FIVE WAYS TO ARCHITECT LIFE BEYOND THE NUCLEAR FAMILY. On Tuesday, November 18 at 9:30am Pacific / 12:30pm Eastern / 5:30pm GMT, join me and the wonderful Sara Sadek on Zoom for a 2-hour workshop salon on reimagining family – including five strategies you can put into action right away. The cost is $25, or $20 for all paid subscribers to The Auntie Bulletin or Sara’s newsletter, Folkweaver. Just let me know if the price point is out of reach. I hope you’ll join us!
DO YOU LIKE WATCHING VIDEOS? I don’t! If you’re more of a reader than a watcher, just below is a little introduction to the conversation in this post’s video, and then right below that is a lightly edited transcript.
Now Let’s Get To It
If you don’t have kids – and something like 75% of this newsletter’s readers don’t, or at least aren’t raising kids currently – you might imagine that the issue of where parents send their kids to school is uninteresting, or perhaps it’s none of your business. Allow me to lovingly disagree!
Schools matter to all of us because they impact all of our lives. As I wrote in my “Demystifying American Public Schools” post in September:
Good schools actually contribute to stronger communities. This is partly because schools offer direct amenities to the community: playgrounds, athletic facilities, computer labs, and spaces for public events. But even more importantly, schools also function as local hubs, where social connections flourish and spread.
Public schools in particular belong to all of us. They genuinely, measurably strengthen our communities and improve our lives.
Schools also matter to Aunties specifically because they have a huge impact on the kids and families we love. Which school the kids attend isn’t (usually) our decision, but the closer we are to the families in our life, the more soft influence we may have. The family might partially base their decision on our proximity – i.e., whether it’ll be easier or harder for us to continue pitching in with childcare (especially if the care we provide is free). Grandparents in particular may have strong opinions about where their grandkids go to school, and be willing to – or insist on – paying private school tuition. My own view is that, as long as kids are safe and cared for, it’s alloparents’ job to support and back up the parents’ decisions, but the reality is that, if parents and Aunties disagree about where the kids should go to school, this does sometimes lead to rifts in relationships. So it’s really helpful for Aunties to make ourselves actually informed.
Meanwhile, figuring out where to send kids to school can be genuinely challenging and confusing for parents. In many parts of the United States especially, the array of choices parents need to navigate is mindboggling – as is the process, including learning about options, visiting schools and programs, talking with educators and other parents, filling out applications, tracking waitlists, coordinating options for multiple children, and on and on and on. Then add into that the many ethical considerations that can arise around school choice: Which option is most equitable? Which option will be best for my child? Which will be best for the neighborhood or larger community? Which will be good for – or at least not do harm to – other people’s children?
The more such ethical questions become salient for parents – for example, because they’re not sure if they’re making the right choice – the more they need sympathetic, curious sounding boards to listen, come alongside them, and support them as they decide. Especially if their parent friends are making different decisions – take it from me, that can get messy – it then becomes extra helpful for parents to have Aunties to talk to.
Earlier this week on Substack Live, I talked with the wise and wonderful Garrett Bucks about public school, private school, parents’ decisions for their children, and how we can talk about complex ethical issues without breaking our relationships. I found the conversation super helpful, not only for thinking about where kids should go to school, but also more broadly, for clarifying the kinds of political strategies I think we need at this moment in history. I came away with real insight about how to navigate tricky ethical dilemmas with practicality and wisdom. And wise practicality? Now that’s Aunties’ business.
Video Transcript
Lisa Sibbett: Welcome! Garrett Bucks and I are here to have a nonjudgmental conversation about where parents send their kids to school.
The question “where do your kids go to school?” can be really fraught. It’s a question we both care about a lot. I love the way Garrett has written about the importance of public schools, and also he writes so well – as you may know – about how shame and blame are not useful political strategies. So we’re going to be talking at the intersection of those topics today.
The perspective I’m bringing is that I recently did a research project with a collaborator of mine, Stephanie Foreman, where we interviewed parents about where they send their kids to school, so I’ve got some research findings I’d love to share with you today. I’m not a parent, but I’ve spent a lot of time talking to parents about these issues.
Here’s a perspective that I learned from Garrett in his terrific Barnraisers community-building training: we can and should be upfront about our perspectives. So in the interest of being up front, let me name that Garrett and I are both public school champions, big fans of public school. We hope people will send their kids to public school. But we also have some perspectives today for parents who choose to send their kids to private school – about how they can continue to be public school champions regardless. We’ll be thinking through the judgmentalness and fraughtness around those choices and how we can all be on the same team.
