Despite Many Choices, Low-Income and City Kids Still Lose Out

A year from now I could be registering my eldest child for kindergarten. I write "could" because I haven't decided whether I even want her to go to school given our bleak options. While there are many wonderful private schools within a few miles of our home, our family cannot afford the tuition at any of them. None-the-less, living in Philadelphia, we have literally dozens of school choices to explore.

Welcome to parenting hell.

In his TED talk The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz laments the depressing consequences of having too many choices.

Schwartz starts out speaking about little stuff like salad dressing and stereo systems. Then he gets into the heavy stuff: Choices about medical treatment. Choices about the timing of marriage and kids. Choices about gender identity. Choices about work. He doesn't specifically mention parents choosing an educational path for our children, but considering that school is where kids spend most of their waking hours, certainly that falls into the category of Major Life Decisions.

Schwartz argues that having too many choices creates a sort constant stress of decision making, second guessing ourselves, and what he calls "paralysis rather than liberation." He gives the example of a study which found that for every additional 10 choices of retirement funds a company offered its employees, enrollment in any program went down. This makes me wonder if the increase in "school choice" through charters and vouchers is one reason for the increase in homeschooling.

After looking at the choices offered to my kids, I definitely feel a lot of the "paralysis" Schwartz spoke of, and I'm seriously considering homeschooling. Or if not that, moving to the *groan* burbs.

If I stay in the city, here are my kids' school options:

1. The public school for our catchment: Oh hell no. This school doesn't even have a playground. We're talking barely passing test scores in math and reading, poor student attendance, high turnover of both students and faculty, and 99% of students are "economically disadvantaged" - which is not at all reflective of our neighborhood's economic and racial diversity.

2. Lots and lots and lots of questionable charter schools: Enough that I get dizzy trying to do my own amateur research on them all. Some will brag about test scores, but leave out some of the icky strategies they use to achieve those scores, such as expelling even mildly troublesome students, or sacrificing joyful learning experiences for grueling test preparation. I have a friend who is a passionate educator with a Masters degree and 8 years of teaching experience. She was suddenly fired (along with almost all the rest of the faculty) by one of Philly's charters simply because her (mostly poor and at-risk students) didn't have high enough test scores. Gee, all their teachers being fired must have been great for the students! Many charters have only recently opened and don't have much of a track record, and could close down just as quick as they pop up.

3. A few good charter schools: The more established charters with good reputations and high test scores are usually nowhere near my neighborhood, and they all have big lotteries and long waiting lists. These fall into the category of Yeah, You Wish!

4. Public schools outside our catchment: There are a couple K-8th grade public schools just outside of my catchment where we can't afford to buy a home, but the schools have higher test scores, genuine economic and racial diversity, and often serve as feeder schools for the best magnet high schools. I have repeatedly heard that principals at these schools can grant students outside of a school's catchment permission to enroll. The idea is to convince the principal beforehand that my kid is a benefit to the school and that my family will be helpful and involved. However, budget cuts have curbed this practice, and until my kid is actually enrolled, there are no guarantees.

Like I said before, parenting hell.

Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson

In his TED talk, Barry Schwartz mentions doctors shifting responsibility onto the patient, and how this is problematic since the doctor more often than not has the experience and knowledge to make a wiser decision. I can't help but compare this to choices about education. We have scores of people with Masters and PhDs in Education, teachers and administrators with decades of experience, and yet we don't have an approach to public K-12 education that provides every parent and child with a single, quality option.

Let's face the real issue here, more affluent communities have excellent public schools. Parents in those communities don't sit around agonizing over pages of data, trying to figure out what schools are excellent, mediocre, or shamefully substandard without sufficient context or expertise, and then keeping track of methods and deadlines for applications, open houses, and stressing out over lotteries, wait lists, and meeting minimum standards for magnet schools. In affluent communities, most typically there is one public school option, and it has reasonably high test scores, well-trained faculty who seem to like their jobs, fine facilities, a variety of extracurricular activities, and appropriate interventions and aids for special needs or gifted students.

As much as the political liberal and progressive educator in me hates vouchers, charter schools, standardized testing, not to mention a public school model with roots in factory-worker-style conformity, I dare say that none of that is the big issue. This is not a question of educational philosophy. This is an issue of economic justice. The best predictor of school success is household income. 

In other words, the problem is poverty. Schools in poor communities have way more problems (due to violence, over-crowding, food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, etc.) but because of the way we fund schools, instead of getting way more funding and resources, they get less. It isn't a coincidence that charter schools serve more low-income students. I feel like instead of dealing with poverty, especially the horribly high levels of child poverty plaguing the USA, we're throwing a bunch of equally lame or worse school options at those families and saying, Isn't this great? Now you have a choice! 

A bunch of crappy choices isn't any better than one crappy choice. In fact, if Schwartz is right, it's worse, because at least if there's only one crappy choice you can complain to the Powers That Be. With all these damn choices, parents are left feeling that we alone are to blame if we make the wrong choice. If the cities want to keep middle class and affluent families from fleeing to the burbs, they need to put more money into the schools. If they want to reduce the hardships of poverty for their most vulnerable citizens, they need to put more money into the schools. Money for more teachers, counselors, tutors, and other support staff who make all the powerful one-on-one connections with students in greatest need.

