Pushy mom invades public school, triumphs

You ever listen to Sandra Tsing Loh's commentaries on public radio? She's got a real sense of comic brio. You can see that in her essays for the Atlantic too. Here's a great STL essay from the current issue of The Atlantic, in which she discusses how she and her husband betrayed their class and put their kids in Los Angeles public schools -- and how she threw herself wholeheartedly into trying to help the school. There's something in here to challenge almost everybody.

For starters, she talks about how she used to hero-worship the liberal education writer Jonathan Kozol.

I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequity in public education. Kozol doesn’t just decry what he sees as the pre-civil-rights-South level of segregation that persists to this day, the percentage of African American children in integrated schools having fallen to its lowest level since the death of Martin Luther King.

But she admits she wasn't about to put her kids into LA's troubled public schools. However, STL and her husband tried to move to the suburbs, but "failed" (this isn't explained). So they had no choice but to stick their girls in their local public magnet school. There was culture shock:

Yes, a First World family’s initial entry into Los Angeles’s 21st-century urban public schools can be daunting. Yes, one’s uniquely American expectations of giving one’s children a better life than one had growing up can be challenged. On simple demographics alone, the landscape startles.

Among educated, upwardly aspiring English-speaking families, my neighborhood of Van Nuys—with its 99-cent stores, pupuserias, and throngs of Hispanics waiting for Godot at MTA bus stops—is considered a no-man’s-land. A study by Van Nuys High School suggests that about 80 percent of our residents are Hispanic, a substantial portion of whom are recent arrivals (although many live in apartment buildings with glamorously scrawled—if faded—British royalty–inspired monikers like “Castle Arms” or “The Windsor!”). Our eldest daughter is the only blonde in her class of 20, her grade being about one-third English-learners.

More:

After a fair amount of heartache, I have to admit I have given up on trying to charm white people, at least a certain NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school. For these shrinking families, the aesthetics alone of public schools are horrifying—the chain-link fence, putty-colored bungalows, fluorescent lighting. Confessed one writer dad to me, about his son’s corner elementary (which he did not have the heart to step inside): “Even the grass made me sad.” Another white mom rejected my daughters’ school because our kindergarten wall art looked “rote.” Asians, on the other hand, tend to overlook the occasional snarl of graffiti (in our city, a way of life). What they see at Van Nuys High, for instance, with penetrating laser vision, are the math and medical magnets embedded within. Indeed, I’ve gradually become aware—via frequent newsletters—that behind those high brown walls flourishes a buzzing hive of Korean Magnet Parents. They are busily committee-meeting, Teacher Appreciation–lunching, and catapulting their children from Van Nuys High School directly into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley! Why should they spend $25,000 for each year of high school to make the Ivy League? These immigrants know how to find value!

Still more:

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in “middle-class” school districts. The good news, if my experience is any indication, is that this could drive middle-class white children back into local poor brown schools, and they would come with parents armed with higher educations, the Internet, fiercely lofty expectations, and an ability to read and (at least vaguely) understand federal legislation. What happens to poor public schools when, God forbid, pushy middle-class, Type A, do-it-yourself PTA mothers become involved and agitate to lift up the boats, not just of their own children but, perforce, of their children’s disadvantaged classmates as well?

It's a pretty amazing story, actually, and I encourage you to read it. What's especially interesting is how her experience of actually becoming fully engaged in the public school, and seeing what individuals can do, put her off Kozol. She says Kozol is an old-fashioned liberal who believes nothing can happen without government throwing more money at the problem and coming in to fix things. Tsing Loh says what made things change for the better was the invasion of "the pushy, whitish, Type A middle-class poor."

Economics has forced us to realize that we are indeed all in this together. We are compelled to play Lady Bountiful. We will bring unneeded extracurricular “enrichment” classes and speak English at them until they turn blue. We must invest in the poor urban school, not because any moral authority à la Jonathan Kozol exhorts us to, but because that school is our school. And in return, we get to be infused with the energy of hopeful immigrants ready to try anything, in a brave new land that, to them (aside from the occasional “bad person” one might encounter in a weekend violin class), itself represents optimism, resources, and a better and better future.

This whole piece put me in mind of a 2004 essay from the Dallas Observer, written by Jim Schutze, a columnist who is liberal to the marrow (and who cannot stand your host, by the way). Schutze's son went to a public high school in our East Dallas neighborhood, and when he graduated from the school, Schutze got something off his chest. Schutze's son sang in what was apparently a great little show choir at the school, but the then-superintendent of Dallas public schools, a white guy named Mike Moses, didn't like the choir because it was too white.

I got the impression, in my few one-on-one conversations with Dr. Moses, that he was by no means warmly disposed toward the tiny minority of white middle-class parents who stubbornly remained in his school system. He spoke with disdain about white people whose attitude is that they have stayed in DISD when they could afford to go elsewhere, and therefore they think the school district owes them something.

Oh, I know, I know. White people are so embarrassing sometimes. But here's the thing. If we have to wait for all white people to be smart and politically cool, that's going to take way, way, way too long.

Meanwhile, I sometimes think that when white middle-class people are being obnoxious, other people should take out pens and pads and begin taking notes. There are some advantages to this obnoxious thing.

Jesse Diaz, the Latino activist, told me once that he and his cohort were aware that whites and even middle-class minorities were attempting to take over the PTAs in certain schools in order to win advantages for their own children.

Yup. That's how it's done.

There is always going to be something starkly unromantic about the middle class. Always worrying and grabbing. Never truly insouciant, like Ben Affleck. They have no Palm Springs élan, nor do they have the Steinbeckian glory of the poor and dispossessed.

But pushy middle-class people also happen to be the people who get the garbage picked up on time.

I'm not a public-school parent, so I'm not sure what to think about all this. But I do find it fascinating, and am wondering what your thoughts and experiences are. As ever, discuss.