The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve

INTRODUCTION

My parents used to say to me, Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving. … I tell my daughters, Finish your homework. People in China and India are starving for your jobs.

—THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

WHY PARENTS NEED INFORMATION ON SCHOOLS. STAT!

There was a time when getting a decent education for your kids was pretty straightforward. You enrolled them in the local public school or you signed them up at the parochial or private academy their cousins attended. When you picked them up from school, you looked at the colorful finger paintings hanging in the hallways and noted what a warm and nurturing place it was. Once a year, you went to Parent Night in order to meet their teacher. Three times a year, you signed a report card. Somewhere along the line you might have made cupcakes for a bake sale, gone along on a class trip, or written a check for an annual fund-raiser. Your kids moved smoothly from elementary school to middle school to high school. Twelve years after you enrolled them in kindergarten, you sat on a folding metal chair beaming as they collected their high school diploma.

That era is gone. Long gone. These days, for better or worse, parents are required to do more—in fact, a whole lot more—in order to secure the best possible education for their child. And all over the country, parents are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of knowing very little about education while making critical judgments about their children’s schooling.

In many communities, parents, faced with an array of school choices, are growing frustrated and demoralized. After attending their fourth elementary-school Open House, Phoebe and Braken Hale reached the boiling point. Unfortunately, their story is all too common. Like most young parents, this Austin, Texas, couple care deeply about the quality of the education that their son, Rune, four, will get. But unlike most aspects of child rearing, where best practices are handed down from parents or discussed on message boards, over wine at the book club, or in countless books and magazine articles, they found that when it comes to schooling, good information is hard to find. The more Phoebe and Braken tried to learn about the school options for Rune, the less they felt they knew. Phoebe was partial to private schools, but the tuition was sky-high and the Web sites for the private schools in her area posted very little information about tests scores or their curriculum. Some new charter schools were generating a good buzz in the neighborhood but Phoebe, now an aesthetician, had taught in one and seen firsthand just how hard creating a successful learning culture can be.

Putting their trust in the process, Phoebe and Braken dutifully signed up and attended Open Houses for a charter school, a public school, a specialty public school, and a private school. All the schools looked decent. But on the school tours, the Hales and the other parents—even highly educated professional couples—seemed intimidated. No one, it seemed, wanted to ask hard questions: Why do the children get only ten minutes of recess? Why does the school favor one reading program over another? How do they handle kids who have behavioral issues? Phoebe was growing more anxious as the fall approached. She turned to a popular school-comparison Web site to see how her local public school stacked up. The standardized test scores seemed above average—about in line with the other schools in her area. The parent comments were neutral and guarded. Touring that school, she met the principal and received a list of skills upcoming kindergartners were expected to know before the first day. Resigned, the Hales opted to send Rune there. But as fall grew closer, Phoebe grew increasingly unsettled. She prides herself on making careful decisions about her family—and especially about the life of her child. There just wasn’t a lot of information about the academic program they were offering or what it would mean for my son, she said. I lie awake at night wondering if I’ve done all I can do. After all, he only gets one chance at this.

There are other factors that have turned what may have once been routine decisions into high-stakes choices. Right now in this country, parents with school-age kids are the best-educated group in history. Many of us have personally benefited from increased levels of higher education, and even if we haven’t, we understand the lasting value it confers. What is evident to almost everyone is that the manufacturing sector of the economy, once a font of solid, steady employment to workers lacking a college education, is rapidly vanishing. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for those who don’t do well in school. In the 1970s, according to a report compiled by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, nearly three-quarters of workers considered to be middle-class had not gone beyond high school. By 2010, that figure had dropped below 40 percent and has continued to shrink. Not only do highly educated people make more money than less educated ones, but the income gap between those who obtain a high school degree and those who get a college degree is growing larger every year. The Great Recession hammered that lesson home. Following the economic collapse of 2008, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves, abruptly, without a job. But not everyone suffered equally. In the second half of 2010, as the nation slowly emerged from the doldrums, the National Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the jobless rate for college graduates under the age of twenty-five was 8 percent. For high school graduates under age twenty-five who did not enroll in college, the jobless rate was a whopping 24.5 percent. These days, parents understand that finding or improving schools so that their children can be successful is the only sure ticket to anchoring them in the middle class.

Many of these same parents have also grown less trusting of educational professionals. In middle-class communities, that’s partially a result of our increased levels of education. Back in our grandparents’ day, the principal of our local school might well be one of the most educated individuals in the entire community, along with the town doctor, the local attorney, and the judge. The principal’s word was sacrosanct. Today, parents who attend Curriculum Night in a suburban town may have as many advanced degrees hanging on the walls of their home office as the principal and superintendent who are addressing the crowd.

