Somehow, I find myself with an almost four-year-old who hopefully will be starting kindergarten next year, or if not the year after. Which means thinking, or more accurately agonizing, about schools.
I thought it was just here in Detroit that where to send your kid and which private schools are good and are any public schools good and $8,000 for kindergarten are you KIDDING me are major topics. Wherever two or more Detroit parents are gathered, there is talk of schools. And based on this extra awesome Five-Minute Time Out with author Sandra Tsing Loh (written by our own Madeline Holler), this isn’t unique to my city.
Loh's book Mother on Fire: A True Mother*^$Sing Story About Parenting, chronichles her school search. Takeaway message: the neighborhood school's all right. And she reserves special scorn for those parents who talk a good, liberal, egalitarian game and yet enroll their kids in the priciest, most exclusive private schools because their kids just are a little too awesome for the publics. If they spent the same time and money on the public school, she points out, they'd be almost as great.
Rarely have I read something like Loh's interview, where I was muttering "damn straight" and "hell yes" right along, but have no intention of following along with anything she advised. See, the public schools here are baaaadddd; not just garden variety bad, but like "taken over by the state, more than half of high school students drop out, metal detectors at the doors, graduates can’t read bad" bad bad bad. Decades of mismanagement mean that pretty much everyone who can afford to has fled to the suburbs or put their kid s in private school –including, I might add, all but one of my friends who actually teach in the district.
I could write more – much more – but just go read it instead. It's that thought provoking and will challenge your assumptions and biases about where's the right place for your child and why.