Now I’ll kick it over to you, Garrett, to introduce yourself and say anything I missed. Then maybe you could start us off talking about the constellation of issues around public school and why judgment isn’t always helpful.
Garrett Bucks: So I was amped to have this conversation, Lisa, because you have done a really cool job of bringing your deep professional expertise – like you have a literal PhD in education, right?
Lisa: That’s right.
Garrett: And you’ve brought that into your writing for The Auntie Bulletin. In the last couple of months, you have put out a couple of guides to schools. These are pieces that I’ve sent to so many people as they try to navigate, like, what is a charter school? What is a private school? Public schools, magnet schools, all the choices people make – like what do these words mean? And then what are the politics behind them, both on a macro and micro level? The pieces you wrote about them were some of the best. I was like, oh, that’s why it’s really cool when actual experts are also really good at talking to people who aren’t as PhD’ed as them.
So I love your writing in a lot of ways, but I in particular love those pieces.
The things I’ll add to my bio: I, like you, have spent a career in and around education in a variety of roles – as a teacher, as part of the broader community, the nonprofit education industrial complex. I have been in all sorts of debates and arguments about every aspect of education, including up on stages having panel discussions with like, the person from the Heritage Foundation, the person from the union, and Garrett is here too and we are going to have fights.
And then I also have had awkward dinner party conversations about these things too.
I also live in the world of someone who cares for a lot of kids, right? For nieces and nephews and niblings, for my own kids. I’ve got a 12 year old and an 8 year old, soon-to-be 9 year old. She has a November birthday, so I want to shout that out. And then a bunch of friends’ kids, right? I have kids that I care about who span income levels, who span racial categories, who span gender identities, who live in rural places, who live in urban places, and whose parents are all doing their best and making all sorts of decisions about their schooling. And that includes me as a parent, right?
So this is not Garrett gets advice from Lisa time –
Lisa: Not at all!
Garrett: But I will say I come to this conversation with an unsettledness. Like, I am eager for advice. As you really beautifully laid out, this is an issue where two things are true for me at once, two core beliefs of mine. And I don’t think that I always resolve them well, right?
One of those two core beliefs is, as you hinted at, I’m a really, really big fan of public schools. I am a big fan of them on a philosophical level. I am a big fan of the ideal of American public schools that never quite happened. And I am a big fan of them on a practical level.
And I think there are real implications, and have been throughout American history, huge negative implications, on a macro level, when people who have a certain level of privilege in society have either opted out of public schools altogether or opted out of a version of public schools that includes kids of all income levels all together, that includes kids of all races, etcetera.
So I have a really, really strong belief about that. And we have titled this a nonjudgmental conversation, but when you have a strong belief, it’s hard not to be judgmental about it, right? It’s hard not to be heartbroken when friends whose values I otherwise share choose to move away from our school district, right? Which is a Title I, majority black and brown school district. It’s hard not to be judgmental when friends who I feel very value-aligned with send their kids to private schools rather than committing to public schools. I do have judgment about that.
Some of that judgment, I think, feels right because it’s related to my beliefs and things that I know from studying the history of education. Some of it is probably deflection and self-righteousness, maybe projection about other choices I’m making within the system that make me feel guilty. But the judgment is there, right? So that’s one thing. I have a belief and that belief actually is not always nonjudgmental.
But also, in my day job I train people on how to do organizing. I write about how to welcome people in, and how to potentially hold relationships that are transformative both for you and for people who are making other choices.
And as you’ve been hinting, that does require a curiosity, a grace, a generosity, and as much of a hard look in the mirror as you are looking hard outwards. And I believe very, very firmly that just being a judgmental grump about any issue actually generally has not helped us advance our social beliefs.
So I’m coming to this conversation actively holding both those things personally, but not always doing so well, I think. And I know from talking to you that you empathize, but I also know you’ve got this fascinating story about this journey you were on, in particular with the study and going all over the place with your feelings on this, right?
Lisa: Totally. I appreciate so much how you’ve laid out the tension there, Garrett, because I think this is just such an intensely emotional question for people. Where parents send their kids to school is so close to home for people, literally, and is like tied up with folks’ perceptions of themselves as good parents and as good people and as loving their children. What could be more emotionally fraught than those kinds of questions? All the strong public school advocates seem to have the same kind of cognitive dissonance that you do, Garrett. Me too.
