The ongoing debate of private vs public education

As evidenced by its comments, Allison Benedikt's piece for Slate, Only Bad People Send Their Kids to Private School,  was meant to provoke. Controversial title aside, the idea that if economically privileged parents sent their children to public instead of private schools, public schools overall would improve is not new, but I think her post is clumsily written, and a little short-sighted. Its effects are cumulative, though, and it's not a risk many parents with the resources to send their children to private school are going to take. I found the link to this story on Hoyden About Town yesterday, and while my comment is still in the mod queue, I'd like to rehash some of it here.

Except for one year of pre-K, I attended private schools. We really couldn't afford it. My senior year, my grandfather had to pay my much overdue tuition so I could graduate, and my situation was far from unique. I disagree with the idea that if parents who can send their kids to a private school opt for a public one instead, even a "bad" one, those kids will do fine because the parents can fill in the gaps. The resources are already there: any "enrichment" can be had at home. Not everyone in private school is well-off or even middle-class. I'd say I definitely benefitted from private school. I learned to love reading, something wasn't really encouraged at home. (It wasn't discouraged, but I didn't come home to overflowing bookshelves either. Living across the street from a really good neighborhood library was a bigger advantage that I could have gotten in any school.) That's not to say that my school was without its own problems. Sexual harassment went largely unchecked and unpunished. There was definitely a hierarchy that was impossible to crack. Tracking, which I've written about before, was taken to self-esteem shattering levels, with six tracks instead of the standard three. The top levels consisted primarily of kids from two of the wealthier catholic grade schools in the city. All were white. If private schooling is kind of a self-segregation, ours was further segregated by tracking. A lot of times, the material was the same, but the upper levels got better teachers and a smaller class size. (And the snob appeal of being labeled a "one.") My old high school is far more integrated now than when I went in the early 90s, but if that tracking system is still in place, I doubt much has changed.

That being said, I was led to believe my education was standard, not exceptional. I would even go as far to say that my high school wasn't challenging enough. It wasn't until I read this that I was smacked in the face by my own privilege:

I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. [...] As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music, and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

Sidestepping over the cultural tourism in that last statement (I could have easily been one of those trailer park kids who provided Benedikt her "enrichment"), reading Whitman in ninth grade (probably sixth or seventh to be honest) or Chekhov in high school did change my worldview, or at least, opened my eyes to a world I wasn't exposed to at home, so I'm really glad I went to a school where we were forced to read more than one book in a span of four years.  I feel strongly about public schools, too, but I also feel strongly about nurturing a love of learning wherever you can get it. I don't have children. I can't say whether I'd send them to public school or not, but I know I'm better equipped to fill in the gaps than my parents or their parents were because they were "bad" enough to send me to a private school.

School Uniforms and Slut Shaming

Annie Rose Strasser and Tara Culp-Ressler for ThinkProgress wrote a good article  about  dress codes and slut shaming. A middle-school in New Jersey banned girls from wearing strapless dresses to the prom, and whatever your feelings are about the "appropriateness" of strapless dresses for preteens, dress codes and uniforms almost exclusively target girls

My private high school required girls wear a uniform -- plaid skirt, white blouse with a collar, socks or tights in school colors only, and a shoe that wasn't a sneaker or a sandal -- while the boys could wear anything they wanted except jeans, tee shirts, and sneakers. This was because the girls "needed" the uniform. The boys didn't need a uniform because, well, boys aren't into silly and superfluous things like clothes. (I started high school during the ass-end of the eighties. Like hell they weren't. Judging solely on the boys' sartorial choices, my high school was like a mix of House Party, Saved by the Bell. and a midwesterner's interpretation of Less Than Zero.)  And had we the agency to dress ourselves we might do something crazy and show a little too much thigh or clavicle and -- gasp -- distract the boys.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have been the first to cry "slut shaming," or at least, damn unfair. (We did lobby for the boys to get uniforms of their own, something along the lines of gray pants and a white shirt. At least we'd look like we belonged at the same school.) But we took at as fact: We needed to be told what to wear because, you know, apocalypse or whatever.

Write a poem, get suspended

A teenager at a high school in California was suspended  after a teacher found a poem in her personal notebook with the line, "I understand the killings in Connecticut; I understand why he pulled the trigger." According to Salon , Courtni Webb and her mother, "told NBC’s Today that Webb was simply expressing herself and exploring ideas about helplessness and darkness that she believed were behind the Newtown massacre. 'Never in my life have I heard that you couldn’t mention a tragedy that happened. I didn’t say that I agree with it, I said I simply understand it' Webb told Today, noting that the she felt the school was making her look like 'a monster.' Her mother said that she believes her daughter’s free speech is being violated."

No threat was made, and there was no reason to believe that the poem was anything more than a creative outlet for Webb. (We still encourage creativity, don't we?) That this was a personal poem, not part of any assignment, I question why the teacher had access to it in the first place, but even if it had been part of a school assignment, I fail to see the reason for the suspension other than a "no tolerance" policy taken too far.