The growing fissure between parents and schools is also partially a result of the so-called accountability movement, which has tarnished our warm feelings about the superiority of the American education system. Since the Department of Education was founded in 1979, the federal government has been keeping close tabs on students’ achievement levels. In the last twenty years, a unique combination of social justice types (concerned about the low achievement of poor kids) and fiscal conservatives (fretting about wasted tax dollars) have come together to force federal, state, and local governments, school districts, and schools into keeping closer tabs on how much kids are learning and how much it costs. In the last ten years, all that data—and comparative data from around the world—has coalesced into a sobering portrait. While some schools do a remarkable job and many more are adequate, a great number of kids—about a fifth in middle-class communities and up to half in poor ones—are not getting the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life. And as Thomas L. Friedman has pointed out, our children will compete for jobs in a global economy.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, spending for public schools has risen from $5,639 per child in 1980 to $10,041 in 2007 (these in inflation-adjusted dollars). Yet our reading scores have remained about the same: about a third of children in our public schools fail to become proficient readers. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States forty-eighth out of 133 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction. The ACT administers subject tests to about 47 percent—some 1.57 million—of America’s graduating seniors. From their scores, they determine whether or not students have enough base knowledge to get a B in a college-level course in that subject the following year. Last year’s results were distressing: only three out of five high school graduates were prepared to tackle a college English course. Slightly less than one in four high school graduates—24 percent—were likely to pass colleges courses in the four tested areas: science, math, English, and reading comprehension. Private schools and parochial schools are not always the passport to success or the refuge from school failure that parents dream they will be. Not only do parents have to come up with the tuition, but all too frequently they have to counteract mediocre teaching by paying a phalanx of tutors to keep their children moving forward or risk having their child counseled out. Even students from middle-class and affluent communities who appear to be doing just fine often exit the public school system with a diploma and big gaps in their education. Almost 30 percent of students who get accepted to a four-year university have to take remedial classes in order to do college-level work. Parents who might have once been content to cede power over their children to school authorities are getting a clear message: they need to take a much more proactive role to get their children the education they deserve.

Joe and Mary Ann Tarnoff, who live near Portland, Maine, didn’t think they’d ever be the type of people to second-guess their daughter’s teacher. Although they hate to admit it now, they used to view the squeaky wheels at their daughter’s school with a combination of bewilderment and bemusement. In part, this is because they are a busy couple—he’s a real estate agent and she’s a lawyer—and have had neither the time nor sufficient knowledge to meddle with the way their local schools were run. When they enrolled their daughter, Francesca, at the neighborhood elementary school, they had no reason to worry. The test scores seemed good. But by the time she was in third grade, they began to wonder what was going on in Francesca’s classroom. She was actively avoiding books and reading. Last November, they reviewed their concerns as they drove to the teacher conference. At the school, perched uncomfortably on scaled-down chairs, they listened to their daughter’s fresh-faced teacher discuss the school’s new reading program. When she finished, Joe asked, So how does our daughter seem to like the new reading program?

All the teachers and students think it is fantastic, replied the teacher with great enthusiasm.

How’s our daughter’s reading progressing? Joe asked.

The teacher frowned, then, with seeming reluctance, opened her grade book.

Well, it says here, she began, running her finger across the spreadsheet. Then she stopped. Oh. That’s interesting.

There was a long pause. Mary Ann and Joe leaned forward in their seats.

We’ve had some concern about her reading ability, Joe explained. She doesn’t seem to like it very much. In fact, lately, she seems to avoid it.

According to her recent tests, well, it doesn’t seem like your daughter has made much progress from last year, said the teacher. Mary Ann’s heart sank. In the spring of last year, Francesca’s second-grade teacher told Mary Ann and Joe their daughter was barely on grade level.

Well, I guess I’ll have to have a discussion with our reading specialists about getting Francesca some support, the teacher said.

But, the teacher added, the reading specialist’s schedule was so packed, it was unlikely Francesca would be able to get a formal evaluation before the first of the year. Coming up with an intervention program would, the teacher told them, realistically take months to put in place. Maybe by the spring? Then the teacher checked her watch. Another set of parents, eager to talk about their child’s progress, knocked on the door for their scheduled parent-teacher meeting. By the time Mary Ann and Joe got to the parking lot, they had agreed that they were going to have to get a little smarter—and a lot more active—in their daughter’s education.