It’s hard to figure out, how do we relate well to people who have made a choice that we don’t agree with? Especially people who we think share our values and that we want to be in solidarity with.
So you alluded to my story around this research study. I’ll just give away the ending. I have come around to a place – and this took years – of actually feeling a lot more empathy and hope for parents, no matter what choice they make about where they send their kids to school. I’ll make visible how that plays out.
But first, the narrative that goes along with this is that my colleague Stephanie Foreman and I, we actually grew up together. We’ve been friends since childhood, but we also are both educational researchers who graduated from the University of Washington with our PhDs around the same time. And Stephanie is a parent in Seattle Public Schools, a very strong advocate of public schools. She was feeling really betrayed because a lot of her friends, including our mutual friends, who had started out sending their kids to public school had all been shifting over to private school as things got hard for their kids.
Maybe their kid was having some kind of learning difficulty that wasn’t being met in the public school. Or the kid was getting bullied, or there was some kind of non-responsiveness from the administration or some kind of major health problem.
So these different things would arise and our friends would bail to private schools. And just to be clear about the policy context, somebody put this in the chat, how the education policy landscape varies quite widely even just across the United States, let alone outside of the United States.
In the state of Washington where I live, we don’t have very many charter schools or vouchers or choice policies. We basically have public school or private school. And then within our public school system, of course, there are lots of magnet programs and alternative programs and gifted programs and those other kinds of things that exist in most places in the U.S.
So where Stephanie and I live, most times when public school isn’t working for people, they shift to private school if they have the financial means – which is, of course, a big “if.”
So we felt like, boy, these people are being really hypocritical. We also know a lot of education professors who research public schools and advocate for public schools in their own research and are really big public school champions, but send their kids to private school. And we felt like, what is going on with that?
So that was the impetus for this study. But over time, in the conversations that I had with families and parents, I started realizing that of course people are going to remove their kids from public school if it feels like the public school is actively doing harm to their kid. And I would posit that most parents, if they truly genuinely believe that harm is happening to their child and they can exit their child from a harmful situation, they will do that. That’s going to be the top priority.
And so then the question becomes, under what circumstances do parents believe that public schools are harming their children? And there are different thresholds of believing that harm is happening or believing that good is happening. Different people have different standards around that.
We talked to a lot of families where, for example, there was a massive health crisis where the mom had stage four cancer and her kids were really struggling in school and the family didn’t have the capacity to keep trying to deal with their kids’ problems. They just needed to get into a place where the school could handle the kids’ issues. To my mind, that was like, “yeah, I really understand that.” I started sort of slowly coming around to, like, I see these places where there might be exceptions, it makes sense that this family would choose private school. I would do the same thing and I would encourage them to do the same thing.
And then as that gray area started opening up, it got bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where we were having a hard time discerning under what circumstances we would say, “you should stay in public school” or “you should shift to private school.” It just became grayer and grayer, essentially.
Garrett: So because of that, you ended up in this place, where you felt – would you say empathy is the right word? You obviously felt less judgmental than when you started. So where did you land, then. Are you now a private school proponent? Or do you hold all your same beliefs, but just a little more gently? What do you feel? Where do you come out differently on the other side of the study?
Lisa: Let me throw a useful concept label into this conversation. A researcher named Charles Tilly, in the late 90s, came up with this concept of “opportunity hoarding.” Maybe people are familiar with the idea, where essentially we hoard resources for ourselves at the expense of other people. This concept label can be useful when we’re thinking about all kinds of domains where people with different kinds of privilege are essentially accruing resources to ourselves and not worrying about how that impacts other people. I would say that there are a lot of people who choose private school for their kids from a place of opportunity hoarding. In our study we weren’t interested in these people so much. They are potentially less interested in the impact of their actions on other humans.
But there is also this big middle set of parents who do care a lot about how their actions impact other people, they do want to be community-minded people, they do want to show up for their communities. And within that group of people, I still want them to choose public school, but I also understand more sometimes why they don’t.
And my research collaborator Stephanie Foreman and I, we came across some strategies that families in this particular group were using. We researched people who had started out in public school because they have these strong civic commitments and they want to be part of their local community, but then moved to private school. They felt sad about leaving public school. They were torn.
