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I love my son's elementary school, where three magnet programs serve all children well, from the lowest performing to the highly gifted. My daughter's middle school is fine, though less imaginative than I want inside the classroom and maybe more imaginative than I want outside class (if your child isn't in middle school, just wait). But overall, on my worst days, I fear my community's public school system is a mess. I'm not the only parent worrying about the state of our public schools. A March poll of 1,000 Americans commissioned by Time and the Oprah Winfrey Show found that over half the respondents were dissatisfied with public schools. In the poll, part of a special Time report called "Drop Out Nation" and a series of shows on Oprah, sixty-one percent of respondents described the public schools as being in a state of crisis. Time reported that thirty percent of American high school students don't even graduate. Among all the issues facing U.S. schools, differences in social class have long been an unspoken undercurrent. The national advocacy group Parents for Public Schools, with community-based chapters in more than a dozen states, was initially formed in 1991 to combat white, middle-class flight from the public schools. Recent books like The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol (2005) and All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public Choice by Richard Kahlenberg (2003) look at the link between socioeconomic status and school performance. In my experience, what tends to separate parents at heterogeneous schools is not race. It's class. Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live, is typical of places rife with concern over the state of public schooling. The community can't agree how to fund the new schools we so badly need, with mostly white suburban parents pitted against mostly black urban parents. Everyone wants better management of the school budget, but nobody wants higher property taxes, and the latest bond referendum failed by a large margin. Instead of offering leadership, the school board bickers like a bunch of second graders. We have an increasing number of students who don't speak English as their first language. What's more, in a troubling development for the city that was the first in the nation to use busing for integration, our schools have re-segregated, thanks to a new plan for assigning students to particular schools. In other parts of the country, add the potential headaches of vouchers and union squabbles to the mix. It all could be enough to make middle-class parents, even those who value public education, give up. If parents aren't leaving public schools in body, are they in spirit? Are middle-class parents still believers in public education and still willing to fight for it? Brain, Child takes a look at some of those pressures and what parents are doing to reclaim their schools. ***
These days, what you want from your local public school might depend on where you sit on the economic ladder. Attentive rich parents can buy—and always have bought—what they need for their kids, whether it's private tutors, private school, or a home in an exclusive neighborhood served by top-notch public schools. Attentive poor parents want what they've always wanted—an education to help their kids do better than they have. But middle-class parents, who used to just blithely send off their progeny to the neighborhood public school from eight to three every day, confident that they'd get what they needed to become productive citizens, now have to contend with a super-competitive marketplace. They worry that the stakes have been raised for their kids, in terms of both getting into the right colleges and making it in the working world. They're taking on giant mortgages on houses in good school districts. But they're less sure that even the best public schools can deliver what their kids need to succeed. Schools themselves are facing unprecedented pressures. We ask them to care for the mental, emotional, physical, and social well-being of our children. We expect them to serve previously unserved portions of the population, like the mentally and physically disabled children who were once shunted off to separate schools or kept at home. At the other end of the spectrum, we're putting more pressure than ever on schools to beef up "gifted and talented" programs for children. Statistically, at least, the majority of middle-class parents still back public schools. According to Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the university's Civil Rights Project, nearly nine out of ten children in the U.S. attend public schools. "The percentage of kids in private schools is lower than it was fifty years ago, mostly because of the decline of the Catholic school system," he says. "Middle-class families in middle-class suburbs are using public schools at a very high rate. There is a relationship between income and use of private schools, but even in higher-income populations, the large majority is in public schools." And yet, there's Oprah's poll: more than half of Americans aren't happy. What's going on here? The feeling among many middle-class parents about their schools and school systems has shifted from generally supportive to conflicted, even contradictory. "There's a disconnect," acknowledges Chad d'Entremont, assistant director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education in New York. "[Parents] say public education is negative, but when you ask those same individuals their feelings towards their own child's school, they give them an A or a B," he says. "They like the schools in their own community." Even within a single family, feelings can be mixed. