{"id":10071,"date":"2015-06-16T10:17:35","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T14:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=10071"},"modified":"2015-06-16T10:17:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T14:17:35","slug":"kids-and-schools-and-liberal-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/06\/16\/kids-and-schools-and-liberal-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"Kids and Schools and Liberal Guilt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt “Dean Dad” Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting<\/a> (also at Inside Higher Ed<\/a>): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion:<\/p>\n

\nFrom a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the most high-achieving, \u201cdesirable\u201d district we can afford is open-and-shut. TB and TG are wildly smart kids who will rise to the expected level; I want the level to be high. That strategy also has the benefit of higher resale value for a house, since other parents make the same calculation. But it also involves pretending not to know certain things, or deciding not to care about them. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s hard. I want the kids to know that the world is larger and more diverse than the Honors track in a competitive suburban district. And while I want my kids to \u201cwin,\u201d I also know that the game is rigged in a host of ways.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We bought our house a long time before SteelyKid came along, but the school district did play a role in that, albeit somewhat indirectly (lots of other public services correlate with school quality). And it was hard not to notice that “Niskayuna schools” in a real estate ad bumped up the price by $30,000 over an equivalent house a few blocks away in the Schenectady district.<\/p>\n

There was a thread on one of the faculty email lists a while back encouraging new faculty not to avoid the Schenectady school district, which has had a bad reputation for years. Many people said their kids had had a great experience there, and a few explicitly raised the issue of the extreme inequality between neighboring districts. I have to admit to a few pangs of liberal guilt over that, given that my kids (like other faculty kids) will almost certainly be just fine wherever they go to school, because Kate and I have the educational and financial resources to provide enriching experiences that would make up for anything they couldn’t get in their regular school. And I know very well that it’s possible to get a good education at a not-that-great school, having attended the rural public school where my father taught.<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, there were aspects of that process that I’d just as soon not have my kids go through. It took a lot of work on my parents’ part to maximize what the school could offer, aided by the fact that my father worked in the district and knew what teachers to steer us to, and which administrators to yell at to get stuff done. And even with that, I was behind some of my classmates from wealthier suburban districts when I got to Williams. Those problems have only gotten bigger as AP classes have expanded in prominence. <\/p>\n

SteelyKid and The Pip will, of course, get whatever they need (within our ability to provide it) to pursue their education. It’d be a whole lot more pleasant for all of us to have that come in the context of the regular school system, though, rather than being something we have to scrap and fight to provide outside of normal channels. Which argues for living in the best possible district, even if that means contributing in a small way to the problems of inequality.<\/p>\n

Which is, of course, why this sort of thing is such a thorny problem. The obvious fix is to go away from the insane system of funding schools almost entirely through local property taxes, but there are enormous political obstacles to that. Inequality in housing and schools isn’t driven just by greed (which can be made a political liability to some extent), but by the desire of parents to provide for their children. That’s a hard thing to argue against, even with politically aware parents who can rattle off all the problematic aspects of the way the system is rigged. You end up pitting a fairly diffuse public good against the very concrete personal interests of families in good districts, and that’s not even close to a fair fight.<\/p>\n

So, yeah, a hard problem. On the one hand, I’m in favor of making a more equitable educational system for everyone. On the other, though, I’m not in any hurry to move out of the elite suburban district we live in, so as to put my kids’ education where my mouth is (as it were). Good intentions, meet road to hell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt “Dean Dad” Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion: From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the… Continue reading Kids and Schools and Liberal Guilt<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,13,2,28,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-class_issues","category-education","category-personal","category-politics","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}