And among those people, there were several who treated private school as a kind of triage method for a little while, and then they went back to public school. Or families where they put one kid in private school, but they kept their other kid in public school.
Or we also talked to families where it was like, when they started out as public school parents, they were really excited and they imagined themselves going to lobby at the state capitol for educational justice. And then when they removed their kids to private school, they felt like they had lost the moral and ethical standing to advocate for educational justice, so they basically bailed on the movement.
One of the things that we ask in this paper is, is it possible to reclaim these people who have sort of decided that they no longer have ethical standing to advocate for educational justice, and instead help them mobilize around the stories that forced them out of public school?
Because really, people are on the same page about what’s going wrong in public schools: not enough recess, not enough lunchtime, too big class sizes, not enough nurses, not enough counselors, not enough librarians, not enough art teachers, undertrained teachers, lots and lots of turnover in teachers and principals. School people and families alike agree that these are problems. A lot of times, they’re the reasons people exit public school in the first place. Maybe they could use those stories as fodder for advocating for justice rather than just being like, I can’t be in this conversation anymore.
Garrett: I love where you ended up. You know that fires me up, this question of how you keep people in movements. I love that ending.
But the thing I’m struggling with – and I don’t want to pretend like you’re not struggling with this too – as I was listening to you, I was like, I totally get it. I bet that the thought process amongst the parents in your study was not like, “Well, I’m going to wake up today and dial up my racism button or dial up my classism button and be like, screw those kids in the public schools. I just want to get mine.” And it wasn’t just dreaming of Harvard for their own kids and wanting to make sure that their future bloodlines were as rich as possible. I’m sure it wasn’t that.
It was like, oh, shoot, we’re in this school community. Communities are messy. School communities that are downstream from every form of systemic oppression are super messy. And there’s a wide variety of ways that socioeconomically diverse Title I public schools struggle to meet every kid’s needs across a wide range of privileges and kid identities and health needs and learning styles and all the above.
So they made a hard choice lovingly. I totally get it. I believe that, I really do.
Here I’m going to tell a version of my story, and in this version of my story I’m leaning more heavily into Garrett Bucks as an uncomplicated public school crusader. Later on, I’ll bring up some stuff that problematizes that identity a little bit.
I am a parent of two kids, both of whom go to public schools here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is a lovely place that I will talk to you for years about why it’s the best place in the world to live. It’s also a city whose working class Black community in particular, and Latino community, but in particular Black community, has gotten hit really, really hard by all the worst forms of American systemic racism. So our public school system – which my kids go to – if you are going to look up the stats about it, you’ll see the kind of stats and headlines about a system as a whole that have always made families of certain privileges and means – white families, middle to upper middle class, rich families, et cetera – run for the hills.
If you were to look specifically at the schools we love – in particular our elementary school where both our kids went and where my youngest currently goes – if you were to look up at Greatschools.org, a website that is the bane of my existence, you would see low numbers and the kind of things that would cause lots of uncomfortable conversations with parents who have choices.
I have a lot of friends who I love deeply who don’t send their kids to our kids’ school, some of whom send their kids to private schools, some of whom send their kids to other schools in the district with higher concentrations of white upper-middle-class kids, and some who moved to the suburbs when their kids were five.
And all of them, because they are smart, empathetic, caring people who I do think had some legitimate guilt and shame about their decision, they can tell me a story about why they did so that I can totally empathize with. And I don’t want to be the kind of person that doesn’t trust the validity of that story, right? Just like all the stories of the people in your study, and like I do in all of my organizing, I want to give them the dignity and honor of why we make the choices we do in a really messed up system.
And I also know as a white middle-class parent myself, that I’ve got a ton of societal junk. When I walk into a school that is more poor than it is rich, that is more black and brown than it is white and Asian, I have an assumption that I don’t want to have, right? About the quality of education being provided in that school, about the outcomes for kids in that building. And those, of course, are judgments that I want to problematize and correct and unlearn. But the narrative, the noise about what makes a bad school and what is a risk for a kid if they go to a bad school, a school whose test scores are not as high, things like that, that’s hard to unpack.
We know that that’s not the answer we can give to each other at the dinner party of why we moved to the suburbs. But I know that narrative is baked in somewhere inside me, right? I still have judgments about my school community that I have to really work on, that I’m not proud of whatsoever. And judgments that are paternalistic, judgments that could be savior-y, judgments in terms of the choices I’m making, all sorts of things, right?