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Annalisa Crannell and Neil Gussman took an unusual step for their blended family of four kids. Their son and her daughter go to public school; his daughters go to private. Crannell grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, "one of the strongest public school systems with a bunch of bleeding-heart Democrats who spend on the schools," she says. She is happy with her daughter's high school in Lancaster, which is big and offers plenty of opportunities, such as an accelerated International Baccalaureate program. But Gussman, who attended a large public school outside of Boston, had an awful time there and dislikes big schools. Though Gussman characterizes Lancaster's high schools as good, he feels the increased opportunities at large schools are more than offset by the problems that come with size. Big schools encourage mediocrity and alienation, he feels, while smaller schools can head off those problems. "A school that graduates fifty kids per year can't be Columbine—there are not enough dark corners for kids like that to fester." He also likes the social aspects of a small, private school, which have allowed his ninth-grade daughter to have the same friends since kindergarten. Many parents also feel torn between commitment to their own children and commitment to their community. Call it the Clinton Conundrum: Like Bill and Hillary with Chelsea, many middle-class people believe in the value of public schools and are committed to the ideal of universal, free education as the underpinning of democracy. But when it comes to their own child, they opt for private education. For anxious parents, the most worrisome stories might be those from public school teachers who decide not to send their own kids to public school. Diane Hughes-Pollard, a former junior high and high school teacher for fourteen years in the Clark County school district in Las Vegas, chose to send her daughters to a private college prep school for its more academically challenging and protective environment. She says her local public schools have changed, becoming overcrowded, since she left her teaching job twelve years ago. "That's not an environment I felt I wanted my children to be a part of," she says. "I wanted to make sure I gave my children every advantage my husband and I could afford so they could be successful." ***
If classrooms are physically overcrowded, curricula are increasingly overcrowded with testing, testing, and more testing. During a recent chat with my daughter's sixth-grade English teacher, it sank in how much testing is affecting her education. I mentioned that Laurel is a fine creative writer but didn't seem to have any opportunities in class for creative writing. The teacher explained what's on the state EOGs (end of grade tests). Creative writing didn't make the cut—so it isn't taught. No Child Left Behind, the 2002 legislation that penalizes schools whose students don't pass state tests, has left an unmistakable mark on curricula nationwide. The nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, in a national study on the effects of No Child Left Behind, found that seventy-one percent of the nation's school districts report that they've reduced instructional time in at least one other subject to make more time for reading and mathematics. That's because No Child Left Behind looks only at reading and mathematics skills—not science, social studies, art or music—to determine if a school has made adequate yearly progress. Scores on state tests are rising in a large majority of states and school districts, according to state and local officials surveyed by the center. Many school leaders cited NCLB requirements for adequate yearly progress as an important factor in this rising achievement. Yet officials in several districts studied felt that the law has escalated pressure on teachers to a stressful level and is hurting staff morale in some schools. Urban districts appear to be experiencing the greatest effects from the law; they feel more pressure for accountability because more students there have difficulty scoring on grade level and need additional help. Some suburban schools are feeling its influence too, particularly those serving children with disabilities or other special needs, says Center on Education Policy President Jack Jennings. The trend of "narrowing the curriculum" is also moving to the suburbs: Given that over seventy percent of school districts report spending less time in at least one subject to make more time for reading and math, that figure "has to include a significant number of suburban districts," Jennings says. The Center is calling for U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to use her influence to remind schools that social sciences, science, the arts and other subjects are still a vital part of a balanced curriculum. Susan Eaton is a parent who finds that the curriculum has become more and more homogenized as her children get older and high-stakes testing takes over. Eaton, author of The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial, to be published by Algonquin Books this fall, sends her sons Will, ten, and Eli, eight, to school in Newton, Massachusetts, a mostly affluent suburb of Boston. Eaton tells me she has been happy with her children's teachers and believes they would like to keep