But Philly is making school budget cuts. So I guess come the fall of 2015, I might be homeschooling my kindergartner, seeing as I'm one of the few parents lucky enough to have at least that option.

On Minority Children Underrepresented

Over ten years ago I briefly worked at a Barnes and Noble. The following encounter was part of why I kept my employment brief.

A youngish woman, maybe in her 30's, blonde, well-dressed, brought a small stack of books to checkout. As I entered the first couple into the register, she leafed through one of her selections - one of those Anne Geddes books filled with syrupy sweet photographs of babies dressed up as angels, flowers, and butterflies. The customer turned another page, halted, and blurted out, "I need to go back. I grabbed the wrong book. I wanted the one with white babies."

My eyes widened a bit. I glanced at the book in her hands, and seeing that it clearly featured a multiracial array of adorable newborns, couldn't help but respond, "But that book does have white babies. It has all different colored babies."

She huffed and (clearly annoyed with my political correctness) said, "Well I'm having a white baby, and I want the book with just white babies."

Apparently she could identify her baby with total stranger babies, regardless of those stranger babies' varying hair thickness, shade, or length, eye color, and unique facial features, so long as those babies were the same race as her baby.

I thought, what a racist dipshit. 

Wait a minute... apparently ten years ago this customer was able to pull two different books by the same photographer, same publisher, and of the same subject, but one featured multiracial models, and the other featured all (or at least mostly) white models. Did the publishing company orchestrate this on purpose in order to sell to the widest audience (in other words, to cater to this racist dipshit?)

It wouldn't surprise me. In high school I had a friend whose mother flew into a rage after seeing a commercial for a new sitcom which featured a black family. She felt there was already more than enough minority representation on television and movies (ha!)

Whatever one might say about Anne Geddes's work (that it's beautiful or disgusting, touching or shallow) it seems clear to me that her models' skin color is first and foremost an aesthetic consideration. In her color photography, each baby's skin tone is impeccably coordinated to harmonize with all the colors surrounding him or her.

The speculative symbolism here is just disturbing.

I keep reading that Geddes prefers black and white photography, and looking at her black and white work of babies, I see that it is there that she can play most with the contrast of dark and light skinned models. In fact I think the only reason she pairs black and white models together in photographs is because she enjoys the look of such contrast (opposed to any attempt at meaningful social commentary.)

I found this odd photograph of a giant white hand holding a miniature black baby on Anne-Marie Ross's Pinterest album I got the creeps from Anne Geddes. Ms. Ross adds the sarcastic caption:

Giant white hand and minuscule black baby. Racism is cured now.

And now the black angel baby grew up and had
his own white baby? Er, maybe in this fictional world
created by  Geddes, skin complexion skips every other
generation. And there's some chromosomal reason
why the dark-skinned generations also have wings.

I can't help but agree with critics of Geddes's work who argue that because commercial appeal is prioritized, the images are often dehumanizing. Geddes uses models' skin color as nothing more than a formal element, incorporates changes in scale as superficial novelty, and includes symbols loaded with cultural meaning as mere props. She thereby dismisses meaningful discourse about race, ethnicity, or social identity. I can't help but feel it propagates the myth (and false ideal) of colorblindness.

We are not colorblind. Racial identity is meaningful. Our skin tones are not just another color on a painter's palette.


The myth of colorblindness is why 90% of my daughters' dolls (mostly gifts from white relatives) are white. The black dolls were all purchased by me with the intention of creating some balance. There is one Native American doll which was purchased by a relative because it was cute and on clearance. And there is a Dora doll given as a gift, because Dora the Explorer is one of the few racial minority characters who has managed to break through the glass ceiling of children's entertainment. (Doc McStuffin's seems to be making some serious headway, too, which is nice to see.)

The myth of colorblindness is why this still happens:

Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

My daughter's baby doll collection; way too monochromatic.

I was surprised to read this article today, because in the children's sections of the Free Library of Philadelphia I find many wonderful titles that feature main characters of color as well as minority authors and illustrators. But now that I think about it, I haven't had to look for those books because they are usually prominently displayed in windows and on the tops of bookshelves. Now I realize that the librarians, sensitive to the fact that most of the children who enter Philadelphia's libraries are black, have been deliberately putting those books out there. What a fine example of how libraries perform a public service.

I'm so tired of people who complain about political correctness. Tired of "political correctness" having a bad connotation. Sure, it can be taken to ridiculous extremes, but most often political correctness is simply about tolerance and respect. We need political correctness because we are still battling a war of inequality. Because the racial and ethnic biases in our society are so built in that we must counter them with self awareness.

In her TED talk The Danger of a Single Story, novelist Chimamanda Adichie gives a much more eloquent and persuasive argument as to why our children need to be exposed to diversity in their literature and entertainment.

So find the books that feature minority characters and buy them for your kids, your nieces, your nephews, your friends' kids. Check out the Coretta Scott King Awards. Go to your local library and ask the children's librarian about books by minority authors and illustrators. Be part of creating a market for books, toys, and children's entertainment that better represents our true diversity.