So I don’t like this about myself, but I hear the answers that I’m empathetic to, right? Like, “for the way my kid learns,” or “the experience that we had” – the part of me that I struggle with, Lisa, is, like, is that all?
And the part of me that then sits with “is that all?” is not then an angry part. It’s the part of me that can’t imagine my kids not being part of the school community that we’re part of and all the ways that we have benefited and learned and grown from the depth and breadth of resources and assets, the best parts of a meeting of different cultures and the best parts of a place trying to be a complicated, beloved community together. I feel sorry for folks, right?
Then I get to the point where, from the organizer side of my brain, I am doing this thing where I’m assuming I know more than the other person, or I’m assuming a secret ill intent? Or a secret unexamined privilege or a secret inherent bias? That may or may not be right for me to do.
So I hear all the things you’re studying, and there’s part of me that’s like, “totally, I just love this exercise in empathy for you.” And there’s a part of me that’s like, “but I don’t buy it totally, that that’s all the story is.” Because we’ve got a lot of ideas, at upper middle-class white dinner parties, about what our kids are worth. We don’t say it that way, but that’s in the atmosphere.
Lisa: I agree on so many levels. You talked about the schools posts I’ve done recently at The Auntie Bulletin. I wrote in one of those schools posts about how, a lot of times when we’ve got a poverty-impacted school with lots of cultural and linguistic and ethnic diversity, those schools will tend to have, like, really low ratings on Greatschools.org. Those ratings come from standardized test scores, primarily. And we know – I think probably a lot of people on this call know – that standardized test scores are very culturally biased and not very reliable measures of actual academic quality.
Garrett: They’re usually a very good indicator of the demographic situation of the kids in a school, rather than what the school is doing. Yeah.
Lisa: Yes, research shows that what they’re a good indicator of is parents’ income, not academic success. So I wrote in that post about how, when a school has a bad reputation, either on Greatschools.org or among the parents on the playground, a lot of times that reputation is false and is based in – let’s just call it what it is – racism and classism. A lot of times it’s very unconscious. Parents kind of age into it as their kids hit school age, where the word on the neighborhood playground is this isn’t a good school. It’s not that the new rising kindergarten parents are necessarily thinking, “wow, there sure are a lot of rough looking black and brown kids at that school,” it’s just that they’ve heard it’s not a good school. So there’s this perpetuation of stories that, at their base, are racist and classist and crappy in a lot of different ways, and they get handed down through new cohorts of parents who then will opt into private schools or magnet schools or charter schools or gifted programs – any way of getting out of that neighborhood school.
All of that is completely real, I’m not just saying this as my opinion. There’s a preponderance of social science and education research that shows huge amounts of evidence of these things that Garrett and I are talking about.
I guess my collaborator Stephanie and I, we’ve been sort of triangulating our way toward a harm reduction approach. The fact is, you’re going to always have families who are not even going to consider their neighborhood local public school, and those people may or may not be within our reach. But the movable middle, whoever they are, however we operationalize them, some of them are going to conclude at some point, “this public school does not work for my child.”
So then what? Then maybe the public school people decide, kind of deep down on a subconscious level, or maybe on a totally conscious level, these people aren’t quite our people anymore. We’re not quite on the same page. We don’t quite trust these parents anymore. They’ve betrayed us a little bit, or maybe they’re being kind of racist, whether or not they realize it. Then we write off those families. This is often what happens in progressive spaces, there’s a wall that arises, maybe unspoken, between the public school parents and the people who have chosen differently.
Garrett: Wait, Lisa, are you saying that in progressive spaces we can be self-righteous and judgmental and put up arbitrary barriers between us?
Lisa: I think I might be the first person to ever say that, but yeah! I’m going to suggest that sometimes this happens.
So what do we do? How do we proceed? How can we continue to be on the same team? Because we need so badly to be on the same team in the political climate we’re in right now. We need everybody with progressive values to be able to move together.
I talked to all these parents who moved their kids to private school, and to be clear, some of them I empathize with so much, and some of them I do not. There definitely were parents who, like, two months into kindergarten, they were like “the teacher talks too loud so we’re moving to private school.” They didn’t try. They didn’t persist. The reality is that I don’t have as much empathy for parents who are just like, “this public school is bad and there’s nothing we can do about it, we’re peacing out. The private school is way better. It has a great social justice curriculum. It’s actually a better social justice school.” That’s what a lot of parents will also say.
