I Hate School!
Too much time spent on homework and pizza parties. Too many pleas for money to make up for cuts in state funding. Too much worry over whether my son is learning enough. I want to be involved in his education, but the demands teachers and principals place on parents these days are ridiculous. That's why, I'm sorry to say . . .
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At least, I thought as we graduated from elementary school, volunteering would drop off in middle school. Kids wouldn't want their parents around, and I could get back to work. Not so. Middle-schoolers may prefer to act as though they were spawned in primordial swamps, but administrators and teachers are not ready to let go. We chose to put Oliver in his neighborhood middle school—one with the same advanced curriculum—instead of opting for more-prestigious programs in wealthier neighborhoods. We did this because, after visiting several schools, we came to a surprising conclusion: We liked our neighborhood school best. The teachers and counselors were enthusiastic, encouraging, tireless, and (my favorite) demanding. Unfortunately, the school looked like something out of Blackboard Jungle: soiled ceiling tiles and window shades in the auditorium, cantankerous air conditioning, mold in the principal's office, rats on the third floor, and a dingy color scheme not quite as cozy as a cell block. Decorations included the sign on the front door, in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, that weapons were prohibited.
We had left a school where parental involvement was encouraged for one where it was desperately needed, which meant that, come August, I was headed back to school. I raised money for a redesigned campus drop-off point—kids narrowly escaped being hit by cars—and brought in speakers and helped with theater class cast parties, the PTA, and reading classes. One of the early PTA meetings began with the principal's plea for still more fundraising so he wouldn't have to cut art and music teachers. I wanted to believe in the school, but my long-held faith in public education was being severely tested.
"If you were at a private school," a pooped friend suggested, "you could just write a check. As long as it was a big check."
DID I CONSIDER PRIVATE SCHOOL? Almost every day. Oliver loved his middle school, but despite the fact that most of his teachers were exceptional, I was still beset with the guilty feeling that I was cheating my son out of a good education. "You don't want your kid to be a social experiment," said a friend who was worrying about keeping his own kids in public school, and his words began to haunt me as I recalled my years as a school volunteer and a witness to financial deprivation. I wasn't sure I could steel myself for more semesters in which books were lacking and class size was sometimes stretched to the maximum—in elementary school, two unlucky fifth graders had bivouacked on a tired sofa for the year because of a desk shortage—and student teachers were scarce. I had helped teach science every Thursday morning for an hour for an entire year in elementary school. I loved it but couldn't help wondering whether someone who had fled from dissection in high school was really the best assistant teacher the kids could have.
I was also worried that the emphasis on standardized-test drills (lest the school get a bad rating at TAKS time) and self-esteem-building would continue in middle school. I was happy to see that Oliver's spelling and punctuation improved dramatically after his first semester of middle school, where rules of grammar were strictly enforced. The elementary school had used, and subsequently abandoned, a curriculum that valued freedom of expression over rote learning. Spelling tests (and many other tests), with those right and wrong answers, were deemed damaging to a child's self-esteem. ("There's always spell-check," one of his teachers told me cheerily.) Before he was eleven, Oliver had learned in detail about the evils of drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, and the Thanksgiving feast inevitably contained lessons on the oppression of Native Americans (as opposed to the religious oppression that drove the Pilgrims to America). He was also asking me whether Sweden was a part of Scotland.
As he got older, Oliver's school-sponsored self-esteem began to suffer as I demanded that he spell and punctuate and do the reading logs that he suggested were "mostly" optional. Other kids didn't do their homework, he said, so why should he? We hired tutors—a math whiz working her way through med school and an "organizational expert" who could teach my child how to keep track of his assignments and study for tests. Our homework battles declined, but so did our bank account.
Where was the covenant between families and the public schools my parents had known, that they could turn over their children for twelve years and the schools would return them possessing the basic skills and knowledge necessary for adulthood? Vanished. Yes, I could join a campaign to get the soft-drink machine away from the cafeteria entrance and raise money for a climbing wall on the playground, but I still could not be reassured that my son would ever learn that Sweden was not a part of Scotland. Unless, of course, I told him myself.
So we looked at a few private schools, thinking he might switch in the seventh grade. "Oliver only has one education," yet another friend, this one with a child in private school, warned. In that moment I thought, briefly, of letting her have it, of telling her that if people like her still had kids in public schools—and still invested their time and money in the same—I wouldn't have to be considering a change.