teaching in imaginative ways. But in the last two years, she reports, her older son's experience in school has diminished: testing has made him feel that his self-worth and ability to learn are being judged by a test. As a result, she says, she's increasingly ambivalent about keeping her kids in public school. "It's not so much because they've had an awful elementary school experience. But I fear for the future—how much worse it's going to get." For her book, Eaton spent four years in an urban school in Hartford, Connecticut, where she found that the test is the curriculum. In the weeks leading to the state exam, she says, the kids drilled for their tests virtually all day, using test booklets culled from old Connecticut Mastery Tests. Though state law mandated that the school still had to offer music, art, and physical education, other subjects—such as social studies, science, and even recess—disappeared. "It was truly appalling," Eaton says. "And I do see this mentality seeping even into suburban schools now, more than ever before. The wolf is at the door." ***
In some parts of the country, teachers' unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are a powerful force, speaking out on curriculum and other issues. But unions also negotiate rules that can limit school district hiring and spending options. When that happens, parents can get exasperated. At one public Montessori school in the Cincinnati area, administrators recently needed to hire Montessori-trained teachers to fill four vacancies. But they couldn't because of contractual obligations. The school system was under a hiring freeze. Before any new teachers could join the public schools, previously laid-off teachers had to be rehired. Yet administrators can't just toss a traditional teacher into a Montessori classroom and expect her to do well. Along with the standard coursework to become a teacher, the Montessori method requires an additional four years of full-time training and an internship to become certified, in part to know how to handle classes that mix several ages and grade levels. "We ended up having to bring in the non-trained teachers," says one of the school's parents, Jennifer Strom. "It has been a very difficult year for them and their students." Other parents, such as Neil Gussman, sees teachers' unions more broadly as one part of what's wrong in American education. Gussman, now a writer, began his career as a union member. "When I was on that loading dock, I got paid the same as the guys who spent as much time as they could in the bathroom," he says. "The hardest-working guys on the dock and the worst guys all got $12.50 an hour." The experience soured him on unions forever: "I just don't want union people handling what my kids learn or not." Janet Bass, spokesperson for the 1.3 million-member American Federation of Teachers, argues that unions have improved what's happening in American classrooms. "The AFT was in the forefront of the standards movement long before President Bush ever got involved," she says. "We've pressed for smaller class sizes and richer curriculums, for more tutoring. We want only high-quality, credentialed teachers because you can't put just anybody in front of kids. We press for things that are not so sexy but we know work because they are based on research in districts across the country." Even so, parents may have trouble warming to unions. That's because when money is tight, districts feel forced to make an impossible choice: honor contractual obligations to their teachers, such as health benefits and guaranteed raises, or spend money on the curriculum. Other reactions may be more visceral—after all, we've been debating the value of unions since we were schoolchildren ourselves. In Chicago, where I grew up, teachers' unions landed on the TV news primarily when teachers walked out. That kind of image lingers in some minds today. ***
Has there ever been enough funding for public schools, or do we feel the pressures more acutely now? The Time/Oprah Winfrey poll found that only ten percent of respondents feel we are spending too much on public schools. Sixty-four percent think we're spending too little; twenty-two percent think our expenditures are just right. As for higher taxes to improve public schools, fifty-nine percent of those polled say they'd be willing to pay them. Those figures are consistent with a 2002 survey conducted by Kappan, the magazine for Phi Delta Kappa, an international association for professional educators (admittedly a group likely to be biased towards spending on education). The magazine asked what states should do to fund education as states were struggling to balance their budgets. To avoid education cuts, seventy-eight percent of respondents felt cuts should be made in other parts of state budgets and fifty-eight percent supported increasing state taxes. Public schools face funding demands our parents could never have imagined. For openers, No Child Left Behind and special education programs are underfunded at the federal level, forcing states and municipalities to pay for programs that are federally mandated. Even as public schools strain to get federal dollars for a wider array of required programs, money is being siphoned off to fund charter and magnet schools. Both charters and magnets are, in fact, public schools. Magnets offer specialty programs such as gifted education or foreign-language immersion. Charter schools run parallel to the public school system, often started by a group of parents and educators. About eighty percent of the nation's 