Garrett: In the Seattles of the world, the Oaklands, the San Franciscos, there’s a set of private schools that has become very, very good at marketing themselves based on this, 100%. “We’re actually the more social justice-y choice.” Because of resources and because of an ability to cater – perhaps in a consumerist way, perhaps in a community-building way – to parental needs, there are progressive private schools out there that are more welcoming environments for gender non-binary kids, for trans kids, than the neighborhood public school. Sometimes that difference is not real, but it’s a difference that is marketed.
The same may be true for kids with disabilities. Generally, private schools are – you know the research – less great at serving kids with disabilities and IEPs because there’s not the mandate that public schools have. But I also have family members whose kids have been able to find a private school, in large metro areas, that serves the specific disability their kids have. They have a program, they have a service, they’ve been running this particular program for autistic kids for 50 years, and it is significantly more welcoming and affirming and empowering than the one the public school has, right? Sometimes that’s false, sometimes it’s marketing, sometimes it’s hype, and sometimes it’s totally real.
This might be a good segue to the question, how do we be honest that, for people like you and me who believe very strongly, who are the public schools crew –
Oh, we have not mentioned one of our favorite advocacy organizations that we both love. If you love doing public school activism, shout out to the crew at Integrated Schools. If we’ve got any Integrated Schools families and parents listening to this right now, we love you –
You and I, we’re an Integrated Schools crew, that’s what we do. What I hear you saying is we’re not going to actually make any progress if the folks who are aligned with us, who believe in the strongest possible public sector and the strongest American democracy, in a public sphere that teaches us interdependence, feel left out. If they feel like, oh, shoot, I made this hard choice for me, and it’s a choice that Lisa and Garrett and your Integrated Schools crowd, I bet you judge me for making – what you’re saying is, like, we want you still in.
We want you organizing. We want you advocating for us the next time there is a referendum for our schools. We want you canvassing with us. The next time there is a fork in the road decision with our school board that we believe could lead to greater or lesser equity in our district, we want you right there with us. And when there is a need to make your private school more equitable, we want to be right there with you.
People who get involved in public school advocacy, we’re emotional about it, too, because we feel rejected, right? I hear so many stories from folks about family members and friends who like, “We were two moms. We had our kids at the same time. We were in it together. It was ride or die. Maternity and post-maternity and patriarchy and partners that may have been great or not have been great, job pressures and all of that. We were all in – until kindergarten.” And then one mom made this choice and one mom made the other. And there are feelings of abandonment and betrayal. That’s so real, on both sides, including on the side that chose private school. I’ve got my version of that too.
But when I try to put that aside, it reminds me to re-put on my Garrett Bucks Barnraisers organizing hat. One of the things I preach in my classes is that, instead of just our stories of advocacy, this is why I believe what I believe, we can connect with people and welcome more people in with, also, our stories of struggle and question.
I said earlier that I would problematize this identity I laid out for myself. I should admit that I have a complicated history with private schools. I am one of six kids in the Bucks family, six kids who went through twelve years of school, each of us, before college – or more if you count kindergarten. Whatever total number of years of school that was, all those Bucks kids, only four of those years by any of us were spent in private school, which means that we were a committed public school family with one interesting blip – and that was my high school. My parents sent me to a private school for high school.
There was not a racial distinction in that case between the public and private schools. This was in Missoula, Montana where both schools were majority white. We had just moved to town. I had been getting my ass kicked in middle school quite a bit. We didn’t quite really know about either school, but my parents chose the smaller one. They were like, Garrett will maybe be less likely to get his ass kicked if there are fewer potential ass kickers around him. In retrospect, both my parents and I realized that the public school I would have gone to would have been a better match for me. But regardless, technically I’m one of the kids in your study: public-school-advocate parents who had a very understandable reason. So that gives me some empathy.
I am also in a moment right now, as a parent, where we’re sending our kids to the school that a lot of parents of my demographics reject. And it’s been so wonderful for us.
But I’ll problematize that. That has been our elementary school. Milwaukee has no feeder patterns for middle school or high school. It’s a full choice system, so we had to choose a middle school when our son went to sixth grade last year, and I left the choice very much up to him. I could have chosen to steer it more. I have some real questions about set-apart, cloistered gifted education. I worry about what it does and the implications for kids who are left out.
