School of Thought at TIME is back from its summer break and so are my kids, who are starting kindergarten. I don’t generally write about them on this blog or in TIME and that’s not going to change but my wife and I made an exception this week. Hope it’s useful, interesting, or both.
I’m a policy guy, not a daddy blogger. As a general rule, I don’t discuss my children in this column or on my Eduwonk blog, but when TIME asked me to write about how my wife (who also works in education) and I chose our kids’ elementary school, I figured why not. We are constantly besieged by friends and colleagues about how we went about picking a school, as if there was some secret education-analyst methodology I was privy to. I wish that were true! But even though I don’t have access to the secret sauce, I do have a pretty good sense of how to kick a school’s tires. Plus, I think it would be a shame not to use all of our parental angst for the greater good. And so, as our kids start a new year at a public school, here are some lessons from our school-hunting experience that might help guide yours.
Unlike a lot of school-shopping parents, you have a choice.. Choose to read the entire column here.
This is an excellent article and I agree with everything in it. Please advocate for the children whose parents can’t or won’t take the time to choose the best school for them. Let’s all work to destroy the status quo of all-minority schools with inexperienced teachers, inadequate funding and inappropriate instruction (i.e. test prep) for our poorest children. This is the shame of our nation and it needs to stop.
I agree with Linda. My kids also start K this year and we need to advocate for the parents who do not have the resources to make the choices we do. In fact, the choices that we (affluent parents) make are exacerbating the status quo and I personally have trouble rectifying that. This is why school choice is so important. I had school choice for my kids by virtue of where I decided to buy a home. Most parents do not and this, more than anything creates the achievement gap for students of color. All parents deserve high quality public school choices.