3,600 charter schools are run as non-profits, with the remainder for-profit. Each with its own board of education, a charter school can hire and fire its own teachers, design its own curriculum, and set its own policies on issues such as length of school day. In exchange for this freedom, the schools are supposed to meet higher standards of accountability for their results. Whoever authorized the school to open—typically either the local school district or the state—has final oversight over the school. Though charters and magnets are in the same family as traditional public schools, they compete with one another for funding. That can leave the old-fashioned neighborhood schools feeling as if their trendy little brothers and sisters, the magnets and charters, always get more attention. Three years ago, Diane Hughes-Pollard, the former public high school teacher in Las Vegas, launched plans for the Rainbow Dreams Academy, a charter school for kindergarten through second grade. The school, which will be part of the Clark County school system, is scheduled to open for the 2007-08 school year. A foundation Hughes-Pollard created with her husband is raising money for construction. Students will be selected through a lottery the school district will run. Local government supports her plan; Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman made an appearance at the school's ground-breaking ceremony. Hughes-Pollard hopes the school, which will emphasize multiculturalism and strive to have kindergartners reading by their second semester at school, will offer "a private school education in a public school setting." If she succeeds, she will be beating a trend. Several studies have found that charter schools' academic results don't surpass those of public schools. (Charters may face greater academic challenges from the start because they are concentrated in urban areas and frequently serve low-income children who haven't succeeded in traditional schools settings.) In the roughly forty states with charter laws, the problem has been too little state oversight of the schools, wrote the New York Times in a May editorial. "Some states have opened so many charter programs so quickly that they can barely count them, let alone monitor student performance . . . To salvage the charter movement, the states will need to abandon the strategy, now discredited, that consists largely of giving public money to what are basically private schools and then looking the other way." In some states and municipalities, public money now helps some families opt out of public schools altogether via vouchers, a phenomenon that began in Milwaukee in 1990. Vouchers are primarily state-level programs that allow parents to switch their children from their assigned public schools into private or parochial schools. Voucher monies can also be used for public school, such as when a parent wants to choose a school outside his or her district. In Washington, D.C., about 1,700 low-income students have fled their public schools, courtesy of a voucher program. Parents involved understandably like having the option of giving their children a better education, but the policy has ramifications for public schools. D.C. schools lost students because of the vouchers, and consequently lost money, since the system is funded on a per-pupil formula. "It's really hard to begrudge parents who choose vouchers when you have such underperforming schools," says Wendy Sefsaf, a Washington, D.C. mother who is fighting to improve the public schools in her district. "We hope they will come back—that we can make it better so they'll come back." Vouchers raise concern among some parents not just because they have the potential to remove public dollars from struggling schools, but because those public dollars can and sometimes do go to religious groups or to schools that aren't required to meet the same criteria as public schools. Proponents say that vouchers lead to competition among schools for students, benefiting all students, but especially those in poor schools. In a 2005 position paper, the Anti-Defamation League maintained that "implementation of voucher programs sends a clear message that we are giving up on public education." The national organization, which aims to combat anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, holds that these programs "subvert the constitutional principle of separation of church and state . . . They would force citizens—Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists—to pay for the religious indoctrination of school children at schools with narrow parochial agendas. In many areas, eighty percent of vouchers would be used in schools whose central mission is religious training." The debate about vouchers is playing out in venues across the country. In Florida, the state Supreme Court ruled in January that the use of public funds for vouchers violates the state constitution. That decision sits well with voucher opponents like former state legislator Suzanne Kosmas of New Smyrna Beach, who says vouchers lack accountability to the public that funds them. Voucher schools are not required to meet the same criteria as public schools in teacher certification and standardized tests, among other areas, she says. But Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who supports the use of vouchers, said, "the public never benefits from government protecting a monopoly." Governor Bush responded to the Supreme Court decision by proposing an amendment to the state constitution to permit vouchers. At press