Lisa: Those programs are also often very racially segregated.
Garrett: 100%. So I’ve also got a set of values about this, but when all was said and done, we really left the decision up to my son, and he chose the magnet gifted school in Milwaukee. So on the one hand, you could probably say, oh, woke progressive Garrett doth protest too much. This is still a school that is 90 percent free and reduced lunch, that is mostly black and brown, it’s fully like the larger demographics of our city. But it’s a school that has been incredible for our son. It’s incredibly well resourced in the district because it is a hub for so many programs: for the theater, for the music, for the Lego Robotics Club, for the extra trips. So my middle school experience sucked. Middle school rules for my son. Who would not want that?
And yet, I’m also somebody who thinks about the city of Milwaukee as a whole. And there’s a lot of middle schools where I can’t help but imagine that one of the reasons why life is tougher there for a lot of kids right now is because of the pull of parental energy, resource energy, and teacher energy – because that is a very, very coveted school to teach at – that go to my son’s middle school.
I share this story to say, this is the kind of story I’ve learned to share more in conversations with parents who have made a wide variety of choices that I could easily be judgmental about. Because do you know who else’s choice I’m feeling judgmental about? Mine. I’m making imperfect, potentially hypocritical choices. The conversations I’ve had come from that point.
In fact, I’ve just had one recently with one of my greatest organizing mentors, a man who I just admire so much. And I’ve always had in the back of my mind, like, why did he move to that suburb? We talked about it the other day, not because I challenged him on his choice, but because I was reflecting on exactly what I just reflected to you. This has been a dope middle school, but I think there may be schools that are impacted negatively by the concentration of resources at my son’s school.
When I start from that place, I can welcome people into more things.
Lisa: I appreciate the thinking out loud that you’ve just done, Garrett. One of the arguments that you make consistently in your newsletter, The White Pages, and your Barnraisers cohorts that I appreciate so deeply is – and this conversation is making me want to really hold this in conscious view as much as possible – is that when we’re talking about difficult ethical decisions, surfacing our doubts and our confusions and our difficulties is potentially a much stronger political strategy than advocating for a black and white perspective.
I happen to have, right now going on at the Auntie Bulletin, a discussion thread about how we resist consumerism. I wrote a little thing at the beginning about resisting consumerism and then I put this big long list of all the ways that I’m resisting consumerism in my own life, reducing plastics, etcetera. But I also ended up writing about all the ways that it’s impossible to have clean hands in our society. I use Airbnb and I fly in airplanes and I eat meat and I drive cars. So I’m doing all these things that look really virtuous, but I’m also doing a lot of things that aren’t very virtuous.
And that discussion thread absolutely took off. It’s been a terrific discussion. People are both sharing the things that they feel really good about and trying to unpack the things that are difficult. Another thing that’s come up for me is I’m like a longtime Amazon boycotter, with the exception that I read almost all of my books through the library and I read them on Amazon Kindle. So how do I hold that? Should I be doing something different? It’s really opening up this ability for us to have a kind, supportive conversation about these ethical issues, rather than an adversarial one. So the point that you were just making is helping me solidify this more nuanced approach.
Also, a couple of people have brought this up in the chat. You were talking about the different groups that aren’t necessarily served well by public schools, sometimes kids with disabilities, trans and non-binary kids. Another group that’s often been served very poorly by public schools is kids of color. To me it’s often very understandable when families of color want to get the heck out of public schools. We talked to some parents of color in our research study who were like, “what do I owe to public schools? This has been a totally toxic institution for my family. Let’s get the hell out of here if we have the resources to do that.” And I’m like, yeah.
Garrett: I’ve obviously been talking from the perspective primarily of a white parent whose greatest judgment has been on the choices of other white parents. In education wars, often, the progressive stance is that you are against charters and vouchers. That’s the most progressive thing to believe. But Milwaukee was the first public voucher system in the country, and the story of how it got there was particularly fascinating. It was an advocacy coalition of two unlikely bedfellows. One was free market conservatives, literally the Chicago School of Economics under Milton Friedman was pushing one of its first laboratories for voucher schools. Their motivation was they hated public institutions and they thought that the more money we can claw away from public institutions, the better.
