a lot of parents make the choice to keep their kids out of the public school system because they have been told, over and over again, that it won't serve them, and the only solution is home-schooling or vouchers.

Over at Salon today, a conversation with Sandra Tsing Loh caught my eye.

Loh's kids are in a school district about 2 over from mine, LAUSD. LAUSD is a behemoth, and it is legendarily hard to find a good neighborhood school within its confines. As a mom without the resources to fund the recommended $25k per year private schools in her area, she did something unheard of: she went to her neighborhood school to see what they could offer.

When I was at public radio looking at kindergartens for [my older daughter] Madeline, for months I did not meet anybody who had their kids in public school in Los Angeles, which is really shocking. I'm a journalist so my friends are journalists: magazines, newspapers, even public radio. Nobody had their kids in public school. That's why I would never think of just going to the corner school and poking my head in. Because that's like going to the DMV.

[snip]

I started doing these questionnaires. I'd say, "OK, before we get started: On a scale of 1-10, how terrified are you of your local kindergarten?" 11! "Have you ever set foot inside that kindergarten?" No! "Do you know any living soul who has ever set foot inside that school?" No! "How do you know the school is so bad?" Uh, neighbor ...? Nobody had any direct experience of that school, but they were so terrified.

So what happens when you take the chance and look inside?

At our school, they're learning to read like gangbusters, the teachers are great, the solids are definitely there. But they didn't have instrumental music. So I found out that VH1 gives grants of new musical instruments to schools, and I did a lot of fancy footwork to get these instruments to our school. Sometimes with these school grants, it's like the Mafia truck drives up and stereos fall off. And it's like, get the stereos! I don't know where we'll put them, but get them! It was like that with these instruments. We got them, and then I had to find a music teacher and then pay the music teacher. It was a bit of a thing to unravel. Yet for me it was sort of fun.

We needed an after-school program. We didn't have one. And our PTA, we were able to start an after-school program with arts and crafts -- and even piano. Piano lessons, they're $55 for half an hour to teach a 6-year-old. We can't afford that either. And if we don't have affordable piano lessons, no one will play the piano. So we got these affordable lessons. I'm in a pocket of bohemian parents who have a little extra time and can teach an art or craft class. Five dollars a lesson, maybe $6, pretty cheap. We scholarship people for free and we still have money left to pay our violin teacher. It's an economy of scale. We know how to rub quarters together and make something.

The public schools need our personal, community, and political support, not the hand wringing. Not the dropping out, by way of home school or private academies. Tsing Loh makes this point,

And I think that goes back to the public school thing, where on one affluent block, in Los Angeles, every morning about 7 a.m. you see the four Lexuses and Range Rovers bolting out of the driveways and going to four different private schools in four different remote parts of the city. If they each just went to the corner public school and took one year of tuition -- $25,000 a year -- and put it into that school for one year, that would be $100,000. That school could buy a new gym, and everyone would save so much money -- you'd save gas, you'd save the planet -- if people just looked around and started thinking a little more communally rather than competitively.

Where I live, in the land of really decent public schools, the hand-wringing and opting out contribute almost as much to the district's difficulties as the budget shortfalls do. I read comment in the local paper a few weeks ago (paraphrasing):

Both of my kids went to private school, so I don't know very much about the local public schools. But I've seen the results: not pretty.

Really? Because I work with teens, and over the past 8 or 9 years I've watched my public-schooled teens go off to prestigious colleges. I've watched them work really hard through high school, in band, in sports, in internship programs with scientific labs. I've seen the way they work in community, heard them express their ideas, their values, and their bemusement over what on earth the adults are so freaked out about.

I've seen the same things from private and home-schooled kids. And I've seen adolescent angst turn into late teen torpor and worried about how best to guide them back in progress and growth. Whether their schooling has been public, private, or at home, the kids are, essentially, kids.

Unfortunately, the tide in this town seems to be turning toward elite selfishness, with parents demanding special charter schools for their special kids, threatening to drop out of the district if they don't get their way, and a school board election coming up which, I fear, will elect a board weighted with cultural extremists who've told the parents that they should have everything they want, and left out the facts that they will also push for prayer in schools and probably the teaching of ID.

We'll see.

But a word of advice to new parents of 4 year olds here in California: read Tsing Loh's article, and then go down to your local school and get to know it.