When You Have Options

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent piece about her decision to send her daughter to a problematic public elementary school, and her subsequent regrets, struck a chord. It spoke to a dilemma that parents who have both options and consciences deal with regularly.

I’ve written before on why my kids didn’t attend the college at which I worked at the time. The short version is that they are their own people, not extensions of me, and they have their own interests and preferences. (They also didn’t want to go someplace where they’d be known as the VP’s kid.) We had the means to allow them options, and we wanted to encourage them to make their own decisions. Yes, we had to rule out a couple of places due to truly excessive cost, but that still left most places on the table. They chose well and thrived. It worked out.

Hannah-Jones’s piece, though, is about elementary school. It’s one thing to allow a young adult to choose their own path; it’s quite another with a 4-year-old. At that point, parents have to make choices.

In a more perfect world, of course, that would be easy. Well-funded, well-run, diverse public schools would be the norm and parents could send their kids to the local school without worry. I’m told that’s how it works in some Nordic countries; it sounds wonderful. If Americans made different political choices, we could get a lot closer to that, and I believe that we should. But on the ground, right now, that’s not how it works.

In grad school, when I was single and childless, I chose where to live based almost entirely on cost and distance from the university. I paid no attention to school districts because I had no reason to. After getting married, when we were expecting our first child, we went house-hunting because the one-bedroom condo we had wasn’t gonna work. Suddenly, the reality of stratified school districts mattered.

The dirty little secret of American public schools is just how racially and economically segregated they actually are.

We sent our kids to public schools for their entire K–12 sequences. (For that matter, they both attended public universities for undergrad, too.) We had both attended public K–12 ourselves, so it seemed normal. But we also knew that in choosing a house, we were choosing a school district.

In some ways, we had a much easier decision than Hannah-Jones did. She wanted a school at which her daughter wouldn’t be isolated by her race, which narrowed the options considerably. As white people in the suburbs, we didn’t have to face that dilemma; our kids wouldn’t stand out racially in most of the districts around us. Some districts were more diverse than others, but we didn’t have to factor in the fear of being the “only.” And unlike in New York City, none of the public schools around us were selective—if you lived in a district, you could attend. We didn’t have to worry about whether our 4-year-old would make the cut. That took some pressure off.

(Side note: Selective admissions for 4-year-olds is insane.)

We wound up balancing an egalitarian sensibility with wanting our kids to get good educations by ruling out the bottom but ignoring fine-grained distinctions at the top. My sense of it was that the kids would do well at anything from a pretty good school on up, and we wound up living in pretty good school districts. We weren’t willing to make our kids martyrs to some sort of ideal, and we had no illusions about them saving otherwise-struggling schools on their own. But we didn’t want them growing up in bubbles, either. It seemed to work.

I’d like to see more parents have the option of at least pretty good school districts in which their kids wouldn’t feel isolated. People make choices under the conditions they’re in; improve the conditions, and the choices become both easier and less fraught. I don’t blame Hannah-Jones for the choices she made, given what she knew at the time. I’d prefer to see us move toward a reality in which she wouldn’t face that dilemma in the first place.