But the bedfellows they found in Milwaukee that I’m deeply empathetic to were actually a set of black activists whose roots were in the Black Power movement. Howard Foley was a veteran of running a Freedom School with Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael). He was a superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and had a deeply liberatory lens for, I want to build a public school district that is the best for Black kids in the country. They hit all of these institutional barriers, including from white progressive organizations, including from the teachers’ union, like “you are racist and you’re preventing all these opportunities for Black kids.” He was like, “listen, these Milton Friedman people are not my people, but if they’re saying I could get a set of schools that we could run with a Black national curriculum, if we could make spaces that could love Black children, I’m going to say yes to that.”
So there was a parent campaign in Milwaukee to build those schools. So that kind of feeling of like, white people have never committed to actual public education ever, so why should Black and Brown families be asked to suffer through public schools that aren’t serving them? I’m very sympathetic to that.
And when I say that my school can be imperfect, I think the risk that my white kids are not seen or not heard in the school system is a much lower risk than for their peers of color.
The other big question that I wanted to make sure that we got to, that our friend Sara has put in the chat, has to do with the structural changes that are needed in schools. I love when friends push me on this. It feels like I have had less imagination for that set of questions. But I don’t even know until we get more people to care about our public schools.
You live in the educational research world. When you hear that broader question, where does your head go, Lisa?
Lisa: Thank you for making sure that we got back to Sara’s question because I feel like it’s incredibly important and a great place to wrap up this conversation. What is possible for public schools?
And listen, public schools could be much, much better.
There are so many things that I love about public schools. I’m a public schools person. I’m a former public school teacher. I’ve done education research in classrooms. I’ve spent tons and tons of time watching teachers teach. I believe in public education as an engine for democracy – a “laboratory of democracy” as our godfather of public education, John Dewey, called it. But our public schools are massively under-resourced and have many, many, many limitations and failings and shortcomings.
And meanwhile, a lot of private schools have beautiful models of education. So the question is, how does that scale? Private schools often have very student-centered and play-based and project-based learning, lots of curiosity, lots of downtime, lots of planning time for teachers and lots of opportunities for kids to design what they want to learn about. These are beautiful models of education.
A thought experiment that has become sort of a guiding light for me over the course of our research project originated with an interview that my research partner and I had with a mom who now lives in the Pacific Northwest but who is from Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, she explained to us, they do not have a private school system. They just have public schools. You know, it’s Northern Ireland, so they have a whole legacy of like Catholic schools and Protestant schools. They’ve got their own issues. But at the end of the day, all the schools are equally resourced. They have an equitable funding model. And parents do not really have a choice about where to send their kids to school. They send their kids to the local public school. That is the only option.
This mom – when she moved to the United States her kids were little – she was boggled by the array of choices with which she was confronted and which she found to be incredibly unjust and unequitable. She just felt like, Gosh, if we there were no choices, if we just had only our local public schools, those local public schools would be amazing.
So the thought experiment that keeps coming up in my mind and heart over the past many years is: What if we didn’t have any private schools? What would be the quality of our public schools?
Garrett: That’s my biggest dream!
Lisa: There’s a concept label for this – “private school abolition” – that is very provocative and makes people feel scared. We don’t have to go there, in terms of the language we use.
Garrett: You’re preaching to the choir. I respect people’s choice to go to private school, but I’ll also be honest that I want private school not to exist. And I believe Metro areas should be uni-district as well. I don’t believe that we should be able to opt out by buying a house next door. And yet I understand the individual reason why friends and family I care about deeply have moved to the suburbs.
I think it was Warren Buffett who said, “If you want to actually improve public schools in America, your first step should be to abolish private schools.” Noted socialist Warren Buffett!
Lisa: Garrett, thank you for keeping a good eye on the chat today. It’s a little bit hard for Substack Live hosts to see the chat through the Live interface. Garrett, anything you want to plug before we go?
Garrett: Oh, you know, there’s this newsletter that’s really good called The White Pages, you should read. It’s written by Garrett Bucks, a fascinating guy.
Actually, what I want to plug is if you love beautiful writing about public schools, my friend Sarah Wheeler writes the newsletter Momspreading. On Friday, she wrote a banger of an essay in tribute to public schools. It is gorgeous and you should read it.
Lisa: Heck yeah. I totally agree, Sarah wrote such a good post that everyone should check out.
So thanks to everybody for being here! Garrett, it was awesome to talk with you. This conversation has been wonderful. See you around the way, all!
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