The mounting pressure on parents to get and stay deeply involved in their children’s education is not just a result of our higher standards: it is also a product of some well-calculated and long-term attempts to use parents’ concern about their kids to force schools to change. Around the country, education reformers all across the political spectrum are hell-bent on transforming low-performing schools into something better. The central idea underpinning most of these reforms is that schools—and especially some public schools—are allowed to do a rotten job year after year because professional educators have a local monopoly on instructing our kids. Private and parochial schools can be a good option, but many of them are lackluster and often the ones that are good are beyond the financial reach of most families. If parents are given a wide variety of affordable, accessible schools to choose from, reformers believe, they will move heaven and earth to enroll their children in the best ones. Parents who are free to choose among different schools, the thinking goes, will unleash the powerful forces of the free market—and those forces will quickly wash away substandard institutions and better schools will grow up in their stead. No one knows if these theories will work, but the experiment is already under way and having a dramatic effect on education around the country.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Compton, California, twenty-five miles and a world away from the glitz and glamour of Beverly Hills’s chic Rodeo Drive.

There, parents like Marlene Romero have unexpectedly become foot soldiers in the battle for this new kind of school reform. Romero, thirty, a stay-at-home mom who recently went back to work, taking a job at Subway, sends her eight-year-old son, Ivan, to McKinley Elementary School, the public school a few blocks from her apartment. McKinley is, by nearly every measure, one of the worst public schools in the state of California. Without an opportunity to learn basic skills, the children who attend McKinley don’t stand much of a chance: the district graduation rate is a shockingly low 46.8 percent, and only 3.3 percent of graduates were eligible to attend public universities in 2008. Romero was one of the district’s casualties: she dropped out of school in tenth grade. Last fall, with help from some community activists, Romero and other parents of kids at McKinley decided to test a new school reform provision, the Parent Trigger, that had recently become law in California. They held meetings with other parents, explaining that the terrible test scores meant their children were not learning, and then they collected signatures on a petition demanding the school be turned over to the operators of a chain of high-performing charter schools. Last December, Romero and the others pulled the trigger. They boarded two specially rented busses and, in front of a battalion of national news reporters and television crews, presented petitions to the Compton Unified School District. Romero is no Norma Rae. Her days are filled with trying to do what it takes to keep the rent paid and food on the table. For her, pulling the Parent Trigger is a moral imperative. And her reasons for becoming active in her child’s school resonate far beyond the confines of her troubled neighborhood. As parents, she said in an interview, it is our responsibility to get our children a good education. We want what is best for them.

The problem is that while we parents are being asked to play an increasingly pivotal role in our children’s schooling, our knowledge about what makes schools effective is rudimentary at best. While McKinley’s failings were easy to see, what most schools offer their students is more variable and the issues are more complicated. Parents of preschool through eighth-grade students are beset by difficult questions: How can I tell if a preschool is up to snuff? What should I be looking for when I’m on a school tour? What kind of math and reading instruction should my kids be getting? Does class size matter? And what about recess? It’s got to be about more than just test scores, right? Or are test scores the bottom line? These are questions that often get hashed out around the local playground or at cocktail parties, but savvy parents understand that absorbing each other’s impressions and alternately echoing each other’s high-minded sentiments and abject fears do not, at the end of the day, help us make good decisions for our kids. We remain ignorant at our peril. The free market approach to school reform may or may not be successful, but it is creating plenty of tumult in a system of education long known for stasis. There will be winners and losers. And while plenty of smart people—from the Left and from the Right—believe the long-term impact on our schools will be a positive one, no one can deny that millions of kids will be on the wrong end of this dramatic transformation of American education.

Many parents—rich, middle-class, and poor—are struggling to find intelligent ways to engage, evaluate, and—when they can—improve schools, and their exasperation is palpable. It seems like the principals are expecting us to choose a school for our sons while wearing a blindfold—pin the tail on donkey style, said Faith Vargas, a Detroit mother who, with her husband, has been looking at schools for their four-year-old twins. It’s absurd! interjects Faith’s husband, Bob. When you purchase a house, you get an inspector’s report. When you buy a sports car, at least you get to check under the hood. But now we are trying to do something that matters one thousand times more to our family than buying a house or purchasing a car—and what happens? We’re expected to attend the Open House, shake hands with the principal, blindly enroll them, and have faith that everything will turn out all right. We don’t even get to look under the hood!

If you are interested in looking under the hood, this book is for you. It will help bring you up to speed on some of the most crucial issues and controversies that are likely to affect your child’s education. It will provide you with a SparkNotes version of the history of education to explain to you why things are the way they are. It will introduce you to the freshest thinking—and some of the most innovative ideas—about how to help our kids do better. But more than that, it will help you judge the value of these ideas by providing you with the most solid research available. In areas where research is not yet clear, you will meet people and hear about research that will be creating headlines—and perhaps school policy—in the years to