Schools, choices

and why we should trust teachers & librarians

One of the things I think about, dropping my children off at their different schools (public elementary for Bea, and a private preschool that’s part of a charter for Harriet), is choice. There are so many good choices around here—Montessori, project-based, public. Like many other parents and caregivers, we drop our children off because to take the bus, Bea would have to leave the house before seven, and Harriet’s school has no bus service, even for the older kids.

The schools get fancier and newer as you approach Briar Chapel, an enormous neighborhood of expensive, new-built homes where we sometimes do our trick-or-treating (copious candy, poor recognition of Egyptian cat-goddesses), and lately have been trail-riding (see aboveawesome bike trails). Surrounding Briar Chapel are four schools—a new public elementary, a public middle school, and two public charters. All of these schools are recently built, and my understanding is that they are all excellent.

But why do we need so. Many. Choices? Even when our choices are motivated by good intentions—finding the best learning model or resources for our kids, or fleeing a bad situation (even more understandable)—isn’t choice a kind of slippery slope? If we choose, and choose, and choose, what’s left for people who can’t choose? And what happens when my choice takes away choices or resources from someone else?

Writing in the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Than Nguyen wrote about his own discomfort, as a young teenager, when reading a book he checked out from the library about the brutality of the Vietnam War.

As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.

Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t complain to the library or petition the librarians to take the book off the shelves. Nor did my parents. It didn’t cross my mind that we should ban “Close Quarters” or any of the many other books, movies and TV shows in which racist and sexist depictions of Vietnamese and other Asian people appear.

The book, he said, became part of his education, and when he re-read it, working on The Sympathizer, he understood something new about the author’s intentions. He continues:

Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.

But those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.

Nguyen was writing in the wake of recent school-based censorship of important books like Maus, Beloved, and New Kid. But I think that the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia expressed by parents advocating for censorship are connected to the desire that so many of us have for choice. The choice to be sheltered, the choice not to know or to pretend that things are not, in fact, the way that they are.

In the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, Terry McAuliffe’s supposed big gaffe was speaking the truth at a September debate. Responding to Youngkin’s claim that parents should “be in charge” of their kids’ education, McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Teachers watching that debate nodded sagely; but replaying that moment, again and again, and amplifying it with racist ads (including a white woman complaining about her high school senior being exposed to Beloved nearly a decade ago), Youngkin won.

He's now being sued by multiple school districts because of his insistence on “choice”—school districts are no longer able to have or enforce mask rules, because “parents are in charge.” But what about parents who don’t want their schools shut down because of Covid spread? Or who don’t want their kids to get Covid? Or for their kids’ teachers to get sick or quit?

In North Carolina, we don’t have a mask mandate—mask-wearing is up to individual school districts, which must have monthly meetings to determine if these mandates continue. Currently 85 of 115 school districts have mask mandates. All of the charter schools close to us have them—and Harriet’s school has done an especially great job of enforcing them, doing contact tracing, and offering Covid tests.

But they don’t have to—charters are governed by separate boards, and can make choices that are more idiosyncratic than a public school system with a traditional school board. This is part of the “choice” that goes into the charter school system. I’m pretty sure the charter schools near us are also not censoring their libraries, or keeping important texts out of the classroom… but that is not true of charter schools overall, which is part of the problem.

Both of the charter schools where I worked in North Carolina (one in Durham, one in Saxapahaw) were what we called then “schools of choice.” (Both kids and administrators would refer to the school that way, meaning very different things.) Parents applied, there was a lottery, and we built our enrollment from there. At one time the school in Saxapahaw had students from six different counties! Lots of people making long drives to get to that school, since of course we did not have buses.

Both schools were project-based, which I loved, and fairly chill, with a hippie aesthetic (shoes-optional at the elementary school). They were both significantly easier places to teach than other places I’d worked, and here’s why:

-The classes were much smaller

-The kids were richer (neither charter school had a bus service, neither offered school breakfast, and one did not even have school lunch, which means that families who depend on bus transportation and school meals were disincentivized to apply)

-There was actually very little oversight/attention to what I actually taught

But here’s the other thing: Neither charter school principal I worked for actually gave a rat’s ass what parents thought. They also cherry-picked applications to weed out “difficult” kids and families.

“Let’s put that application in the circular file,” one principal joked after a family with rambunctious kids took a tour. The other principal banned parents who were especially difficult from campus—she actually called the cops and told them that the parents were trespassing. And the cops complied! Both principals have since retired, and I don’t think either school does that now, but because of the very small board of governance, it was pretty easy for a small group of people to make big decisions for the entire school.

Well, what about school choice and private schools? Many have pointed out the hypocrisy that at least one of Glenn Youngkin’s children attends a private school (not even in Virginia) with a mask mandate. So, his kids are protected, but how about yours? Perhaps he would argue that the school was responding to parent demands, being responsive to those (never mind the fact that mask mandates are popular with teachers and parents in many school districts in Virginia). And private schools do have a certain degree of parent-pleasing to them. But while I’ve never taught in a private school, I have taught perfectly lovely students who were “counseled out” of them. These were kids who didn’t fit in, for one reason or another (usually learning differences) and whose families were not rich enough to make them worth keeping.

That’s the dirty secret. There is no magical school (aside from home school?) where you can make every choice for your kids, because that’s pedagogically unsound as well as impossible, unless you live somewhere everyone agrees on everything… which also sounds kind of dangerous and weird.

Instead, I think we need to focus our choice-making, whatever school our kids attend, on doing helpful things that benefit the public school system. This includes donating resources if you have them, volunteering for shifts at the PTA thrift shop in Chatham, NC if you’re a local reader (we’ll say more about that in an upcoming post), and recognizing that good public schools require taxes and benefit all of us… whether we have kids or not.

Maybe most importantly, we need to trust and support our teachers and librarians. The best, most knowledgeable, most up-to-date with readings, most patient people I know are all teachers and librarians. I’m so grateful for them—in my life, my childrens’ lives, and your life too.

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P.S. Here is a new joke from Bea:

Q. Why shouldn’t you trust a subatomic particle?

A. Because it makes everything up!