time, his proposal lost in the Florida senate by one vote, with another vote scheduled on a new voucher plan designed to pass Constitutional muster. Rather than use state funds, the plan would let corporate sponsors pay for the vouchers and receive a tax credit in the same amount. That raises red flags for people like Kosmas. "Public education accounts for billions of dollars each year in the Florida budget," she says. "Private enterprise would like to open the door to getting into that pot of money. So the fight is not just about good education." A few states, along with individual cities like Cleveland, currently run voucher programs. Others have proposed such programs, typically planning to offer between $3,000 and $7,500 per student for use towards his or her desired school. When Congress considers renewal of the No Child Left Behind law in 2007, vouchers will likely be on the agenda, says Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice and author of Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice. What's happening in Washington, D.C. could be a model for a federal voucher program offered nationwide. For parents who like the idea of funding alternatives but want to keep the focus on public schools, there are local education foundations, or LEFs. LEFs are independent, private non-profits that fund a single school, a set of schools, a school district, or even multiple school districts. Individuals and companies can all contribute to a LEF; some LEFs also apply for state and federal grants. One kind of LEF is essentially a giant piggy bank that raises and disburses money for a single school. That structure is attractive to parents who want to avoid higher property taxes for school financing in their district but don't mind funneling money only to the school their child attends. Though LEFs are as diverse as the communities they serve, they've been criticized (in the pages of Harper's magazine, for instance) for contributing to the problem of inequality among schools, as being just one more case of wealthy parents doing more for their own kids' education while ignoring larger societal responsibilities. Some LEFs do widen the gap between rich and poor schools, agrees Howie Schaffer, public outreach director of the Public Education Network (PEN), a national association of LEFs whose members include eighty-seven educational funds in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia. But he believes there is a way to do LEFs in a more equitable way. PEN members serve one or more districts, not just a single school, and have the broader goal of building support for public schools. That can mean anything from urging voters to keep education issues in mind to encouraging citizens of all political persuasions to run for school board. Unfortunately, power struggles may be a natural offshoot of LEFs; money seldom comes without conditions attached. What happens, say, when a LEF wants to raise money for a snazzy new high school performing arts hall, but the school board is opposed because there's no funding to build a similar space at other schools? Just such a funding debate came to a head recently in Santa Monica, Schaffer says. There, the superintendent insisted that of every dollar donated to the school district's foundation, ten cents had to go into a fund serving all area schools. "There was a donor revolution," Schaffer says; some called the scheme "communist." But the superintendent wouldn't yield, believing that private donations had to help elevate every school in the district. ***
"Elevating the schools" has become virtually a second career for some parents. Principals and administrators seem to need parental involvement much more than they did twenty or thirty years ago. Most of us don't recall our parents serving on school leadership teams or poring through a district's testing data. They didn't think much about building basics like toilet doors, either. But in some districts, that's all changed now. Just ask parents like Wendy Sefsaf, who banded together with other members of her Washington, D.C. PTA to win adequate funding for the D.C. school district to repair badly aging schools. The PTA already routinely paid for such basics as air conditioning and even bathroom doors, but the district's own administrators had estimated the system needed $3 billion over the next fifteen years for building improvements. Sefsaf helped lead a group that advocated for full funding to modernize and repair aging school buildings. The parent coalition, called the D.C. School Modernization Campaign, created posters and placed them all over the city at a time when local government was debating how much to spend on the new Washington Nationals baseball team. Schools deserved the money just as much as baseball, the coalition contended. Eventually, twenty-nine PTAs from across the city signed a letter calling for change. The letter was published as an ad in small weeklies and daily papers serving the area. It was important to demonstrate broad community support, Sefsaf says, so politicians "didn't think this was just for rich white parents." The local media started reporting the parents' efforts. It took six months of intense effort, but the legislation passed in March, allocating $200 million a year indefinitely for school building renovation. Other positive changes have come about recently as well, including new standards from the superintendent to help ensure that an A represents the same quality of work across all schools in the district. For other parents seeking more funding for