Instead, I fell in love with places like the one she had chosen for her daughter. The teachers had impressive credentials. The campuses and classrooms were beautiful, and there appeared to be plenty of money for all the extras Oliver's school lacked. With so many parents chipping in, I thought, maybe I could do less. But no. From canvassing my friends with kids in private schools, I found that they have similar curriculum battles, and most moms are volunteering just as often as I am, going on field trips and babysitting during teacher teas—and they also get asked for $10,000 donations on top of their $12,000 annual tuition.
We had one more option, of course: moving to a more expensive neighborhood with a more highly regarded public school. But as former University of Houston and UT professor Elizabeth Warren (now at Harvard) noted in her book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, many better public schools have become almost as expensive as private institutions. The high cost of housing plus chipping in for all the extras has stretched many couples to the breaking point, causing the bankruptcy rate now to surpass the divorce rate. "Schools in middle-class neighborhoods may be labeled 'public,' but parents have paid for tuition by purchasing a $175,000 home within a carefully selected school district," Warren wrote in 2003. In my city, $375,000 to $500,000 is more like it. As Warren told me, it is this, not parental neuroses, that "is just crazy."
We didn't want to send Oliver to a school, public or private, that was practically segregated racially and economically, but when he was accepted to the private school we liked best, I thought long and hard about making a change. (The school took Oliver despite the fact that in his interview he had asked the headmaster why the school had no Hispanic kids. "And, Mom," he told me, "he didn't have an answer.") As it happened, that acceptance came on the day of an awards ceremony at Oliver's middle school. All his teachers came—there were especially loud cheers for Oliver's math teacher, a strict but vigorously devoted Taiwanese immigrant who offers tutorials before and after school every day, and his history teacher, a heroically patient Vietnam vet who has lined the walls of his classroom with GI Joes dressed as fighting men dating from the American Revolution to the recent war in Afghanistan. There was a lot of joy in the room for kids who, everyone knew, had struggled mightily against enormous odds—kids whose parents had very little money and spoke very little English, kids who had never known their fathers, kids who had lost siblings to drugs and alcohol, kids who know the value of an education better, I sometimes think, than my son.
If I had to say why we stay in the public schools, this diversity would be my explanation. In Oliver's life, that word is a thrilling reality instead of a hackneyed political buzzword. He's been immeasurably enriched by being around so many different kinds of people—people who, by the time he's an adult, will be running things instead of being held back, as they were in my day. Oliver loves his teachers and his friends. He's bilingual, makes good grades (with our relentless prodding), and can go on for hours about the difference between Sean John and Fubu jeans. He's developed a healthy disdain for the sense of entitlement sometimes displayed by more-privileged kids, even if it can be a little misplaced. (When I asked why he didn't let his hair grow long, like boys I'd seen at the mall, he gave me a withering look. "Mom," my pale-faced son said, "that's for white kids.") I want to believe that somehow, for Oliver, being at home in the world is more important than knowing, in detail, about the Byzantine Empire by the sixth grade. But I still worry about my choice nearly every day.
I know too that there's an emotional cost to the way my family has structured its life together, despite the PTA's well-meaning advice. I worry that Oliver will always remember his mother as a woman racing six feet ahead of him, moving in a blur from one task to the next, rarely conveying enjoyment, rarely able to focus entirely on the job at hand. (This seems to be, still, the lot of women: Show me a father who chairs the annual school auction and I'll show you an outsourced software developer.) I'm sure Oliver wishes for a mom who doesn't panic at the news of a surprise homework assignment—"Mom, I need to bring ten family pictures by tomorrow," he casually mentioned one night around bedtime—on the eve of a major deadline at work.
I do too. I would love to be the kind of mother my mother was, someone who had the time and patience to help me translate a complicated short story from Spanish to English or go over an excruciating chapter in the history book about early Texas settlements or (more interesting to me, then and now) dissect the psychological complexities of thirteen-year-old girls. But I made that choice a long time ago. I love my son, but I love my work too, and the price is living with the day-to-day impossibility of ever finding a balance, only intermittent compromise.
And so, what made me happiest about this past summer was that the Texas settlers didn't come up and there was plenty of time to talk about why Oliver hated Hilary Duff and loved Alyssa Milano and to revel in not reverting to school mode. On a trip to Boston, we hiked the Freedom Trail with a friend, and when we got to Paul Revere's house, she provided her eight-year-old daughter with a concise tutorial about his famous ride. I kept mum and bought Oliver a Red Sox cap instead.
My Library
