Much has been made of the increase in charter schools on offer to low-income families whose default neighborhood schools are notably low-quality. Some see charter schools as bastions of innovation, and others point out that they drain resources from the schools that serve the vast majority of children, and because of their small scale will never serve as systematic levers for major reductions in inequality in education. But the school choice decisions that are rarely talked about these days are those made by families with financial means.
My daughter starts kindergarten next week, for which we are all very excited. The past year has been an interesting one as we’ve watched friends and other acquaintances grapple with the decision of where to send our children to school. I have spent countless hours myself investigating the public schools in our city to figure out which ones to list as our top choices. For many of my peers, deciding on kindergarten involves some choice—moving to another town with a “better” school system, thinking about private schools, figuring out how to get into one’s public school of choice if it’s not the neighborhood school. For others, the choice was made when they bought a property in the “right” town or neighborhood, in anticipation of their children one day making use of the area’s public schools. This lever for increasing inequality in education is rarely discussed, because we are so focused on thinking about inequality as some families’ lack of resources, rather than others’ maintenance and compounding of advantages. But both are important drivers of inequality in society.
Before I was a parent I was a public school teacher, and I swore I’d never send my future children to private schools. I believed that public education in urban, diverse schools was good for society, and good for the kids who see that many children’s lives are different than the ones they have already encountered. But the past few months have brought much self-doubt in my belief in urban public education, as I’ve watched friends leave the city or its public schools. I don’t blame my friends and acquaintances for the choices they have made—we can’t expect parents to do anything but pour their hearts and resources into what they consider to be the best education for their children. But, I do wonder how it is that we’ve become a society in which, as my colleague Deborah Jewell-Sherman has said, the quality of one’s education is determined by one’s zip code or lottery number. And I also wonder about what we can do to change that, so that all children can experience the joy of a high-quality education in environments that expose them to peers with a range of life experiences, family circumstances and structures, and interests.
The class and racial segregation of our schools is damaging not just to the children whose families and local schools lack financial resources, but also to those children who grow up without a real understanding of how those with fewer resources live. In my study of students attending elite universities, I’m finding that many find it difficult to talk about class and race, in part because their neighborhood and school experiences before college were so limited in terms of who they encountered. This lack of exposure seems to lead many to a lack of understanding of what it means to grow up as a racial minority in American society, or to grow up without the kinds of resources that were available to them and most of their peers.
Diversity and Inequality in Education 