their local schools or change on a similarly big issue, Sefsaf says it's important to engage the business community early on. Funding debates often center on taxes—either property, parking, hotel, commercial real estate, or others. (In Washington, D.C.'s case, the money is coming from sales tax revenue.) Parents' advocacy has a greater chance of success if business leaders agree with the proposals and help get them passed, Sefsaf believes. Tapping into parents' talents is also critical. A former head of facilities for the D.C. public school system served on the steering committee for Sefsaf's group. Experts in public policy and public finance volunteered to examine the wording of the legislation and make sure it would truly provide what it promised. The Washington group got other critical elements right. Margaret Carnes of Charlotte Advocates for Education, a group that trains parent leaders in Charlotte, says parents need sophisticated skills in everything from data analysis to understanding other cultures if they hope to make lasting reforms. They also need to think beyond their own child's school. "It comes out sounding a little spoiled if middle-class parents like me complain about an uninspired writing curriculum, while in urban districts they aren't even teaching science or social studies in the several months before the [No Child Left Behind] test," says author Susan Eaton. "But if parents from many corners can get together and form an alliance to voice complaints to state legislatures that come from all kinds of school districts, it will have more power." She believes it's important not to blame teachers, who are already under enormous pressure. More often than not, she says, parents will find allies in teachers. The Harvard Family Research Project has found schools reform best when there is trust among parents, teachers, and administrators—and when parents have a real opportunity to influence the debate and results on critical issues. Several organizations offer suggestions and resources so parents can be more effective advocates; they include Parents for Public Schools (parents4publicschools.com) and The Center for Parent Leader-ship (centerforparentleadership.org). ***
As a parent, all these decisions, these choices, these requests for money and help from the schools can be downright exhausting. But that level of involvement may be what it takes to ensure the kind of education we want for our children. And the decision-making doesn't stop once you've chosen a school for your child. I loved my daughter's elementary school and think her middle school is okay, but like some other parents, I worry when I look ahead to the high school. A new student assignment plan dramatically changed the school's demographics, increasing the percentage of low-income students. I have read the studies suggesting that when a school serves predominantly low-income students, test scores for all students there drop. At the same time, a group of parents is working hard to attract families like ours to the school's accelerated magnet program. At a couple of high schools farther out in the suburbs, test scores are higher and discipline problems apparently lower. But those schools are much more homogeneous. If we move there, we will essentially be choosing public schools for middle-class and rich kids. Is that the right answer for middle-class families who want to both stay in the public schools and ensure our kids get the best education possible—to keep moving farther and farther into the exurbs where schools often have fewer problems and more funding? It's an option many families consider. The Associated Press reported in May that, according to Census data, from 2000 to 2004 virtually every major metropolitan area had more people move out than move in. More flight from the cities suggests that middle-class parents perhaps are giving up not on public education, but on urban public education. Why does the image persist of middle-class parents longing to escape public schools? Carlos Garcia, former superintendent of Clark County, Las Vegas, schools and now an executive with McGraw-Hill Education, blames the media and politicians who convey the idea that public education is a lost cause. "Statistically, public education has never been better," Garcia maintains. "There are more graduates than ever before. The top twenty percent of our students score higher on tests than ever before and more children are educated than ever before. The real problem is our society has changed and so have our expectations [of public schools]." Good news for that top twenty percent, perhaps. But as well intentioned as we might be, it's easier to forget struggling children when your own kids don't go to school with them. Supporting our own children's public schools is not the same as supporting all public schools. For middle-class parents, our greatest challenge may be figuring out how to do what's best for all children, not just our own. Wendy Sefsaf provides one model of how to do it. Many of her friends are surprised she has put up with her public school system's decayed facilities, not to mention what she describes as its frequent change of superintendents and lack of consistent standards across all schools. "People literally say, 'Your kids are in public school? You're so brave'," she says. But she sees no division between her children's public school and all public schools. She is dedicated to both: "To me it was always a no-brainer. Why wouldn't we be in public school?"
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